nuclear-news

The Innate and Inseparable Ties Between Nuclear Weapons and Energy

Why are these statements significant? Because there is a long track record of attempts by the nuclear industry and advocates for nuclear power to erase or at least camouflage the connection between the technologies used to develop nuclear energy and the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

Understanding these connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy helps explain why governments around the world continue to support nuclear power despite the multiple problems associated with nuclear power. On top of huge amounts of funding, ultimately from the public, that is made available to nuclear enterprises, the linkage with nuclear weapons is also used to control information flows and exclude outsiders from policy discussions, thus weakening democracy

M.V. Ramana, February 24, 2026, https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/24/the-innate-and-inseparable-ties-between-nuclear-weapons-and-energy/

What do Canada’s retired general Wayne Eyre and Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman share in common? Answer: In their own ways, both have inadvertently warned the public about the deep relationship between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

The former’s warning came earlier this month, when the retired general told a conference in Ottawa that when it came to acquiring nuclear weapons, Canada should keep its “options open,” pointing out that Canada had “a good nuclear enterprise” including “the civilian infrastructure” and “the scientists.” Eyre, who served as Canada’s chief of the Defence Staff from 2021 to 2024, argued, “Let’s just have the conditions in place so that if we decide to go that way, we can do it in shorter order than some other countries who have no nuclear enterprise. It’s all about hedging\.” Part of the strategy he recommended was to invest in aerospace and missile technology.

Canadian government officials were quick to state that the country remained opposed to acquiring nuclear weapons, and others pointed out that such acquisition wouldn’t be so simple. But Eyre was pointing to a deep truth—Canada’s nuclear energy program would facilitate the building of nuclear weapons, should the country decide to do so. Indeed, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, highlighted this fact in its editorial (“The strong civilian nuclear industry could provide a springboard if ever Ottawa chose to go that way”) even as it argued against Canada building nuclear weapons.

This fact is equally applicable to all countries that acquire the technology to generate nuclear power: they would be closer to having the capacity to make nuclear weapons than if they had not built nuclear plants.

The last time this connection was so prominently broadcast was back in March 2018, when Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS News about Saudi Arabia’s equivalent hedging strategy. Earlier, the country had announced that it was interested in deploying nuclear power plants for “peaceful purposes,” but during the interview, MBS pointed to the possibility that Iran might develop a nuclear bomb, and declared that Saudi Arabia “will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Effacement Efforts

Why are these statements significant? Because there is a long track record of attempts by the nuclear industry and advocates for nuclear power to erase or at least camouflage the connection between the technologies used to develop nuclear energy and the capacity to build nuclear weapons. An early example of the attempt to make the two pursuits seem unrelated was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which the President announced at the United Nations General Assembly in December 1953 with the stated aim of hastening “the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of the people and the governments of the East and West.”

The Atoms for Peace speech came just seven years after the 1946 Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy that explicitly warned that “the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.” The intervening years witnessed a dramatic shift in the policy of the United States to build a larger and more destructive nuclear arsenal, including hydrogen bombs, and, simultaneously, a growing movement for nuclear disarmament and peace. The US government was also involved in an effort to induce private companies to build nuclear plants, in part to advance military capabilities. Eisenhower’s speech is an attempt to paper over the contradiction between a claimed interest in peace while developing nuclear capabilities.

In subsequent decades, the nuclear industry and its supporters have resorted to simply denying any connection between nuclear power and weapons. For example, Ted Nordhaus, who recently praised Trump’s policies to promote nuclear energy in the Washington Post, exhorted people to “stop confusing nuclear weapons with nuclear power.”

Overlaps

There are five overlaps between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons: technical, historical, geographical, personnel and institutional.

Let us start with the technical. The greatest challenge to developing a nuclear arsenal is obtaining the necessary fissile materials, namely highly enriched uranium or plutonium. These materials are “the key ingredients in nuclear weapons.” Neither is found in nature.

