written 28 September, 2025
published 5 October, 2025
In the rush to build more nuclear power, billions are being poured into advanced reactors, and billions more into expanding the nuclear fuel chain. The published reason is the massive power demanded by data centers and artificial intelligence (AI). Disregarding the social risks of AI, the real attraction is the money to be made, as nuclear power is some of the most expensive on the grid. Nuclear is the perfect capitalist power source. The price tag is huge, significant taxpayer subsidies are involved (corporate welfare), monopoly power guarantees return on investment, liability is limited, power is centralized, and a few dozen corporations control the industry. This isn't about affordable electricity, it is about maximizing return on investment.
Even before Fukushima, nuclear development hadn't been robust for years, as they are economically unaffordable in the face of cheaper renewable power. Among other delusions, our president believes the climate crisis is a hoax, so renewable energy must be squashed. Consequently, the nuclear rush is based on fiction, like all the financial bubbles throughout history.
It is fiction nuclear is clean energy. During normal operations, a nuclear plant emits no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, plant construction and nuclear fuel production have a significant carbon footprint, even without considering disposal of nuclear waste and decommissioning aged reactors.
It is fiction nuclear can deal with climate change, which has been ignored for so long that only rapid change will be sufficient. Reactor construction takes twice as long as projected, so building traditional reactors can't happen fast enough to be relevant.
The new hope is small modular reactors (SMR), which are promised to be cheaper, faster to construct, and safer than current reactors. These promises are fiction, unsupported in reality, since no SMR is in operation today. Though SMR construction has begun in several locations, none of the designs are complete, nor approved.
The president is pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is tasked with nuclear safety, to rubber stamp these designs to make things happen faster. But there is a reason for safety concerns. Nuclear reactors are complex, and the consequences of failure are impactful and expensive. All the reactors in operation today evolved from a few basic designs that have been updated over decades as new concerns came to light. Even then, the unknown unknown can show still show up a fatal weakness. SMR's are a new design, with no track record and no guarantee safety will be anything like what is promised.
Safety is expensive, and cutting corners saves money in the short term. The US military has a long history of nuclear safety in the navy, because cost savings were never a priority over safety. This is not the case in commercial nuclear power. At Chernobyl, the Russian design was thought to be so safe a containment structure was considered an unnecessary cost. That failure was felt over 1,000 miles away, and the exclusion zone is still hazardous to life 40 years later. At Fukushima, General Electric saved money placing the emergency backup pumps close to sea level, despite evidence of large tsunamis in the past. That failure was a trillion dollar disaster they said could never happen. Safety will be sacrificed in the current rush for profit as well.
The economics of nuclear power are constrained by the scale of manufacturing. No matter how many SMR's are built, the total quantity can't compete with the scale of creating solar panels, where improved manufacturing over the last 50 years has reduced the cost per kilowatt hour by a factor of 1,000, while reactor costs keep getting more expensive.
Nuclear power consumes uranium, a finite fuel source, which is mostly imported. But it competes with renewables, which collect free energy. Some of the SMR designs expect to use High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU): uranium enriched to 20 percent, much closer to weapons grade. Domestic facilities for this level of enrichment do not yet exist. Other SMR designs intend to reuse existing spent nuclear fuel, which will have to be reprocessed before being useful, creating even more radioactive waste in the process.
Nuclear power produces radioactive waste on a good day, and radioactive contamination on a bad day, neither of which have ever been successfully dealt with since the beginning of the atomic age. The driving force is making money, not affordable energy. The public pays for nuclear mistakes and electric bills keep increasing.
