nuclear-news

Trump’s Big Nuclear Reactor Push Raises Safety Concerns

1 October 2025, https://english.aawsat.com/features/5203506-trumps-big-nuclear-reactor-push-raises-safety-concerns 

A huge nuclear deal announced by the Trump administration earlier this week provides a multi-billion-dollar incentive for the US government to issue permits and approvals for new Westinghouse reactors – an unprecedented structure that critics say poses environmental and safety risks.

Under the agreement with Westinghouse Electric’s owners, Canada-based Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management , the US government will arrange financing and help secure permits and approvals for $80 billion worth of Westinghouse reactors.

In return, the plan offers the US government a path to a 20% share of future profits and a potential 20% stake in the company if its value surpasses $30 billion by 2029.

The deal is one of the most ambitious plans in US atomic energy in decades, underscoring President Donald Trump’s agenda to maximize energy output to feed booming demand for artificial intelligence data centers.

But the financial incentives risk clouding regulatory scrutiny aimed at preventing nuclear accidents, according to safety advocates and regulatory experts. “The things that could go wrong are Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima,” said Greg Jaczko, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pointing to three of the worst nuclear power accidents on record.

“All have causes tied to insufficient regulatory independence.”

The White House said concerns about safety were unfounded.

“The regulatory regime remains the same and is not compromised. There’s nothing in the deal about regulatory changes,” the White House said in an emailed statement. Westinghouse owner Cameco declined to comment. Brookfield and Westinghouse did not respond to messages requesting comment.

TD Cowen analysts told clients in a research note this week they expect Westinghouse to have 10 new large-scale reactors – enough gigawatts to power several million homes – under construction by 2030 as a result of the deal.

Typically, it takes around a decade for a new nuclear power plant to get built, largely due to the rigorous permitting requirements and enormous costs and complexities associated with construction. 

Patrick White, a nuclear regulatory and technology expert at the Clean Air Task Force, said effective regulation did not need to be a slow or extended process and there were benefits to moving more efficiently.

“Ensuring that nuclear regulation is also timely and predictable is in the best interest of both companies and the public,” White said. Todd Allen, a nuclear expert at the University of Michigan, said the design of Westinghouse reactors is well established, but questioned how fast projects could progress.

“With that aggressive timeline, and demand for the reactors around the world, I wonder if there is a big enough workforce to handle all of these projects,” Allen said.

DELAYS TO PREVIOUS US PROJECT

Westinghouse’s last US-based nuclear project, building two nuclear reactors at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, forced the company into bankruptcy protection in 2017.

The two reactors were about seven years behind schedule and cost about $35 billion, more than double the original estimate of $14 billion.

Patty Durand, director of nonprofit Georgians for Affordable Energy, has spent years analyzing that project and said she fears fast permitting would overlook the risks associated with climate change.

She said severe droughts have forced operators to curtail nuclear power in Europe and the United States to avoid overheating their reactors. Westinghouse also had a slew of problems related to the modular design of its AP1000 reactors, such as some parts’ dimensions being wrong when they arrived on site. The AP1000 would also be used for the new reactors, built from prefabricated parts and assembled on site.

Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he fears the Trump administration will exert too much power over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get the new reactors permitted.

“If the White House fully takes over the NRC and it is no longer at all independent, then it could be used just as a tool for sweeping deals for which the White House could accelerate licensing on its preferred projects regardless of their actual safety implications, and that’s a dangerous thing,” Lyman said.

November 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

It’s Not a Ballroom. It’s a Bunker.

The billionaires have gone bunkers. …..every action indicates that they’re not just preparing for collapse, they’re betting on it, they’re driving it. They want it to happen. We’re already crossing tipping points, like the loss of the coral reefs. Things we predicted for the 2040s are happening now.

Trump serves as the figurehead of a deeply paranoid technocratic network who sees the world collapsing, because they collapsed it. They plan to wage wars from their cyberbunkers, at home and abroad.

And there’s a reason.

Jessica Wildfire, Sentinel Intelligence, October 27 2025

The Trump administration has torn down the East Wing to build a new ballroom. Despite all the noise, everyone seems to be overlooking a simple fact.