Uranium occurs naturally in two main varieties, called isotopes, the heavier uranium-238 and the lighter uranium-235.The latter is the one that can sustain a chain reaction, which is the basis of both nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs. But the concentration of uranium-235 in nature is usually too low for such a chain reaction to occur. Whether it is to make nuclear weapons or to use as nuclear fuel in most common nuclear power plants, the uranium-235 concentration must be “enriched,” from 0.7 percent to 3 to 5 percent for most nuclear power plants and ideally around 90 percent for nuclear weapons. One technical overlap between the processes used to produce nuclear weapons and generate energy is that the facilities used to produce low-enriched uranium fueling nuclear power plants can be modified to produce weapons-useable highly enriched uranium, a technical detail that is at the heart of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

Plutonium, too, is not found in nature but is produced when uranium fuel is irradiated in a nuclear reactor. In order for this plutonium to be used either as nuclear reactor fuel or in nuclear weapons, it must first be separated from uranium and other chemicals in the irradiated fuel through a chemical process called reprocessing.

Historically, many countries built their first nuclear reactors to produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. The United States, for example, built reactors in Hanford to produce plutonium, and the first uses for the plutonium thus produced were the nuclear weapon tested in New Mexico in July 1945 and the bomb dropped over Nagasaki.

There are some countries, such as Israel, that only operate nuclear reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. That is rare. Which points to the geographical connection between nuclear weapons and energy: a significant overlap between the countries that have built nuclear power plants and those that have nuclear weapons. If one looks at the 413 nuclear reactors listed as operational by the International Atomic Energy Agency as of February 2026, 279 of them are in countries with nuclear weapons. If one adds countries that are part of military alliances with nuclear-weapon states, such as members of the NATO alliance, then the overlap is overwhelming.

There is also an overlap in the training needed to have personnel who can design and operate nuclear power plants and who can produce fisile material for nuclear weapons. Examples include Pakistan and Iran, both of which received training for scientists and engineers from the United States.

Munir Ahmed Khan, who was responsible for launching Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, explained it thus:

“The Pakistani higher education system is so poor, I have no place from which to draw talented scientists and engineers to work in our nuclear establishment. We don’t have [a] training system for the kind of cadre we need. But, if we can get France or somebody else to come and create a broad nuclear infrastructure, and build these plants and these laboratories, I will train hundreds of my people in ways that otherwise they would never be able to be trained. And with that training, and with the blueprints and the other things that we’d get along the way, then we could set up separate plants that would not be under safeguards, that would not be built with direct foreign assistance, but I would now have the people who could do that. If I don’t get the cooperation, I can’t train the people to run a weapons program.”

Finally, there is a deep connection between institutions that oversee nuclear energy and weapons programs, as exemplified in the United States by the Department of Energy (DOE). The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a semi-autonomous agency within DOE that is responsible for maintaining the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the United States and for “modernizing” it (namely, to make new weapons). The DOE also promotes nuclear energy through multiple funding mechanisms. There is also a significant overlap between the private corporations involved in building nuclear power plants and servicing the nuclear weapons industry.

Significance

Understanding these connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy helps explain why governments around the world continue to support nuclear power despite the multiple problems associated with nuclear power. On top of huge amounts of funding, ultimately from the public, that is made available to nuclear enterprises, the linkage with nuclear weapons is also used to control information flows and exclude outsiders from policy discussions, thus weakening democracy.

The expansion of nuclear energy also thwarts efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons. It will not be possible to eliminate nuclear weapons without policies and resource-allocation decisions that are grounded in the reality that nuclear energy cannot be separated from nuclear weapons.

M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia and the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India.

February 27, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Ontario – Lecce’s nuclear spin –and the $3.3 billion he forgot to mention

Energy Minister Stephen Lecce likes to trumpet how Ontario Power Generation (OPG) finished its Darlington Refurbishment Project on budget and ahead of schedule. It’s a great story. Except it’s not true.

In fact, as OPG has admitted in filings with the Ontario Energy Board (OEB), the project will run at least 25% over budget and take another six years to fully complete.

As our new fact sheet describes, OPG will have to spend at least another $3.3 billion to ensure the safe operation of the Darlington Nuclear Station until 2055. 

So the truth is that Ontario has maintained a perfect record on nuclear projects: every single one has been over budget and finished behind schedule.

That’s just a little unsettling given the province’s plans to spend about $400 billion on new nuclear projects, including what it hopes will be the world’s largest nuclear station in Port Hope. You’re already paying more for power every month thanks to rising costs for nuclear power. All the happy talk in the world isn’t going to change the reality of eye watering costs and huge financial risks when it comes to new nuclear.

Instead of betting on costly nuclear, Minister Lecce should direct OPG to work with First Nations to develop offshore wind in the Great Lakes and solar farms at OPG’s generating station sites in Port Hope, Nanticoke and St. Clair Township.

Please tell Energy Minister Stephen Lecce that we need to invest in renewables and energy storage – not new nuclear – to make electricity more affordable for Ontario’s families and businesses. 

February 15, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Looking to Blame Anyone But Israel for Youth’s Anti-Israel Turn

Ari Paul, February 5, 2026, https://fair.org/home/looking-to-blame-anyone-but-israel-for-youths-anti-israel-turn/

Younger Americans are turning against Israel. “On both the left and the right, young Americans are growing more skeptical of offering unconditional US support to Israel,” Politico (9/29/25) reported. Brookings (8/6/25) ran the headline “Support for Israel Continues to Deteriorate, Especially Among Democrats and Young People.” According to the Forward (11/21/25), “Younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.

Pro-Israel media are looking for blame. It’s often easy to paint youth opinion that is out of sync with official state policy as emotionally driven social justice warriorism, the result of hearts not yet hardened by life’s cold realities. The Zionist media narrative is looking for the culprits who have apparently miseducated our youth, turning them not just into Israel critics, but Jew haters.

‘Panicked’ by young people

At the Atlantic (12/15/25), Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece headlined “The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am,’” with the subhead, “Anti-Jewish prejudice isn’t a partisan divide—it’s a generational one.” To his credit, Rosenberg starts off reporting on very real instances of antisemitism, but then watch carefully what he does in the middle:

Young people also tend to be more critical of Israel than their elders, leading a minority to excuse or even perpetuate anti-Jewish acts in America in the name of Palestine. These critics are likely to consume anti-Israel content on their social-media apps of choice. The platforms then funnel some of those users toward antisemitic material—a sort of algorithmic escalator that ends up radicalizing a percentage of them.

In the first sentence, the only evidence Rosenberg cites is a link to his own article (Atlantic, 5/22/25) about how “Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two people as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum,” with the headline “A Dangerous Disguise for Antisemitism.” Rosenberg said the “assailant used the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews.”

But as I have previously written (FAIR.org, 5/29/25), much of the media framed this attack as antisemitic without any factual basis. While there was plenty of evidence that the act was political, with Rodiguez’s manifesto denouncing Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state,” there wasn’t any evidence that the attacker held antisemitic views, or targeted the event because of the faith of the victims. If someone obsessed with Saudi Arabia’s aggression in Yemen killed two Muslim workers at the Saudi embassy, that would certainly be anti-Saudi political violence, but not necessarily anti-Muslim terror.

‘Sewer of filth and lies’

Rosenberg doesn’t quite say that today’s young critics of Israel are necessarily antisemites, but argues that by putting anti-Israel content on social media, they’re helping to drive traffic to actual antisemitism. This is a framing that lets Elon Musk—who famously gave a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s second inauguration—off the hook for overseeing the rise of this antisemitic content on X (CNN, 9/29/25).

Politico (9/29/25) cites Israel’s “latest moves to launch a ground offensive in Gaza City…and deny evidence of widespread famine” as reasons for the country’s loss of support among young people.