As a piece in The Hill mentions in passing, the east wing hides a bunker. Roosevelt built the bunker during WWII, after Pearl Harbor, and he used the east wing specifically to cover it up. The bunker has served as an emergency operations center ever since. They don’t care what sits on top of it. That’s an afterthought.

Traditionally, the First Lady uses it.

Tiny corners of the internet are whispering that the demolition has nothing to do with a ballroom. It has everything to do with upgrading the bunker. Since they’re hardening the bunker, they might as well build Trump the ballroom of his dreams, the perfect place to run crypto schemes and host corrupt dictators.

Trump’s niece Mary, a vocal critic, has confirmed that the regime is simply using the ballroom as a cover for new bunker plans. Sources have also informed CBS News that the bunker upgrades will definitely happen during the ballroom’s construction. You can read about all of that here.

So, there you go.

If you don’t believe in conspiracies: When Roosevelt’s administration was building the first bunker, they also lied to the public about it. They said they were renovating the east wing to put in a museum. They knew they were fibbing.

The president technically has more than one bunker. There’s the first one built by Roosevelt’s administration, and a second one under the north lawn, and potentially a whole network of subterranean tunnels and command centers throughout D.C., stretching all the way into the Virginia mountains. They run hundreds of feet deep. The second one, under the White House Lawn, contains its own air supply.

It also has a food and water cache.

The media frequently primes the public to salivate over plush bunkers while dismissing the motivations for them as “paranoia.” Meanwhile, actuaries have warned world leaders that current estimates of the climate crisis are deeply misleading. In reality, 3C of global warming will drop the global GDP by 50 percent and kill billions. As a report by The Guardian summarizes: “At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.” That’s right, 3C of warming equals 4 billion deaths. Climate research increasingly points at 3-4C of warming as the new likely scenario. In practical terms, we’ve already crossed the 1.5C threshold, a decade earlier than expected.

We’ll likely breach 2C by the end of the decade, and by then things will look bad enough that life will look and feel like collapse. It won’t be theoretical or hypothetical anymore. It’s going to be a lived experience for many of us.

That’s why they’re building bunkers.

It’s not exactly surprising that someone like Trump would want an upgraded bunker where he plans to spend more time hanging out as the world falls apart. Everyone from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg are doing it. Zuckerberg has reportedly spent $300 million on his bunker, which just happens to match the amount Trump has raised to pay for his bunker, ahem, I mean, his ballroom.

They’re not just making the Spartan bomb shelters of yore.

They’re installing premium sanctuaries. Their demands have spawned an entire industry that builds luxury bunkers. These bunker companies are building their clients everything from underground sports car garages and swimming pools to movie theaters and virtual golf courses. They’re building fabrication workshops. They’re building arsenals. They’re building drone hatches. As one bunker builder puts it, “The scale and complexity of these environments have expanded dramatically, evolving far beyond survivalist shelters into fully integrated, high-comfort retreats.”

Will Trump’s bunker have a virtual golf course?

I wouldn’t doubt it.

The press casts doubt on the Trump regime’s timeline, saying there’s almost no chance they’ll actually finish before he leaves office. Of course, they’re basing that on what’s “normal.” Nothing normal is happening under this administration. As we’ve seen, when the super rich put their minds to it, they can accomplish almost anything with a swiftness that leaves everyone’s jaws on the floor.

For example:

Elon Musk’s AI company partnered with Nvidia to build the Colossus supercomputer near Memphis. It took them about four months, after estimates said it would take years. Experts consider it a superhuman feat. Now look at the speed they’re attacking the “ballroom” with. They’ve already completely torn down the old east wing. They’re not wasting any time on this thing, are they?

Consider who’s paying for it.

From The Guardian:

Donors for the proposed ballroom include a slew of major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google. Defense contractors and communications companies have also pitched in, including Lockheed Martin, Palantir, T-Mobile and Comcast.

These corporations have accumulated $350 million for construction. The biggest tech companies in the world are paying hundreds of millions for… a ballroom? Defense contractors are chipping in?

No, I don’t think so…

Companies like Palantir don’t dabble in ballrooms. They’re in the business of building mass surveillance software, artificial intelligence suites, and drones. In fact, the U.S. military recently signed a $10 billion contract with Palantir for new toys. They’ve signed contracts with several big tech companies, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Even Amazon is quietly starting partnerships with the defense industry.