Younger Americans are turning against Israel. “On both the left and the right, young Americans are growing more skeptical of offering unconditional US support to Israel,” Politico (9/29/25) reported. Brookings (8/6/25) ran the headline “Support for Israel Continues to Deteriorate, Especially Among Democrats and Young People.” According to the Forward (11/21/25), “Younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.”

Pro-Israel media are looking for blame. It’s often easy to paint youth opinion that is out of sync with official state policy as emotionally driven social justice warriorism, the result of hearts not yet hardened by life’s cold realities. The Zionist media narrative is looking for the culprits who have apparently miseducated our youth, turning them not just into Israel critics, but Jew haters.

‘Panicked’ by young people

“Younger Americans…are likely to trust and get their news from lightly moderated social-media platforms,” writes Yair Rosenberg (Atlantic, 12/15/25), “which often advantage the extreme opinions, conspiracy theories, and conflict-stoking content that drive engagement.”

At the Atlantic (12/15/25), Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece headlined “The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am,’” with the subhead, “Anti-Jewish prejudice isn’t a partisan divide—it’s a generational one.” To his credit, Rosenberg starts off reporting on very real instances of antisemitism, but then watch carefully what he does in the middle:

Young people also tend to be more critical of Israel than their elders, leading a minority to excuse or even perpetuate anti-Jewish acts in America in the name of Palestine. These critics are likely to consume anti-Israel content on their social-media apps of choice. The platforms then funnel some of those users toward antisemitic material—a sort of algorithmic escalator that ends up radicalizing a percentage of them.

In the first sentence, the only evidence Rosenberg cites is a link to his own article (Atlantic, 5/22/25) about how “Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two people as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum,” with the headline “A Dangerous Disguise for Antisemitism.” Rosenberg said the “assailant used the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews.”

But as I have previously written (FAIR.org, 5/29/25), much of the media framed this attack as antisemitic without any factual basis. While there was plenty of evidence that the act was political, with Rodiguez’s manifesto denouncing Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state,” there wasn’t any evidence that the attacker held antisemitic views, or targeted the event because of the faith of the victims. If someone obsessed with Saudi Arabia’s aggression in Yemen killed two Muslim workers at the Saudi embassy, that would certainly be anti-Saudi political violence, but not necessarily anti-Muslim terror.

‘Sewer of filth and lies’

The root of the antisemitism problem at X is not criticism of Israeli war crimes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25).

Rosenberg doesn’t quite say that today’s young critics of Israel are necessarily antisemites, but argues that by putting anti-Israel content on social media, they’re helping to drive traffic to actual antisemitism. This is a framing that lets Elon Musk—who famously gave a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s second inauguration—off the hook for overseeing the rise of this antisemitic content on X (CNN, 9/29/25).

Nor does he recognize that Meta is aggressively policing against criticism of Israel, even as it ends efforts to proactively screen out hate speech like antisemitism (Washington Post, 2/25/25). Last year, Meta announced “that it will expand its policies to classify the misuse of the term ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for ‘Jews’ as antisemitic and Tier 1 hate speech” (World Jewish Congress, 6/9/24). Al Jazeera (10/24/24) also reported on “testimonies of routine deletion of Palestine-related posts and a deep-seated pro-Israel bias” at Meta.

Rosenberg is rightly concerned that there are too many far-right extremists promoting white nationalism and antisemitism on social media networks (Wired, 5/2/24; PBS, 8/13/24), and these corporate regimes are too tolerant of such activity on their sites. But Rosenberg manages to twist this into an argument that young people need to shut up about Gaza.

Of course, many people are upset about anti-Israel content on social media not because it leads to antisemitism, but because it’s anti-Israel: The reason for the shift in youth opinion isn’t Israel’s behavior, the argument goes, but social media’s influence. Hillary Clinton blames youth criticism of Israel on TikTok (Hollywood Reporter, 12/2/25). The Australian (12/12/25) wrote: “Young people live now on social media. And social media is an unregulated sewer of lies and filth.” The Israeli government has reportedly recruited social media personalities and public relations firms to tell its version of the story (Jerusalem Post, 10/3/25; Al Jazeera, 10/30/25).

‘Brainwashed’ into opposing sex pests

The issue of this generational divide is the center of a piece at Free Press (12/17/25) by Olivia Reingold, called “The Jewish Parents Who Raised Mamdani Voters.” For the unacquainted, Free Press was bought by Paramount (10/6/25), now controlled by oligarch David Ellison, thus turning the once-marginal publication into the closest thing the right has to the New Yorker. (The acquisition also elevated Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss, noted right-wing pundit, to CBS News editor-in-chief.)

Free Press quoted one parent in particular, Sagra Maceira de Rosen, whose bio describes her as “chair of SIO Global, an investment and advisory firm working with private equity and investment.” She said she was “horrified” that Mamdani won the election. What’s worse for her was that her grown child campaigned for him. “I fear that kids I care for—my children—are brainwashed.”

Parents looked for answers. Reingold reported:

They wondered if they should have parented differently. Did their children get enough Jewish education? Were they brainwashed by their elite private schools? Where did they go wrong?

“Maybe I failed in the sense that the kids didn’t go to Israel enough,” a 63-year-old physician in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, told me. He said his daughter, a civil rights attorney, holds anti-Zionist views and refused to vote for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo due to his alleged sexual harassment. “It would’ve been better if they went more, just to see the lies they’re being told.”

It’s not clear if the doctor or Reingold knows what they’re saying here. Jewish kids need to 1) go to Israel to get indoctrinated and 2) stop being appalled by sexual harassment. These issues are more connected than one might think, as a Jewish Currents (4/18/18) investigation by Lilith executive editor Sarah Seltzer found widespread problems of sexual violence within Birthright, the program offering young Jews free guided trips to Israel.

Lacking ‘a capacity for critical thinking’

Another parent, Lisa Fields Lewis, lamented that her grown children liked Mamdani:

Lewis was raised by an Israeli mother; her father survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She said the rise of Mamdani awakened a “generational trauma” in her. Now, she can’t shake the feeling that history is repeating itself. And kids don’t seem to realize just how dangerous Mamdani’s views are, Lewis said.

With Mamdani set to be sworn in just after midnight on January 1, Lewis doesn’t know if their relationship can return to normal any time soon. “I feel sad,” Lewis said. “I feel envious of my friends whose kids are proud Zionists, or at least have the capacity for critical thinking.”

It’s not FAIR’s job to comment on others’ parenting skills, but Lewis just told the world she thinks her children don’t have a “capacity for critical thinking”; the tension in this household might have to do with a lack of respect, rather than just differing politics. What’s really dangerous here is that the author doesn’t challenge the absurd suggestion that “Mamdani’s promise of providing free buses and righting the city’s widening income gap” is the first step in sending the Jews to the camps.

By what measure does the Free Press think Mamdani is dangerous for Jews? It pointed out that he “has consistently denied Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” saying instead that “Israel should exist ‘with equal rights for all’—a bar the nation already meets.”

Reingold can’t decide what she wants here: a Jewish state or a state that doesn’t discriminate.  Maintaining the former requires preventing the latter, as Palestinians that have been under Israeli control for nearly 60 years need to be denied the right to vote in Israeli elections. Jews from anywhere in the world have a “right to return” to Israel, but non-Jewish refugees from pre-1948 Palestine do not. A number of human rights groups, including an Israeli one, have found that the legal separation of peoples in Israel proper and the Occupied Territories amounts to apartheid (B’Tselem, 1/12/21; Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21).

Reingold went on, “More recently, the mayor-elect has caught flack for his controversial appointments to his transition committees, which include fringe anti-Zionist rabbis.” Again, there’s nothing here that represents antisemitism–instead, there’s inclusion of Jews. The problem is that Mamdani is close to clergy whose politics don’t align with the Weiss editorial regime. To put things into perspective, Mamdani won a third of the city’s Jewish vote (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/25)—not a majority, but not exactly a “fringe” either.

‘A problem of disobedient children’

These pieces spend a lot of ink displaying anxiety for this generational divide, but never really ask why it exists. If they did that, they might find out that while many in the older generation could indulge the fantasy that a pre-Netanyahu Israel was engaged in a peace process, when mainstream Israeli leaders paid lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, younger Jews only know a place of extreme bellicosity.

Any voter in their 20s doesn’t remember the Oslo Accords or Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat (Conversation, 9/12/23). Instead, what they know is a country that has mostly been under the control of the right-wing Likud party and its extremist allies, an anti-democratic slide into authoritarianism (Haaretz, 10/30/25; Committee to Protect Journalists, 12/11/25), government corruption (New York Times, 11/30/25), settlement expansion (UN News, 9/29/25), alliances with the European far right (CNN, 3/26/25; Foreign Policy, 5/9/25) and several lopsided wars against Gaza.

But neither the Atlantic nor the Free Press can say this. The answer can’t be that Israel’s actions against Palestinians and its decaying political system are turning people off. No, the problem is that young people are led astray by social media and distance from real education.

“While Israel’s actions have always been structured by apartheid and ethnic cleansing, the scale and the visibility of its structural violence has been placed at the center of American political discourse,” said Benjamin Balthaser, author of Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. “Americans, not just Jews, are compelled to respond.”

He added, “That the Free Press sees this as a problem of disobedient children or a lack of Torah school is not unlike Hillary Clinton blaming outrage at Israel on TikTok videos and social media.

February 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Artificial intelligence will not revive the nuclear industry

 January 25, 2026 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/01/25/artificial-intelligence-will-not-revive-the-nuclear-industry/

On the contrary, we need renewable energy and natural intelligence, writes Stéphane Lhomme

The current boom in artificial intelligence is accompanied by a massive increase in energy and water consumption, and, according to what we are told, this phenomenon is only just beginning and will grow exponentially. 

However, far from taking measures to stop or at least slow down this phenomenon, industrial and political leaders are instead competing with announcements and decisions to support it. As a result, various countries, including France, are trying to attract data centers by promising their owners, mainly the famous GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), to provide them with cheap and, above all, “green” electricity. 

France is offering its nuclear power because, as everyone knows, nuclear power is “clean”… if we are willing to forget the devastation caused by uranium mines, the massive radioactive, chemical, and thermal discharges from power plants into rivers and oceans, radioactive waste, and the occasional contamination of an entire country or continent (during disasters such as Fukushima and Chernobyl). 

During the World Nuclear Energy Exhibition (WNE) held in Paris from November 4 to 6, 2025, the vast majority of the media reported the countless announcements about a supposed “return to favor of nuclear power,” which, however, is just as illusory as the “great return of nuclear power” announced in the early 2000s – already accompanied by much fanfare at the time – by the same media outlets and sometimes the same journalists, who are taking advantage of the general amnesia of our “information” societies.

Despite the efforts of the high priestess of nuclear power at the time, Ms. Lauvergeon, revered by most of the media (always the same ones!) before leading her company Areva into bankruptcy (we are still waiting for the investigations that have been ongoing for 15 years to result in a trial), there was no “great comeback.”

Producing 17.1% of the world’s electricity in 2001, nuclear power has since seen its share steadily decline to below 10% in 2020 and below 9% in 2024 (8.97% to be exact). A veritable collapse as a “return to favor.” But we would have to believe that this time, buoyed by GAFAM and their unlimited checkbooks, the nuclear industry will truly experience a golden age (or rather a plutonium age). Let’s take a look at some of the thunderous announcements made in recent months.

Last June, Google announced that it would be relying on nuclear fusion to power its data centers! Let’s just remember that for 70 years, the major nuclear powers have failed completely in this endeavor, even when they joined forces in the Iter project in Cadarache (Bouches-du-Rhône). If nuclear fusion really is what powers Google, then this search engine is bound to shut down quickly!

In fact, last October, Google fell back on a plan B: restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa, which had been shut down since 2020. Never one to be late in relaying the nuclear industry’s announcements, AFP produced a dispatch reminding readers that this was the third project of its kind.

Indeed, the restart of the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan has been announced for 2023. But almost no one mentioned the official report of October 2024 revealing that the reactor, which had been shut down for several years, was severely affected by corrosion.

In reality, it is highly likely that this plant will never restart, nor will the Duane Arnold or Three Mile Island plants: in the latter case, the plan is to restart reactor 1, which was shut down in 2019, and not reactor 2 (whose core melted during a serious accident in 1979), as reported by the media, which we will charitably describe as inattentive.

Another avenue for the supposed “return to favor of nuclear power” and its ability to fuel the insane consumption of AI is that of the famous SMRs, small modular reactors, which are of course touted as being “safe, easy to build, and inexpensive.” So all we had to do was think of it.

However, the 127 SMR projects identified worldwide by the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, far from making this idea a reality, show instead a total lack of focus: many start-ups are chasing subsidies generously granted by politicians who are ignorant and, above all, terrified of being seen as dinosaurs who have missed the boat on renewal.

The SMR bubble is about to burst. In France, the main start-ups (Naarea, Newcléo, Jimmy, etc.) are in serious difficulty or have already suspended payments, and EDF’s Nuward project has been postponed indefinitely. In the US, the only project that had made any progress, NuScale, has already closed down.

After initially announcing the construction of new nuclear reactors (large or SMRs), then falling back on restarting shut-down reactors, GAFAM companies are now cautiously turning to existing facilities. In the US, for example, gas-fired power plants are being called upon. In addition, Meta (Facebook) has signed an agreement to purchase the output of the Clinton nuclear power plant (Illinois), a plant that is currently in operation: this is safer than relying on virtual or shut-down plants!

It is already clear that, wherever data centers are built, GAFAM will monopolize electricity production to the detriment of the population. This situation, which one might have thought was the stuff of science fiction, is already a reality in the US, for example in Virginia, Georgia, and Arizona, where the population is deprived of water, which is monopolized for cooling the numerous data centers built in these states, which attracted them by exempting them from taxes (again to the detriment of the population).

The same is true, for example, in Chile and already, or soon, in all countries that have had the bad idea of welcoming these famous data centers. Selfishly, we can only hope that, despite the grandstanding of the showman Macron, France will fail to attract data centers. It will then be the “winners” of this absurd race who will fall victim to GAFAM, and thus there will be electricity and water left for the needs of the French population. It should also be noted that various countries are beginning to take measures to slow down or suspend the installation of data centers.

Unfortunately, it is to be feared that nothing and no one will put a stop to the madness of AI and its senseless consumption of electricity (not to mention the “mining” of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, an activity that also consumes a tremendous amount of energy and water).

However, contrary to what is claimed in the numerous articles mentioned above, nuclear power will not be able to meet this demand: as demonstrated by the failures of large reactors—EPR (France) and AP1000 (USA)—as well as SMRs, the construction of nuclear power plants is far too uncertain, slow, and costly.

Moreover, according to the International Energy Agency, since 2020, 90% of new electricity generation capacity worldwide has been renewable, which is much cheaper than nuclear power and, above all, can be brought online very quickly. AI will therefore not save nuclear power; quite the contrary: once they have finished with their absurd announcements, even the GAFAM companies will turn away from it and choose realistic options. That said, while it is of course much better for electricity to be renewable rather than nuclear, one wonders where the progress will be if it is monopolized to power AI rather than meet the needs of the population.

On this subject, there is still time to cancel the senseless EPR reactor projects (even renamed EPR2 to make them seem like an improvement), which EDF is proving incapable of building and operating, and to devote the available money to realistic, decentralized energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that are supported by and for the population: Natural intelligence and renewables rather than artificial “intelligence” and nuclear power.

Stéphane Lhomme is the founder and director of Observatoire du nucléaire. This article was originally published by Observatoire du nucléaire.

January 27, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster | Leave a comment