As we recently noted here, Silicon Valley has taken a hard military turn over the last year. The Trump administration has even created a “technical innovation unit” that’s recruiting CEOs and project managers from the same major tech companies that are funding the east wing construction. Tech investment in military tech has spiked 33 percent. They’re clearly preparing for all kinds of wars, especially urban ones.

Of course, Mary Trump makes the big mistake of dismissing the bunker as yet another sign of a fragile ego, and not a dark omen.

It’s a dark omen.

You don’t spend hundreds of millions on a structure with a bunker underneath it simply because you’re a paranoid loon with a big ego. Big military tech companies certainly don’t foot the bill for it. Don’t get me wrong, Trump is definitely a paranoid loon with a big ego. So is Peter Thiel and Russell Vought. But these aren’t the paranoid loons of ten years ago. They’re the paranoid loons of the 2020s, the ones who understand the depths of the climate crisis, the ones who lived through a pandemic, the ones watching the collapse take shape and all of the civil unrest it’s inspiring.

These bunkers have become their own perverse status symbols, with super rich families trying to top each other in terms of luxury and spectacle. Some families have built bunkers with moats, with underground race tracks for their kids, inside bamboo forests, and I suspect one or two have theme parks and shopping malls. The Kardashians tried to build a bunker with an underground spa.

Trump’s bunker tells us something.

They know.

As we’ve discussed here, the super rich and their political puppets are fully aware of what’s going on with the climate crisis. Big tech companies have largely dropped their climate pledges. So have the big banks and investment firms. They’re all going full steam ahead with coal and gas, and they’re rebooting nuclear plants, too. They’re doing it to power their AI fantasies, because they desperately want to replace people with robots while starving us and unleashing a pandora’s box of diseases. They know what’s in the latest climate reports. They know “there’s no future.” They sell hope to the masses, while quietly preparing for the end of the world. The mainstream media, and the Mary Trumps of the world, write them off as paranoid.

It’s so much worse than that.

The billionaires have gone bunkers. As we document here every week, every action indicates that they’re not just preparing for collapse, they’re betting on it, they’re driving it. They want it to happen. We’re already crossing tipping points, like the loss of the coral reefs. Things we predicted for the 2040s are happening now.

What else?

Consider what’s going on in South America…………………………………….

Trump serves as the figurehead of a deeply paranoid technocratic network who sees the world collapsing, because they collapsed it. They plan to wage wars from their cyberbunkers, at home and abroad.

You may have also seen stories that Trump is contemplating a third term. Yes, we already know it’s unconstitutional. But this Trump, often called “Trump 2.0,” has even less regard for the constitution than he did in 2020.

Everything they’ve done so far indicates that they’re planning to seize control of elections by 2026, and certainly by 2028. By then, it won’t matter what’s constitutional. The Thiels and Voughts will run Trump as long as they can, until he literally keels over dead, either in office or at one of his rallies, and then they’ll replace him with Vance. By then, they’ll have a firm grip on blue cities and polling places. If Trump never gets to enjoy his ballroom bunker, I’m sure Vance will use it.

So, if you were planning to take over the government, invade major cities, preside over a deep recession, nurture new pandemics, start wars with other countries for their resources, and potentially invade Canada, all while the planet’s climate breaks down into a chaotic mix of droughts, dust storms, heat waves, and hurricanes that ultimately collapse the GDP by 50 percent and kill billions of people….

Wouldn’t you want a cool new bunker?

I would. https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/its-not-a-ballroom-its-a-bunker/?ref=the-sentinel-intelligence-newsletter

October 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

New nuclear push brings old dangers back — and bigger than ever 

by Kevin Kamps, opinion contributor   – 10/06/25 https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5537588-nuclear-power-dangers-regulation/

When President Trump and Keir Starmer, prime minister of the United Kingdom, signed a deal to rapidly expand nuclear power in the U.K., nuclear stock prices soared to record highs. But the boom ignores the overwhelming evidence that nuclear is a bad risk.  

The only U.S. reactors built in the last 30 years, Vogtle Units 3 and 4, cost over $35 billion, resulting in the world’s most expensive electricity. Prohibitive cost overruns also sank NuScale, the only U.S. attempt to commercialize small modular reactors. 

Notwithstanding, irrational nuclear exuberance is reaching a pitch. Spiking electricity demand, cratering nuclear regulation, reckless nuclear boosterism and federal attacks on renewables have produced a perfect storm fueling nuclear expansionism. Former regulators warn that with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now compromised, the storm may blow us onto the rocks. 

Nuclear hubris is so extreme that NASA says it will put a reactor on the moon by 2030. But with regulatory guardrails down, we ought to worry more about preventing a nuclear moonscape on earth. 

One neon danger sign is the rise of “zombie nukes” — restarting old, disused reactors, including those previously shut down for safety reasons. It’s happening at Michigan’s Palisades nuclear plant, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island 1 and Iowa’s Duane Arnold. 

Another red flag is so-called “advanced” reactors, including small modular reactors. Contrary to the name, small modular reactors are not new, not always small and probably not modular, comprising 127 different designs that are mostly speculative and haven’t been built yet. 

Small modular reactors aren’t “walk away safe” or carbon-free. Their lower output precludes economies of scale and their construction costs aren’t proportionately smaller than conventional nuclear, so their electricity is costlier. They also produce up to 30 times the waste and leak more neutrons. They emit greenhouse gases and thermal pollution. Subsidizing them and other nuclear undermines renewables and makes climate change worse. 

Holtec, a privately held firm facing ethical questions and known for hawking (though not yet building) small modular reactors and pioneering zombie nuke restart, was tapped in the U.S.-U.K. deal to develop nuclear-powered data centers in northeast England worth $15 billion. It gained notoriety by buying moribund U.S. nuclear plants cheaply under pretense of dismantling them and then pivoting to convert them back to operations, though it has no experience as a nuclear operator. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission obliged, granting regulatory relief and safety exemptions enabling Palisades to transition from decommissioning to “operations” status.

Holtec also plans to install small modular reactors there, next to a large cache of radioactive waste. It has similar plans for decommissioned nuclear sites it owns in New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, and it intends to go public in the next few months with an IPO potentially valued at $10 billion. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

A nuclear engineer recently warned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards that once Palisades is restarted, it could fail within six months, with “unimaginable impacts to the general public,” due to mishandled steam generator tubes or its cracked primary cooling system.

Watchdog groups in Massachusetts, where Holtec wants to install small modular reactors on the closed Pilgrim nuclear site, are decrying a pending energy bill repealing a 1982 state law requiring a permanent repository for radioactive waste, as well as voting up a referendum before any new nuclear can be built. Neither condition is met, but Gov. Maura Healy (D) is bent on small nuclear reactors and nuclear-powered AI data centers anyway. 

At New York’s Indian Point, Holtec proposes to install small modular reactors and restart old, partially dismantled reactors, despite signing an agreement that prohibits even proposing renuclearizing the site without local, county and state support, which it doesn’t have.  

Last year, Holtec sued to block a state law prohibiting it from dumping radioactive water into the Hudson River, which Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed. Then nuclear lobbyists went into high gear in Albany, including hiring former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, prompting an ethics complaint. Hochul then flipped, directing the New York Power Authority to build at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear in the state.  

This about-face toward nuclear buildout is happening as the regulatory regime, never robust, is in free fall. Four former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairs (three in this article), have sounded the alarm. Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners testified before Congress that they expect to be fired if they question unsafe reactor designs and fail to rubberstamp them. Former Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Katy Huff and colleagues wrote that making nuclear regulatory decisions “for political reasons” is “setting the U.S. on the fastest path to a nuclear accident. … This is neither hypothetical nor hyperbole.” 

From their mouths to market handicappers’ ears. Amory Lovins wrote recently that nuclear-powered AI centers “may be a trillion-dollar bubble, but it’s sellable until market realities intervene.” The same is true of the harsh realities of nuclear’s inherent dangers. Let’s hope radiological disaster doesn’t intervene before nuclear’s unacceptable risks and costs get priced back in. 
 
Kevin Kamps is the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear.

October 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment