Repeat After Media: Data Centers Are Wonderful and Good
It’s true that in a digital world, there will always be data centers. The question is whether they need to expand at a breakneck pace, largely to serve the needs of AI. Voters are rightly asking whether the environmental impacts of AI are worth it—for a technology with the potential to take people’s jobs and flood the news ecosystem with fake imagery.
Ari Paul, 11 Sept 26, https://fair.org/home/repeat-after-media-data-centers-are-wonderful-and-good/
If you follow conservative media and Republican politicians, you could be convinced that any opposition to AI data centers is not due to their sprawling footprint, greed for electricity or insatiable need for cooling water. Rather, it’s the result of a Chinese Communist plot.
These data centers are dreadfully unpopular. “Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed,” according to Gallup (5/13/26). From YouGov (9/1/26): “About half (51%) of Americans say that the construction of new data centers is a bad thing for the country. Only 20% say it is a good thing.”
The reasons for this opposition is that these centers put enormous strain on the electrical grid, need loads of water for cooling, can be extremely noisy and take up lots of space in communities. “The environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world’s largest countries,” AP (6/3/26) reported.
Opposition from ‘Chinese entities’
Much like how some liberals have convinced themselves that MAGA and American nationalism are fueled by Kremlin disinformation, the right-wing line is that communities opposing these giant data centers are motivated not by their own interests or common sense, but some unseen Beijing-manufactured psychosis.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) demanded that the Justice Department “investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure,” as he suspected that a “network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate US policy and public opinion on data centers.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in the words of Newsmax (9/2/26), believes “China is helping fuel opposition to artificial intelligence data centers in the United States.” “Beijing has a strategic interest in convincing Americans to slow construction of the infrastructure needed to compete in the global AI race,” the far-right outlet paraphrased.
The Washington Examiner‘s Facebook page (8/30/26) featured a cartoon from A.F. Branco depicting a Chinese data center running a psy-op on Americans who oppose data centers.
The National Interest (9/1/26) said:
Chinese entities have a long history of collaborating with far-left causes, and they have again found common ground in opposing the construction of data centers. They are pushing mutually reinforcing messages that criticize a host of alleged environmental and ethical concerns as reasons to disempower American growth in a critical economic and competitive sector. Officials at the federal, state and local levels should recognize this noxious alliance as they field criticism of data centers.
‘They want to be backwards and poor’
The rest of the corporate media don’t insist that Chinese mind control is the reason for data center opposition. But these outlets attack citizens for their ecological concerns nonetheless.
FAIR (11/20/25, 7/9/26) has covered the Washington Post’s unbridled enthusiasm for data centers and AI. It’s not hard to see why the paper is so interested in this: The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, which has 900 data centers, according to Bloomberg (11/24/25). The Post editorial board (8/20/26) denounced opposition to data centers, saying AI “can make [people] wealthier and more productive.” “Data centers need a better plan for negotiating with local governments,” the editorialists allowed, “but the frothy debate about the economics of AI also needs a reality check.”
For the Wall Street Journal editorial board (8/31/26), the voting public on both sides of the political aisle have lost their minds. “We’re running scared over investment that creates jobs and pays local property taxes,” the board said. For one thing, these centers are “the backbone of the internet and power the apps on your smartphone,” and they “enable Zoom meetings, online food deliveries, video streaming, instant retail stock trading and more.”
It’s true that in a digital world, there will always be data centers. The question is whether they need to expand at a breakneck pace, largely to serve the needs of AI. Voters are rightly asking whether the environmental impacts of AI are worth it—for a technology with the potential to take people’s jobs and flood the news ecosystem with fake imagery.
While the Journal board doesn’t engage in the same kind of Chinese conspiracy theorizing as the rest of the right-wing media, it does say “the US is in an AI competition with China, which won’t be a benevolent force if the US falls behind.” The board hailed President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post (8/31/26) where he claimed people opposed data centers because “they want to end up being backwards and poor.”
“Please keep it up,” the Journal told His Excellency, saying Trump “rightly notes that if the bipartisan campaign against data centers succeeds, the winner will be the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Journal’s support for the Trump administration, environmental destruction in the service of corporate profit and Cold War fearmongering are par for the course. But an editorial like this almost makes one wonder if the Journal‘s headline (8/26/26) “Ditch the 40-Ounce Water Bottle: You’re Probably Hydrated Enough,” was meant to prepare us for water austerity.
And it’s hard to blame voters for their AI skepticism when they see something like this, a lead from Newsweek (9/1/26):
A data center linked to AI and bitcoin mining operations in El Reno, Oklahoma, lost more than 3 million gallons of water after a private water line failed, according to local news reports, raising fresh concerns about water-intensive data centers amid one of the worst droughts the state has seen since 2022.
Won’t someone think of the jobs?
The New York Times (8/21/26) attempted to quell both liberal and conservative populist uproar against data centers and their corporate owners by bringing in Don Slaiman, the political coordinator of IBEW Local 26, representing Washington, DC–area electrical workers. Slaiman’s op-ed said that data center expansion will create good union jobs for the building trades.
This is a very typical response: Environmental outrage holds back technological progress, as well as limiting blue-collar job growth. If something creates jobs, it must be a good thing, goes the line. This rhetoric has been deployed against opposition to the XL pipeline (Heritage Foundation, 12/13/11), fracking (Fox News, 2/27/20) and mountain-top removal (Wall Street Journal, 6/13/11). CBS News (6/1/26) was also confident about blue-collar employment in data center construction.
But there are other ways to put people to work: Renewable energy infrastructure, new public schools, hospitals and high-speed rail networks could all put building trades unionists on the work clock. Big Tech and Big Energy aren’t the only things that create jobs.
And Trump doesn’t care about jobs: His administration saw 400,000 federal job cuts across the country, a mass layoff spearheaded by tech oligarch Elon Musk (NBC News, 8/4/26). Congressional Democrats (Joint Economic Committee Democrats, 2/11/26) noted that “the manufacturing industry lost 108,000 jobs during the first year of President Trump’s second term.”
The jobs growth with these centers is overhyped. The Brookings Institution (5/4/26) said “Data centers do create local jobs, though fewer than industry advocates claim” and that “Wages are unaffected by data center builds while home prices rise 2%–5%.” Economic writer Doug Henwood (Left Business Observer, 9/3/26) said of AI and construction jobs:
Yes, the sector looks to be creating some jobs, but not in size…. For the year ending in June 2026 (the most recent month available), industrial construction overall—the building of factories, office buildings and the like—grew by just 2,000. Nonresidential specialty trades, another subsector of the construction business, where data center electricians and the like are employed (along with many other specialists who do the finishing work, as opposed to the people who put up buildings), showed more robust growth, 78,000, but the subsector accounts for just 1.8% of total employment, little more than it did two years ago, and less than it did in 2001. In percentage terms, it’s doing better than total employment, but that’s a low bar lately.
What about golf courses?
The New York Times (7/25/26) also roped psychologist Adam Mastroianni into making a fairly weak “what about” defense of these centers:
Communities have long tolerated wasteful projects that take up tons of space, consume lots of natural resources and serve the whims of wealthier people. They’re called golf courses and backyards. The 14,000 golf courses across the United States used nearly 550 billion gallons of water in 2020, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans use over 3 trillion gallons of water on “landscape irrigation” each year. No one knows for sure how much water data centers use in total. One reasonable estimate from Brian Potter at the Institute for Progress put it at about 100 billion gallons in 2023. Even if the number of data centers increases tenfold, we may still end up using less water on artificial intelligence than we use to keep our grass springy.
Yes, it’s true that there are many different other things that are wasteful. Maybe we should rethink those sprawling suburbs and private golf courses, too. But are golf courses projected to use almost 12% of all US electricity by 2030, like data centers are?
‘Potential mortality burden’
The health impacts of these centers really cannot be understated, according to Artie Vierkant, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, who told FAIR in an email:
One analysis of the Vantage Data Center facility in Loudoun County estimated that data center, alone, could produce between 3.4 and 6.5 additional premature deaths per year, in addition to other health and economic impacts. (Since some people seem to value economic arguments over arguments about lifemaking and quality of life, note the analysis says this corresponds to a $49–$95 million hit to the local economy).
Further, these estimates are based on emissions levels these data centers have received permits for. According to a report in Politico (3/11/26), after construction was approved the local government realized the energy company servicing the data center wouldn’t be able to connect it to the grid for its first three years of operation—meaning it’s expected to spend years relying exclusively on what is otherwise supposed to be backup power sources, which could theoretically mean it may output more emissions than the analysis even expects it to (meaning, an even higher potential mortality burden).
Vierkant coupled the growth of these centers with the continued use of coal plants in a place like Virginia—like the Virginia Clover Power Station south of Lynchburg. The whole state has been dubbed “the world’s data center capital” (Virginia Mercury, 7/6/26). Vierkant, again:
This additional health impact is not factored into the assessment of the data center itself, meaning any ongoing impacts from this coal power plant continuing to operate stack on top of other negative externalities here.
The bottom line is, we can talk about theoretical versions of what’s happening all we want—facilities with no negative impacts somehow, clean energy sources, the tech boom going on forever so those putative tax dollar increases stick around, etc. But then we’re not talking about the material reality of what’s happening immediately in front of us, which is devastating on a local and broader, world-ecological level.
The fact that the AI boom is also increasing reliance on coal power (Yale Environment 360, 1/15/26; Greenpeace, 3/4/26) is a big piece of the general AI data center problem, Vierkant said.
Imminently bursting bubble
The fact is, communities are responding to these new data centers being thrust upon them whether they want them or not. This comes while there are serious warnings about the imminent bursting of the AI bubble (Real News, 8/6/26), and ethical questions about what AI could do to jobs, education, human cognition and the news media.
“Looking at the reality makes it obvious what the opposition to data centers is all about,” Vierkant said, “whereas indulging in counterfactuals reinforces the idea that the backlash is about people being somehow misled.”
US universities get millions to do military research for Israel.
xpayers give money to the US government. The US government then sends billions of dollars to Israel. Israel uses that money – there’s not a strict accounting – to purchase goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions.”
These projects are not funded by traditional academic grants. Instead, they are procured as “defense articles and services,” paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program – the same mechanism Israel uses to purchase F-35 fighter jets and other U.S. defense exports.
The projects, which often fail to disclose their funding, include efforts to create surveillance robots and improve missile guidance
See an insect crawling in the corner of the room? It might be a surveillance robot, thanks to research at Carnegie Mellon University to develop cockroach-like robots with, and for, the Israeli military.
Robot cockroaches, “terror-network” mapping, and rapid missile guidance are just three examples of at least 70 research projects U.S. universities have conducted on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMoD). Over a thousand pages of internal university and U.S./Israeli military documents reveal a sweeping, decades-long program to sponsor military research collaborations with at least 30 U.S. universities, from Cornell to the University of California at San Diego, since at least 2009.
Projects are conducted in collaboration with the Israeli military and sometimes explicitly incorporate environmental conditions in Palestine into the work. One project designed fuel cells for “distributed sensor networks” tailored to the temperature and soil conditions of an Israeli border that could monitor “potential terrorist activity” for “border security.”
Recent reports from Dropsite News, The Nation, and the Anti-War Initiative found millions of Israeli military dollars flowing into U.S. schools. Public records obtained from 13 U.S. universities reveal this money was directed via a U.S. arms export program to fund collaborations with Israeli scientists and military officials.
These projects are not funded by traditional academic grants. Instead, they are procured as “defense articles and services,” paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program – the same mechanism Israel uses to purchase F-35 fighter jets and other U.S. defense exports.
At least 11 contracts sent U.S. scientists to Israel to work face to face with their counterparts at an Israeli university and/or the IMoD, earmarking funds for U.S. professors to attend meetings and present their research to the IMoD.
The research
Though research subjects span the breadth of Israel’s military interests, including drone swarms, missile guidance, fuel cells, and quantum sensing, we highlight just a few threads to illustrate how U.S. universities support Israel’s military.
Alongside robotic cockroaches, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter built “inchworm-like” crawlers with an IMoD scientist at the University of Maryland. Profs. Indejrit Chopra, also at Maryland, and Kenneth Breuer at Brown University were inspired by hummingbirds and bats to develop micro-drones that can search caves and demolished buildings. Columbia Prof. Hod Lipson built the Flexipod, a “soft quadrupedal robot” agile enough to do backflips and navigate varied terrain.
The IDF has used other drones to collect massive surveillance datasets that are fed into AI software to track targets and accelerate “kill-chains.” Recent Israeli innovations in this area follows years of IMoD-sponsored research at U.S. universities on this kind of technology.
In December 2016, the IDF prototyped an AI tool to “Tell You What’s Happening in a Video,” generating captions to help soldiers “keep an eye on the battlefield.”
The following year, Prof. Kate Saenko received $120,000 from the IMoD for research on “Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Video” using AI to automatically describe and classify people and objects in a video. While sponsored by a second IMoD contract on “Zero Shot Captioning,” or using machine-learning to describe things not seen before, Saenko’s group presented software for the “detection of novel objects” titled “Learning To Detect Every Thing” at a Tel Aviv conference.
Saenko told RS the conference paper was not related to her IMoD funding, but did not answer repeated requests to clarify which of her papers are.
According to an ex-IDF intelligence officer, a human eye “will go over [AI-generated] targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” One IMoD-sponsored project at the University of California, Berkeley could make that process even faster.
Neuroscientist Robert Knight tested electrodes in a brain-computer-interface (BCI) for “cognitive enhancement” of “high throughput tasks requiring visual recognition.” In his internal proposal to the IMoD, but not in his published study, Knight discusses applications like “detecting ‘suspicious’ activity.”
Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian at the University of Maryland received IMoD funding to study “Targeting of Terror Networks” to “find weak points for the destabilization of terrorist networks.” He has applied these algorithms to identify alleged “sympathizers” of Hezbollah on social media.
Another of Subrahmanian’s IMoD contracts on “Massive Social Networks” involved analyzing “1.04 million person-days” of cellular location data for tracking population flow in Israel and its Occupied Territories. The study notes its algorithms are “related to… monitoring for evading targets by a flock of unmanned air vehicles.”
Other IMoD-sponsored projects studied drone swarms directly.
“Human-Robot Interaction Design for a Single Operator with Many Robots” was the IMoD project of Prof. Holly Yanco, the director of the University of Massachusetts’ Lowell’s Robotics Center. MIT Prof. Emilio Frazzoli devised “trajectory optimization” algorithms for groups of quadrotors, emphasizing his results are “easy to implement and may be used directly.”
When reached for comment, Frazzoli stated his research was on a “very basic/generic problem in robotics: how to generate a path to move one robot from point A to point B,” and that there was “nothing specific to defense” about the work.
Frazzoli’s IMoD-sponsored contract was titled “Rapidly Exploring Random Trees for Missile Guidance.”
Prof. Joaquim Martins at the University of Michigan optimized “package delivery UAV” fleets for the IMoD, given “mission requirements” with “various package weights and delivery distances.” He found that quadrotors are best for “long-range missions with small numbers of customers,” and thanked Israeli arms company Rafael’s CTO of Multi-Domain Warfare for help with “research methodology.” Martins’ published paper only lists civilian applications like delivering “medical supplies” despite its IMoD sponsorship.
This is not the only seeming example of a gap between an IMoD proposal and the published paper that followed it. In 2015, Profs. Alexander Yarin (University of Illinois Chicago) and Eyal Zussman (Technion) submitted a chemical sensing proposal telling the IMoD their “Overall research objective is to develop [a] fundamental understanding of sampling and detect[ing] buried explosives,” elaborating that “the detection of buried improvised explosives and mines [is] a major challenge in the battlefield.”
But a public-facing paper detailing experiments nearly identical to their internal application only listed civilian applications like “mining,” without any references to “explosives” or the “battlefield.” The paper did not acknowledge any funding sources, including the IMoD. Neither professor responded to a request for comment.
The funding pipeline
The research is purchased by the IMoD Mission to USA, the Israeli military procurement office that spends roughly $3.3 billion in annual U.S. aid to buy defense goods and services.
As analyst Christian Sorensen of Eisenhower Media Network explained over e-mail: “US taxpayers give money to the US government. The US government then sends billions of dollars to Israel. Israel uses that money – there’s not a strict accounting – to purchase goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions.”
To receive IMoD funds, universities like UC Irvine certified they were “entering into an agreement to sell defense articles … to the foreign government listed above,” and that the payment would be made “under the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act.” The projects are classified as Direct Commercial Contracts (DCCs), or sales from a defense contractor to a foreign military, subsidized by the U.S. government. Because only DCCs of over $100 million to Israel require legislative notification, the program has no public reporting mechanism or granular congressional oversight, and we do not know if any other countries use DCCs to sponsor U.S. science. In an e-mail to the IMoD, one university administrator called this funding arrangement a “departure from standard process.”
For over 35 years, Israel was one of just ten countries authorized to use DCCs, spending over a billion dollars annually on defense exports from private entities such as these research projects. But in April 2026, the Pentagon extended this privilege to over 50 countries.
A bureaucratic carve-out known as the Fundamental Research Exclusion allows the IMoD to bypass export controls for defense research it sponsors if the results are eventually “published and shared broadly.”
Both MIT and the University of California systems censored their funding databases after student activists discovered their schools’ IMoD contracts. In July 2025, an MIT professor canceled a proposed IMoD contract due to public backlash.
A spokesperson for the State Department referred questions about this purchasing arrangement to a fact sheet on U.S.-Israeli Security Cooperation. The sheet notes that the U.S. participates in “a variety of exchanges with Israel,” including research and weapons development.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Claim about Scottish support for nuclear power doesn’t add up
Ni Holmes, St Andrews, 27 Aug 26
I WAS not surprised to find, when I got to the foot of a letter challenging Paul Kavanagh’s assertion that “Scotland does not need nuclear energy and most in Scotland don’t want it” as being “wrong on both counts” (Aug 26), that it was written by Lincoln Hill, the Nuclear Industry Association’s director of policy and external affairs.
Mr Hill appears not to be too good at maths. He cites a YouGov poll showing that fewer than a third of people in Scotland consider nuclear power as the most important energy source and that a similar number identified it as their preferred source of energy. To my understanding, the remaining two-thirds of Scots who do not support nuclear power are indeed most of the people in Scotland.
Mr Hill goes on to assert that Scotland needs “more than one source of electricity”. This suggests that lack of basic counting skills is the foundation of his weakness in maths. We already have multiple sources of electricity: we have had hydro-electric power for decades, we have wave generators, we have onshore and offshore wind turbines, and new technology is making solar power viable even in our climate. By my count those five already add up to the “more than one” that Mr Hill claims we need. We will still have more than one source after the last nuclear power station in our country is finally decommissioned.
It seems to me that it is Mr Hill that is wrong and Mr Kavanagh was entirely correct on both counts. We neither need nor want nuclear power in Scotland, the Nuclear Industry Association, or for that matter the Westminster Labour Party’s small-scale reactors and Starmer’s “GB Energy”. What we do need is our independence so that we can make our own choices in the interest of Scotland and the all of its people, rather than English energy requirements or the wealthy seek to profit from energy production.
Documents Reveal Trail of Unreported Millions From Israeli Military to U.S. Universities
Research funding by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and arms manufacturers often fails to appear in national databases intended to track foreign funding.
Murtaza Hussain, Aug 25, 2026, https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-military-funding-universities?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2510348&post_id=212599104&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=5mo6u&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The Israeli Ministry of Defense and Israeli defense companies have directed millions in unreported funding to U.S. university research programs for weapons development, sponsoring research directly or serving as the pass-through entity for the funding, a Drop Site investigation has found.
A sample of state and university audits, foreign-funding disclosures, and other institutional records identified millions of dollars in financial ties over the last two decades between the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD), Israeli weapons manufacturers, and American universities, much of which does not appear consistently in national databases intended to track foreign funding into U.S. universities.
An analysis of audit records, building on findings compiled by the Antiwar Initiative, an academic research group that documents the connections between universities and the global arms industry, found more than $15 million of unreported or inconsistently reported entries for funding tied to the Israeli MOD or defense manufacturers.
The true scale of Israeli support is difficult to determine because entries for such funding were often not reported in public filings mandating disclosure of foreign gifts, but were discovered by manually cross-referencing public and internal databases, audit records, and acknowledgments in academic papers. Some projects listed in university materials as being sponsored by the Israeli MOD or defense companies also did not include the amounts of funding provided, or contained inconsistent or contradictory records in audit databases.
Drop Site reviewed and verified public records that showed research grants, tuition payments, and receipts of gifts totalling millions of dollars to dozens of colleges and universities around the country. The data shows examples of financial support and sponsorship for American researchers from the Israeli Ministry of Defense as well as Israeli weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems.
Records dating from 2004 to 2025 point to a large number of schools that have had financial relationships with the Israeli MOD or Israeli weapons manufacturers, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, the University of Connecticut, the University of Tennessee, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Rhode Island, the University of New Mexico, the Washington University in St. Louis, and the State University of New York.
The recorded financial relationships include time-bound research contracts and do not indicate whether relationships with the MOD are still ongoing. Previous reporting has documented MOD funding of programs at MIT and student protests there over the relationship.
In addition to financial support from the MOD and Elbit, records also showed sponsorship of individual research projects related to military technologies by Israeli defense manufacturers Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.
Taken together, the records reveal an opaque defense-research pipeline spread across some of the country’s most prominent universities.
In one example that illustrates the typical nature of these ties, an Israeli MOD-sponsored project at the University of Connecticut was listed in public audit records with the title, “Impact Point Prediction Research for Short & Medium Range Thrusting Projectiles.”
Connecticut’s annual federal-award schedules record $668,456 in funding under that title across nine fiscal years between 2013 and 2023 with the funder listed as Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Another Israeli MOD-linked research project at the school titled, “High Sensitivity SQUIDs for Magnetic Field Detection,” received $251,336 in funding across the same time period.
Federal law requires colleges and universities receiving federal assistance to disclose gifts and contracts totaling at least $250,000 in a calendar year from a foreign source, though transactions below that threshold may remain outside the public reporting system. But these multi-year contributions do not consistently appear in federal databases intended to help the public track foreign money flowing into American universities. The Education Department’s latest public disclosure of foreign gifts and funding contains no Israel-attributed entry for the University of Connecticut, even as entries for MOD funding show up in other databases and audit documentation.
The Israeli government and its allies in Congress are now seeking to transform relationships like these from a scattered research pipeline into formal American defense policy. The fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act already directed the Pentagon to establish a U.S.-Israel Defense Industrial Base Working Group to consider integrating Israel into what it calls “the American National Technology and Industrial Base.”
A proposal advanced by the House Armed Services Committee for the fiscal 2027 NDAA would go further, creating a United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative charged with expanding bilateral research, development, testing, weapons production, and industrial cooperation. If these measures become law, the scattered funding connections documented in American university audit trails and research papers would become part of the architecture of the American military-industrial base.
Gears of War
Israeli forces have used drones, automated intelligence tools, persistent aerial surveillance, precision-guided projectiles, and large-scale data analysis throughout the genocide in the Gaza Strip, as well as wars in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen.
Those operations draw upon the technologies originating in the same research fields that the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers have paid American academics to advance: video surveillance, human-activity recognition, autonomous flight, network analysis, target identification, magnetic sensing, and projectile impact modeling. At the University of Central Florida, researchers have received funding from Elbit Systems to develop algorithms to recognize human activity and detect objects in video.
Records from the University of Tennessee show that a U.S. subsidiary of Elbit also provided $514,500 in payments to the school between 2023, 2024, and 2025. The available public documentation does not identify what programs or researchers the contributions are intended to support, with the description listing the purpose of the funding as simply “tuition payments for various students.”
“For relatively small sums—like the price of funding a single PhD—Israel has gained major new capabilities that have bolstered its capacity to commit genocide in Gaza, carry out a brutal occupation of Lebanon, and spark a war with Iran that has escalated to a region wide conflict,” said William Hartung, a political scientist and expert on the U.S. arms industry and Pentagon budgetary practices.
Many awards from the Israeli MOD are classified as U.S. Department of Defense expenditures, with the Israeli ministry identified as the pass-through entity that administers the grants. MIT, for example, has stated that the money for its projects funded by the Israeli ministry originated with the U.S. Department of Defense. The U.S. provides an estimated $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel on top of other forms of assistance.
Some audit records identify the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which administers U.S. security assistance and weapons-transfer programs, as the primary agency providing the funding that was ultimately directed by the Israeli MOD. The public documents do not establish whether every dollar for particular research support at a school came from Israel’s treasury, from U.S. military assistance placed under Israeli procurement authority, or from some combination of the two.
Audit Trail
In the summer of 2025, MIT professor Markus Buehler withdrew from an Israeli Defense Ministry grant after a student-led campaign publicized the project. The decision followed more than a year of protests over MIT’s defense relationships with Israel, which the university says amounted to $4 million for individual ministry-linked projects between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2024, plus $290,000 in fiscal 2025.
A trail of open source records traces similar financial and research relationships between the Israeli defense establishment and schools in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Virginia.
At Columbia University, annual audits name two ministry-linked projects and record $799,190 in grants. One MOD-funded project for “Direct 3D Printing of Integrated Electro Mechanical Systems” accounted for $469,999 from 2016 through 2021, while another for “Optimizing Micro Resonators Based Sensor” accounted for another $329,191 from 2021 through 2024. Columbia’s fiscal 2024 audit lists the latter project under the U.S. Department of Defense, with the “Israeli Ministry of Defense” as the “pass-through name,” and records $25,327 in funding.
The Research Foundation for the State University of New York shows audit entries for five Israeli MOD-linked projects totaling $949,915 from 2010 through 2021.
Florida’s statewide audits record $1,195,795 in expenditures passed through the Ministry of Defense from 2012 through 2021, while not identifying the schools that received all of this funding.
Campus records connect at least some of the awards to the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida. One University of Florida engineering publication names an Israeli MOD-sponsored project, “Coupled Size and Rate Effects in Ultra-High-Performance Concrete,” beginning in 2012. While listing the project under “Sponsored Research,” the newsletter did not identify the amount the school received from the MOD for the study.
In response to a request for comment about another $150,000 contract beginning in March 2015 that named the Israeli Ministry of Defense at UC Berkeley, a spokesperson said that, “UC Berkeley complies with all of the statues and regulations that apply to contracts and gifts from foreign sources,” noting that the school is only involved in fundamental research and adding that, “every government, every researcher, every person in the world is able to read the results of our research in freely available scientific publications.”
UC Berkeley did not respond to additional questions about the purpose of the MOD funding. Other schools contacted by Drop Site did not respond to requests for comment or stated that they could not provide information about the cited funding.
In addition to records from audits, public information from individual researchers provides more hints of the scope of Israeli military’s U.S. research funding.
In February, The Nation reported that computer-vision researchers Mubarak Shah and Abhijit Mahalanobis received a $200,000 Elbit Systems of America grant in 2020 to develop “human activity recognition” technology, while Mahalanobis received another $60,000 for algorithms involving object detection and human-activity recognition.
At the University of Maryland, aerospace engineering professor Inderjit Chopra’s research page lists two Israeli ministry grants: $150,000 for “Autonomous Operation of Micro-Helicopters,” from 2011 to 2012, and $300,000 for “Aeromechanics of Rotorcraft in High Speed Flight,” from 2014 to 2016.
A curriculum vitae filed by another researcher in a separate U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proceeding lists Israeli MOD funding of $150,000 for “Functional Targeting of Terror Networks: A Big Data Approach,” from February 2017 through December 2018, and $153,520 for “Fast Algorithms for Group Between-ness Centrality in Massive Social Networks.”
Princeton University records identify physicist Michael Romalis on a $600,000 contract called “Pulsed Scalar Atomic Magnetometer.” The university’s fiscal 2018 sponsored-awards report names the Government of Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency as sponsors and gives a contract period from July 2015 through June 2019.
Texas Tech University’s engineering newsletters list yet another award for $400,000 from the Israeli Defense Ministry to research a “Sealed Vircator HPM System,” naming James Dickens, John Mankowski, and Andreas Neuber as researchers. The same amount and title appear in both the January 2014 and April 2015 newsletters.
The vircator technology has a clear military application: Texas Tech’s Center for Pulsed Power and Power Electronics describes vircators as compact, high-power microwave sources and says its work includes coordinating vehicle-mounted emitters with GPS timing to place a microwave “hot spot” at a desired location—an application potentially useful for combatting drone swarms.
The purpose of a separate Israeli Defense Ministry-linked funding stream at the University of Texas at Austin is less clear from the public records. UT Austin’s fiscal 2013 financial report identifies $58,992 in expenditures under an Israeli Ministry of Defense purchase order. Statewide audit schedules record expenditures under the same purchase order reappearing in public audit records from 2010 through 2014, for a total of $299,952.
The audit archive contains still more Israeli military-named expenditures, including recorded contributions to Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis, and repeated entries for the MOD in audits for the state of Virginia.
But the opaque nature of some support that turned up in public records means that financial and in-kind support to universities may not even be recorded in any audit trail at all.
At the University of Texas at Dallas, Haoran Wei and Nasser Kehtarnavaz produced a video-surveillance system in a study that the published paper indicated was “funded by Elbit Systems of America through a contract with the University of Texas at Dallas” without mentioning the amount of financial support. The report also noted that the company had provided “far-field video clips” to help conduct their research on target recognition.
The researchers did not respond to requests for comment about the nature of their work and ties to Elbit.
Disclosure Gap
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act generally requires a federally assisted university to report covered gifts and contracts from a foreign source when they meet or exceed $250,000, including multi-year contracts meeting that threshold over their duration. Under the Education Department’s example, a five-year research contract worth $50,000 a year is reportable at signing because its lifetime value is $250,000.
The Education Department’s inspector general warned in February 2025 that oversight of the system was weak with insufficient controls to ensure reporting requirements were being met. The current disclosure thresholds also make it easier for foreign countries to contribute amounts below that number to avoid triggering reporting requirements but can be significant for individual research projects.
That lack of oversight contributes to a situation in which millions of dollars from a foreign military under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. for human rights abuses and facing genocide charges from international courts has been able to spend millions of dollars funding military research at American universities.
These relationships are now coming under greater scrutiny at a time when public opinion on Israel has soured in the U.S. due to the genocide in Gaza and Israeli conduct in other regional conflicts.
“No self-respecting university should accept funding from Israel, given its destabilizing, destructive, and inhumane use of U.S. weapons,” said Hartung.
Ukraine’s “Turning the Tide” Narrative has Already Sunk
The result is an information environment in which the possibility of mutual coexistence with Russia is treated as almost unthinkable, even as the costs continue to mount for Ukrainians, Russians, and Europeans alike.
How the mainstream media spins each new failure as success – with Leonid Ragozin
Ian Proud, Aug 10, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/ukraines-turning-the-tide-narrative?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=210596621&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
One of the most striking features of the Ukraine war has been the speed with which Western and Ukrainian narratives appear in the mainstream, dominate the discussion for a while, and then quietly collapse with absolutely no reflection on how they were wrong.
The latest example was the campaign launched this summer that ‘Ukraine is turning the tide’ against Russia in the war.
In conversation with independent journalist Leonid Ragozin, we examined what that campaign actually delivered. Back in June, long-range strikes deep into Russian territory and occupied areas — particularly Crimea — were presented as the pressure that would force Putin to the table on terms closer to Ukraine’s.
Defence Minister Mikhail Fedorov was the public face of the effort. Forty days later the results are clear: Russia’s position has not softened by an inch. In fact, it has hardened.
The possibility of land swaps that once featured in negotiations after Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has now been taken off the table. Fedorov has been removed, triggering a political crisis in Kyiv and the replacement of the Army’s Soviet-style commander-in-chief.
As Leonid pointed out, this follows a familiar pattern. The 2023 summer offensive was sold as the moment Ukraine would roll Russian forces back. The Kursk operation briefly revived the idea of territorial leverage. Each time the goalposts have shifted — and each time they have shifted in Russia’s favour.
What began in late April 2022 (thanks to Liz Truss) as talk of liberating Crimea has now contracted to trying to hold the remaining parts of Donetsk. The human and material cost of the progressive contraction of the narrative has been enormous.
What makes the current moment particularly revealing is the gap between elite rhetoric and public sentiment. Gallup polling over the past three years shows a clear shift among Ukrainians: where two-thirds once insisted the only acceptable end was total Russian defeat, the same proportion now favour a negotiated settlement.
Yet the war continues.
Leonid’s explanation is straightforward and uncomfortable. This is not primarily a war of nations. It is a war of interlocking elites — securocratic structures in all participating countries and defence-industry and bureaucratic interests in the West — whose incentives diverge sharply from those of ordinary people.
The same dynamic helps explain the hermetic quality of Western media coverage.
Having worked for the BBC for twelve years, Leonid notes how far British (and wider Western) journalism has travelled from its willingness to scrutinise government claims over Iraq, to providing a blank cheque for foreign policy idiocy in Ukraine.
Nuance has been replaced by a single vantage point that treats any deviation from the Overton window as suspect.
The result is an information environment in which the possibility of mutual coexistence with Russia is treated as almost unthinkable, even as the costs continue to mount for Ukrainians, Russians, and Europeans alike.
We also discussed the deeper cultural and political roots of this hostility — the way liberal elites, in competing with the populist right, adopted their own version of enemy-creation, and the neocolonial mindset that still treats the region as a theatre for proxy competition rather than a space for independent states with legitimate interests.
Mainstream journalists are now as complicit in the needless blood-letting that continues in Ukraine with no end in sight. One wonders what they will call the next, vanishingly insignificant turn of the tide?
The full conversation with Leonid is available here.
How Lockheed Martin, Raytheon & BAE Systems Are Propagandizing Children To Support War Through STEM
If Saudi Arabia is Washington’s biggest customer, then Israel is its prime recipient of welfare. A study from Brown University found that in the two years following the October 7, 2023 attack, the United States spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, including aircraft, missiles, and all manner of small arms munitions.
August 1, 2026, Alan Macleod Mint Press News, https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/01/how-lockheed-martin-raytheon-bae-systems-are-propagandizing-children-to-support-war-through-stem/
Raytheon sponsors the Girl Scouts of America. BAE Systems is reading your toddlers their favorite fairytale stories. And Lockheed Martin funds children’s math and STEM festivals. This is done with great fanfare, supposedly to empower and inspire children to pursue their passion for science. In reality, though, these companies are attempting to launder their images and enlist the next generation to become cogs in the military-industrial complex.
All the while, these organizations’ products are being used across the world by the United States and Israel to commit war crimes – in Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and beyond – to target children.
MintPress explores the murky world of the arms companies training kids to bomb kids.
Normalizing War to Kids
When many Americans think of Raytheon (now officially rebranded as RTX Corporation), they don’t envisage rockets and cruise missiles; they think of math. For decades, the second-largest arms manufacturer on the planet has bankrolled a wide range of organizations aimed at getting children excited about STEM subjects.
Since 2009, Raytheon has been the title sponsor of MATHCOUNTS, a non-profit organization that provides engaging math programs for middle school students in every U.S. state, as well as organizing math competitions to find the brightest children in America.
In 2005, Raytheon launched its MathMovesU program, aimed, in its own words, “to inspire middle school students to get excited about math and science.” In addition to the materials provided, it has also spent millions on scholarships, grants, and study awards to thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers.
And its MathAlive! traveling exhibit promises, in rather outdated branding, to take math “2theXtreme”. MathAlive! Has also traveled to several countries in West Asia, including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia – all of them among the biggest purchasers of Raytheon weapons technology.
The company also enjoys a longtime partnership with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA). In 2017, for example, it launched the GSUSA’s first national computer science program and cyber challenge for middle and high school girls.
“The progress to diversify the STEM workforce needs to be accelerated… At a time when technology is transforming the way we live and work, we can – and should – show young women a clear path to taking an active role in this transformation,” said Thomas A. Kennedy, then-Raytheon CEO; “Working together, Raytheon and Girl Scouts will help girls build confidence to see themselves as the robotics engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity professionals who will create a better tomorrow.”
Raytheon also spearheaded the GSUSA’s “Think Like a Programmer” project, which encourages girls to explore the world of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and developed many of the programming badges available to the scouts.
GSUSA appears proud of this relationship. Its website profiles one former scout who now works at Raytheon as a success story and a model to follow. The article includes a step-by-step guide and a list of tips for those wishing to follow in her footsteps.
Unsurprisingly, Raytheon also works closely with the U.S. military on these matters, establishing four new STEM “centers of innovation” with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Michigan, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., all near military bases.
While some might be surprised by the closeness of the relationship between a children’s organization and an arms manufacturer, it is worth remembering that the scouting movement was originally established by Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, as a stepping stone towards boys joining the military. Baden-Powell was deeply concerned that English boys would not be physically fit enough to fight for their country in any upcoming wars, and designed an organization that would train them both physically and mentally to do so.
Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities,” she told MintPress, adding:
“Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”
Lockheed Martin U
But Raytheon is far from the only weapons giant directly targeting America’s children. Lockheed Martin hosts CYBERQUEST, an annual high school competition that encourages children to pursue careers in intelligence and cybersecurity. The 2026 event was held in 11 locations across the country, as well as virtually around the world. The arms giant offers high school internship programs designed to fast-track America’s brightest young minds into careers in defense. Every year, Lockheed Martin hires thousands of young interns, and claims that 60% of these candidates go on to paid work at the company.
It also sponsors “young minds at work” days, setting up hands-on experiments for children to play with, including bottle rocket experiments and more.
Universities are a key recruitment ground. The corporation spends huge sums attracting top talent, including hosting “Lockheed Martin Day” at more than a dozen colleges nationwide, where company recruiters are allowed on campus to dazzle students with virtual reality exhibitions, flight simulators, and even landing helicopters directly on college greens.
Lockheed Martin has entered into partnerships with several top colleges. A $1.5 million donation to the University of Texas at Arlington, for instance, resulted in the renamed of one of their buildings as the Lockheed Martin Career Development Center.
The company touts its reputation as a safe space for women and LGBT employees, and is regularly listed as one of the best employers for inclusivity. One woman the company itself profiles is Haley, who, as a girl, dreamed of becoming an inventor. “As a child,” they write, “Haley clung to a notebook where she sketched her ideas and inventions. On the cover she scribbled, ‘Haley’s Way to Make Life Better.’ Her best idea? A self-folding Christmas tree cleverly called ‘Merry, Bright and Boxed’ to make cleaning up after the holidays more efficient.” Today, that child with dreams of making the world a better place is a missiles and fire control engineer with Lockheed Martin, developing weapons that efficiently kill people all across the planet.
Targeting Toddlers
Boeing, too, has developed a number of projects aimed at young children. Their “Engineering is Elementary” program is designed for pre-K, kindergarten, elementary and middle school students, and, like those from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, is focussed on funnelling young minds into a career in weapons manufacturing. “Boeing has a strategic community focus to increase teacher effectiveness in math and science and to attract more students into STEM-related careers,” a company representative said, adding,
“Engineering is Elementary provides teachers and students a greater understanding of engineering, and it accomplishes that in a fun, interactive way. Our goal is to interest students in engineering at an early age and increase the number of scientists and engineers.”
Aerospace manufacturer BAE Systems, however, goes even further. The London-based giant that produces jet aircraft, missiles, howitzers, and warships published a series of bizarre videos featuring both its employees and members of the British Armed Forces reading classic fairytales to children. This included Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. These came complete with worksheets to help extremely young children with their problem-solving skills.
Reading bedtime stories to babies is just part of a wider strategy BAE Systems is conducting in order to, in their own words, “improve our corporate reputation at both a local and national level.” Other initiatives include hosting school roadshows, robotics festivals, science camps, and local community outreach programs, all aimed at children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it also stepped in to provide schools with branded learning materials for children as young as five.
Bayes appeared appalled at the company’s actions, stating:
“We are aware that BAE Systems claims to spend as much as £100m [U.S.$134m] per year on educational activities. It claims its motives are community based, but we would say that this is part of their recruiting strategy: seeking to influence young people without presenting the full facts of what an arms company is, and what the consequences of working for them would be.”
Fairytales and Nightmares
As much as these companies attempt to present themselves neutrally as scientific entities, the reality is that their primary businesses revolve around producing the hardware and weaponry that the United States uses to dominate the world.
In the past twelve months alone, the United States has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. And it is companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that make this kind of extraordinary planetary violence possible.
For example, on February 28, the United States launched an attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, Iran. A Tomahawk cruise missile – one of the most precise guided weapons on the planet – was launched from a nearby warship and pummelled the building, causing the school to collapse in on itself. Soon after, a second missile hit the school’s courtyard, where desperate survivors were gathering.
The attack was timed precisely for maximum damage: 10:45am on a school day. At least 156 people were killed, most of them pupils at the school, which neither served any military purpose, nor was located near any military target. Over 100 more were injured.
The event was immediately denounced as a major war crime. But Secretary of War Pete Hegseth brushed it off, and later stated that, “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they’re going to live.”
The Tomahawk cruise missile is produced by Raytheon, and subsystems used in the operation were made by a subsidiary of BAE Systems.
Washington also uses its primacy in weapons to keep its allies in power. Saudi Arabia is by far the U.S.’ top arms customer, purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of hi-tech weaponry, which it immediately uses against Yemen, and to suppress domestic dissent.
Riyadh has pursued a genocidal attack on civilian infrastructure in Yemen, including against farms, sewage, and water facilities, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In August 2018, it dropped a 227 kg (500lb) laser-guided bomb on a school bus in Dhahyan, northern Yemen. Fragments found at the scene identified the bomb as having been produced by Lockheed Martin. Forty children were killed in the attack – a far from uncommon occurrence during the Saudi-led campaign to topple Ansar Allah from power.
If Saudi Arabia is Washington’s biggest customer, then Israel is its prime recipient of welfare. A study from Brown University found that in the two years following the October 7, 2023 attack, the United States spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, including aircraft, missiles, and all manner of small arms munitions.
Israel has used these weapons to systematically target children in Gaza and beyond. At least 97% of schools in the densely-populated strip have been hit. One of the more notable examples was the Khadija Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah, which was targeted on July 27, 2024. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that Israel dropped at least two GBU-39 bombs on the school – munitions manufactured in the United States by Boeing.
Thus, while arms manufacturers read fairytales to Western kids, children across the world are forced to live out a very real nightmare, thanks in no small part to these companies.
Whether they live in the United States or one of the countries under its boot, however, children everywhere are being targeted by these weapons firms, though in different ways. In the United States, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and others have stepped in to bolster cash-strapped education departments. While their rhetoric emphasizes empowering children – especially girls – to follow their science dreams, their true intent is to launder their reputations as merchants of death, and to train up the next generation of Americans to become willing members of the American war machine.
Children on the other side of the globe, however, are given no such illusions, and have to live with the constant terror that they be these companies’ next victims. This image, is not the one the likes of Raytheon want us to think about when we picture their products, and so they spend millions attempting to distract us with stories of empowerment and discovery. What a world we live in, where weapons companies are training kids to bomb kids.
Data centers powered by next-gen nuclear? Don’t fall for Big Tech’s PR hype
Amazon could decide not to purchase any electricity should generating it from these SMRs turn out to be too expensive. Likewise, the agreement between Kairos Power and Google talks about selling “energy, ancillary services, and environmental attributes to Google under Power Purchase Agreements.” The announcements said nothing about the terms of the power purchase.
Estimates of electricity costs from SMRs show that each unit of electrical energy from SMRs would be far more expensive than a corresponding unit from solar and wind power plants,
such incentives [Loan guarantees ] cause recipients to invest in excessively risky projects because they do not bear all the cost of a project’s failure.”
By Molly Langabeer, M.V. Ramana | Analysis | July 20, 2026
Nuclear energy recently crossed a global milestone. In 2025, the share of all electrical energy flowing in the world’s grids coming from nuclear power plants was just 8.8 percent, roughly half of what it was 30 years ago. In contrast, 19.5 percent of the electrical energy came from fast- growing renewables such as solar and wind power. Large hydropower plants provided an additional 13.9 percent.
This decline may come as a surprise, given the ongoing parade of announcements about the bright future of nuclear power, featuring oft-repeated terms like “renaissance” and “revival.” In recent years, two elements have featured prominently in these announcements: The demand from Big Tech companies for nuclear power, and their investment in so-called next-generation or small modular nuclear reactors.
In October 2024, a company called Kairos Power and Google announced that they had signed a “Master Plant Development Agreement, creating a path to deploy a U.S. fleet of advanced nuclear power projects totalling 500 megawatts by 2035.” Two days later, the utility company Energy Northwest and Amazon announced “an agreement to fund efforts to move toward the development and deployment of small modular reactor (SMR) technology in Washington state.” The Amazon version of this announcement also contained the expectation that these reactors “will help meet the forecasted energy needs of the Pacific Northwest beginning in the early 2030s.”
Peer under the hood however, and it becomes evident that these press releases are all show, with little substance.
To start, the actual announcements were far more circumspect than some media coverage would suggest. Amazon, for example, only promised to “fund the initial feasibility phase of an SMR project” in exchange for “the right to purchase electricity from the first project (4 modules), which is expected to generate 320 megawatts of energy capacity.” Having the right, presumably, doesn’t force Amazon to purchase the electricity—and Amazon could decide not to purchase any electricity should generating it from these SMRs turn out to be too expensive. Likewise, the agreement between Kairos Power and Google talks about selling “energy, ancillary services, and environmental attributes to Google under Power Purchase Agreements.” The announcements said nothing about the terms of the power purchase.
There are good reasons for companies to be circumspect about investing in nuclear power plants. In the United States, each unit of electrical energy from a new nuclear reactor costs about three times the corresponding energy from a solar or wind power plant. Furthermore, the diverging long-term trends for nuclear power (becoming more expensive over time) and renewables (becoming cheaper with time) suggest that the cost divergence will only increase. Estimates of electricity costs from SMRs show that each unit of electrical energy from SMRs would be far more expensive than a corresponding unit from solar and wind power plants, even when the cost of storage technologies and other means of accounting for the variability are included. For Big Tech companies already struggling with input costs, buying power from expensive nuclear reactors would only make their business less likely to be financially viable.
Then there is uncertainty. Nuclear power projects have historically been delayed and have cost more than initially anticipated. One study examined 180 nuclear power projects and found that 175 had exceeded their initial budgets and timelines. This is particularly likely with so-called advanced reactor designs and small modular reactors, because there is little or no experience with building such plants. The only recent experience with small modular reactors is in Russia, where the KLT-40S design was based on the design of reactors used in the nuclear-powered icebreakers operated by the country for decades. But building the first power plant based on the KLT-40S design took 13 years from the start of construction to generating electricity, instead of the expected 3 years. In China, the twin High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor units (Shidao Bay 1-1 and 1-2), took more than twice the promised “50 months.”
To be clear: There are no small modular reactor projects currently under construction in the United States. Their estimated times of arrival have already been significantly pushed back. For example, in 2020, the Energy Department declared a goal of having the Natrium reactor and the Xe-100 reactors be operational “within 5-7 years.” But in November 2025, an executive working for Natrium promised “commercial operation delivery date, power on the grid” by “2031.”
When these reactors might actually produce any electricity is also dependent on how much assured funding there is behind each project. Many announcements are ambiguous; of the ones that do specify an amount, the largest investments have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In October 2024, a consortium involving “Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, affiliates of Ares Management Corporation, NGP, and the University of Michigan” announced that they were investing “approximately $500 million” in X-energy, the designer of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. The following June, Terrapower, the nuclear company started by Bill Gates, announced that it had raised $650 million from a group that included “NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, and current investors”; the latter included, not surprisingly, Bill Gates and the South Korean company, Hyundai.
To put these figures in context, one estimate of TerraPower’s proposed Natrium nuclear plant is $9.4 billion for 345 megawatts of electrical power. This puts it at roughly the same total cost as a project in Idaho involving six NuScale SMRs that would have generated 462 megawatts of power. The NuScale project was cancelled in 2023 because the $9.3 billion cost estimate was too high for potential purchasers of electricity from this project. Cost estimates for high-temperature gas-cooled reactors like Xe-100, supported by the Amazon consortium, are even higher; if actually built, both Natrium and Xe-100 would produce electricity at costs per unit that are double or more of the cost of producing electricity from large nuclear plants. And, as mentioned earlier, the cost of electricity from large nuclear plants is three times or more the cost of electricity from solar and wind power plants.
Even the largest investment announced so far, $650 million, would not suffice to fund the construction of a single Natrium reactor, or even the much lower power output NuScale SMR. In short, AI companies are not spending anywhere near the amounts needed to bring new nuclear power, especially from small modular reactors, online.
The AI industry certainly has the capital to do so. During their February 2026 earnings calls, Amazon and Google said that they were expecting to spend up to $200 billion and $185 billion, respectively, during the upcoming year on data centers. Their nuclear commitments are just a fraction of one percent of their annual expenditures earmarked for building data centers. This suggests that their announcements of nuclear power investments—typically containing the self-promoting, if questionable, adjectives “safe,” “reliable,” “clean,” and “affordable”—are primarily meant as greenwashing, in order to divert attention from the negative environmental impacts of data center operations. Such investments are more likely to come from the portions of their budgets dedicated to public relations than operational expenses.
In addition to being too expensive, the potential contribution from new nuclear projects will be too meagre. One report estimated that currently 10 percent of data centers require more than 1 gigawatt of power; but projected a doubling of this fraction, to 20 percent, by 2030. Stargate’s Abilene data center project in Texas wants up to 5 gigawatts of power. Meta is planning a 5 gigawatt data center in Louisiana. In January 2026, Pacifico Energy announced that its GW Ranch project received a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality air permit for 7.65 gigawatts of gas-fired power generation, the largest permit granted in the United States.
A single small modular reactor—defined as having the capacity to produce less than 300 megawatts of electricity, or less than a third of a gigawatt—would not go very far in meeting the voracious energy demands of AI data centers. Large reactors would be more helpful in meeting these enormous demands, but they are also far more expensive. The last large reactors built in the United States were the Vogtle project in Georgia, which ended up costing over $36 billion—more than double the $14 billion estimated when construction of those reactors started.
The sizeable gap in investment will, at least in part, be filled by public money, either from US citizens or citizens of other countries. In September 2024, when Constellation Energy and Microsoft announced an agreement to restart the Three Mile Island reactor—the twin unit to the reactor that melted down in 1979—they claimed that it was “entirely…a private agreement” and that it “involves no public funds.” The following month, the Washington Post revealed that Constellation had applied to the Energy Department for a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. In November 2025, the Energy Department loaned $1 billion to Constellation, and in June 2026, it announced a “$17.5 billion American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans… to accelerate the deployment of 10 large-scale commercial nuclear reactors.”
Loan guarantees were a key mechanism used by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to incentivize what was described as a so-called “nuclear renaissance. (That renaissance fizzled!) What such guarantees do is transfer the financial “risk to the public,” as a 2008 Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”) report explained. The CBO went on to caution: “economic theory suggests that such incentives cause recipients to invest in excessively risky projects because they do not bear all the cost of a project’s failure.”
Which is what happened. US utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, but just four proceeded to construction, of which two were abandoned mid-project after over $9 billion was spent. Consumers in South Carolina are still paying every month for that project, although they never benefited from any electricity. Duke Energy also wasted billions of dollars on nuclear projects that were never built. The only two completed reactors were the ones at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia that cost close to $37 billion.
The Trump Administration has also used the threat of tariffs to twist the arms of other countries. Earlier this year, the government of Japan promised to invest $40 billion in two SMR projects in Tennessee and Alabama, and $33 billion in natural gas facilities in Pennsylvania and Texas; some of the power generated is to feed “co-located data centers.” If these investments move forward, then it would presumably be Japanese taxpayers who would be shouldering a significant part of the financial burden.
The backdrop to these announcements is the tremendous growth of data centers, which are being built at a rapid pace. As of July 2026, the website Data Center Map lists 11,826 data centers around the world, 4,467 of which were located in the United States. According to a report funded by many AI companies, private investment in artificial intelligence in the United States reached $285.9 billion in 2025, and AI data center power capacity “reached approximately 29.6 gigawatts by Q4 2025, enough to power all of New York state at peak demand.” The scale of the power demand from data centers has resulted in huge increases in consumer electricity bills—a Bloomberg article cited one case in which a blind man living on disability payments in Baltimore was contending with an 80 percent increase in his energy bills over three years. (He lives an hour’s drive from a part of northern Virginia known as ‘Data Center Alley.’) And he had it better than some consumers; the article found that “electricity now costs as much as 267 percent more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity.”
Nuclear energy, however, declined marginally from 831.5 TWh in 2020 to 826.1 TWh in 2025. We can conclude that nuclear power has played no role in fulfilling the increased demand for energy from data centers. If the output from any nuclear reactors were being directed towards data centers, then this electricity would have to have been diverted from the general public or other traditional consumers.
What else is increasing alongside demand from data centers is national carbon dioxide emissions, which increased by 147 million metric tons in the last year. The increase is in part because electricity produced by burning coal went up by about 13 percent. Underlying this increase is utility companies’ reliance on increased use of coal to provide electricity to data centers.
Not so long ago, most Big Tech companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, made commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their operations. Microsoft pledged to achieve net negative emissions by 2030, Google and Meta committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2030, and Amazon committed to net zero emissions by 2040.
Google is singing a very different tune these days and is evidently interested in being seen as supporting the Trump administration. At the 2025 Hill & Valley Forum, an annual meeting featuring prominent tech executives, venture capitalists, and federal policymakers, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called for “accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.” Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees: “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power.”
Between 2019 and 2023, the indirect greenhouse gas emissions caused by the generation of energy purchased by an organization (technically known as “Scope 2” emissions) from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft increased substantially, with emissions from data centers nearly doubling during that period. There are reports that the “real emissions” from company-owned data centers are over seven times higher than officially reported. Rather than scaling back growth to remain aligned with their climate targets, these companies continue to accelerate investments in AI infrastructure, increasing energy consumption and emissions, and mostly ignoring their own former goals.
This is perhaps why Big Tech firms and their supporters have emphatically described nuclear power as “carbon-free” when announcing any agreements with nuclear companies. For example, when the agreement between Microsoft and Constellation Energy to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was announced, multiple officials used the term “carbon-free” while talking about nuclear power. The October 2024 news release by Amazon had the sub-headline: “New Small Modular Reactor agreements are part of Amazon’s plan to transition to carbon-free energy.”
Other than building small modular reactors, one way nuclear power could help meet the energy demand from data centers is by restarting reactors that have been shut down—if the companies running these plants could get the public to look the other way when it comes to concerns about the cost of running these plants and the risk of accidents.
There are a handful of reactors that were closed in the recent past, usually because they were uneconomical. First on this list is Three-Mile Island Unit 1, which was designed to generate 819 megawatts, for which Constellation received a $1 billion loan from the DOE. The 2017 decision to shut down this reactor, according to its then-owner, Exelon Corporation, resulted from “more than five years of losses… and its recent failure in an auction to sell Three Mile Island’s power into the regional grid.” The even more dangerous possibility is the reopening of the 805 megawatt Palisades nuclear reactor in Michigan, aided in part by a $1.5 billion loan from the Department of Energy. The dangers stem from problems discovered in the reactor and from the checkered history of the company that is to oversee repairs and operate the reactor. Finally, there is the 601 megawatt Duane Arnold reactor in Iowa, which was shut down in 2020 because a derecho (moving windstorm) caused extensive damage to the reactor’s cooling towers, reinforcing an earlier decision by the owner to shut down the plant because it had calculated that replacing nuclear energy with wind energy would “save customers nearly $300 million in energy costs, on a net present value basis.”
Even if these three reactors were to come online, they would only contribute 2.225 gigawatts of power, at best. Under the extremely optimistic assumption that these decades-old reactors work as anticipated without shutdowns or other problems, and operate at their historical load factors, they would together generate only about 15 TWh of energy every year—a tiny fraction of the Energy Institute’s demand estimate from US data centers of 312.6 TWh in 2025. The demand is expected to only increase.
Projections of future demand, however, have become far more uncertain in light of public opposition to data centers. Data Center Watch reports that between March and June 2025, twenty “projects were blocked or delayed amid local opposition, affecting $98 billion in potential investment—more than all disruptions tracked since 2023.” In July 2026, New York state banned the construction of data centers for a year.
A recent IPSOS poll, for example, found that when asked whether they support or oppose the construction of new data centers in the United States, 44 percent of those polled would oppose it, more than double the percentage of people who support the project (21 percent). When the question was modified to support or opposition to “a data center being built within your community,” support dropped to 14 percent, whereas opposition jumped to 57 percent. And 61 percent of those polled did not agree that rapid growth in the use of artificial intelligence was “mainly a good thing for the country.”
Opposition to data centers springs from multiple concerns. A Gallup survey from March 2026 found that people opposed data centers because of their effects on resources, such as energy consumption and water usage; the effects on costs, especially utility bills; noise pollution; and concerns about quality of life and economic effects from loss of jobs. Some of these concerns would be accentuated if these data centers are powered by nuclear reactors, which could drive up the costs of electricity because of how expensive it is to build new nuclear plants. Using reactors will also increase the water demand. Nuclear reactors that operate on a once-through water cycle withdraw, on average, 44,350 gallons of water for each megawatt-hour of electricity generated, roughly four times the corresponding figure for a combined cycle natural gas plant. It is possible to reduce these water requirements through by essentially recirculating the water used to absorb the plant’s waste heat, or what is known as “closed-cycle cooling,” but that would drive up the energy requirement—a loss either way. In contrast, renewables require little water because there is no heat production.
Finally, there are also reasons to question whether this demand for energy will diminish because the AI industry might be, as some analysts characterize it, a bubble. The main reason to expect this bubble to burst is the absence of a viable business model to pay for the immense expenses of building and operating the immense infrastructure needed. Some investors are even betting on this market collapsing. If that happens, then that would also remove the ostensible motive to build nuclear reactors.
Looking to the future, nuclear power and small modular reactors will be unable to provide any significant boost to the electricity consumption of data centers anytime soon—especially within the next several years, when AI-related energy demand is expected to increase most rapidly. The potential increase of nuclear output from restarting old reactors that were shut down because of age and poor economics is a small fraction of the demand—current and anticipated—from data centers. New nuclear reactors are at least a decade away from being started, and the scale of investment from tech companies in small modular or advanced reactors is completely mismatched to the actual cost of building even a single nuclear reactor, let alone the dozens that would have to be built for nuclear power to contribute a sizeable fraction of the demand from data centers.
It’s Not Terrorism When We Do It
This is why a state was so crucial to the Zionist project. Before 1948, the groups that became the IDF, from the Haganah, to the Lehi and the Irgun were explicitly called terror groups. And their members were Jewish terrorists. These labels were widely used by western media, and the existence of Jewish terrorism was not controversial. In a 1948 Guardian editorial, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, the paper referred to “Jewish terrorists” who it said are “ruthless men corrupt by the sickness of the time, caring nothing for the sufferings of the individual Jews in Europe” for whom “every school boy’s jest is another argument for Zionism.”
But as soon as the Jewish Zionists got their own state, the terrorists were absorbed into the military arm of the state,
July 18, 2026, Nate Bear Do Not Panic, https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/18/its-not-terrorism-when-we-do-it/
Yesterday Pete Hegseth triumphantly tweeted a picture of Iran’s Chabahar maritime port tower collapsing following an attack by the US regime. The image bore a striking resemblance to the collapse of the towers on September 11th.
Despite the fact this was, like most of the attacks on Iran, an attack on civilian infrastructure, it will not be labelled as such by the western media and political class. They will never call it terrorism or a war crime, despite the fact that it was both. Whether a civilian tower, a bridge, or a school full of children, western actions that result in mass murder will always simply be the product of a “strike.”
Benign language whenever the imperialist death machine starts slaughtering is a critical tool in maintaining consent for war crimes and state terrorism. And even though Hegseth literally tweeted a picture of this war crime, I‘ve yet to see an imperialist media outlet reproduce the image, because they know how bad it looks. This is a classic tactic we see over and over again: selective reporting and the omission of detail in order to bolster public support for state terrorism and war crimes abroad. Western media has already bundled this “strike” in with all the others in order to present a false equivalence between an illegal war of aggression on the one hand, and legitimate Iranian defence on the other (defensive actions which, by the way, are always labelled as “attacks.”)
The underlying psychology behind the double-standard is rooted in arrogance and supremacy: they’re the bad guys, and they do terrorism. We’re the good guys, and we “conduct strikes.”
And by we, I mean the forces of western imperialism, whether that’s the US or any other power that lines up behind the American regime, especially, but not exclusively, Israel. The use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” are also a critical rhetorical device, conditioning westerners to accept imperial violence as legitimate, and any resistance to that violence as illegitimate. This tendency was seen starkly of course after October 7th. Hamas does terrorism, while Israel merely strikes. Those strikes can be genocidal, they can reduce entire cities to dust, destroy hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, grain silos and the means of life for two million people. They can kill tens of thousands of children in all manner of sadistic and gruesome ways, they can wipe out entire bloodlines, but they are never labelled terrorism. They are, and always will be, simply strikes. Because terrorism is bad, and we’re the good guys.
This is why a state was so crucial to the Zionist project. Before 1948, the groups that became the IDF, from the Haganah, to the Lehi and the Irgun were explicitly called terror groups. And their members were Jewish terrorists. These labels were widely used by western media, and the existence of Jewish terrorism was not controversial. In a 1948 Guardian editorial, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, the paper referred to “Jewish terrorists” who it said are “ruthless men corrupt by the sickness of the time, caring nothing for the sufferings of the individual Jews in Europe” for whom “every school boy’s jest is another argument for Zionism.”
But as soon as the Jewish Zionists got their own state, the terrorists were absorbed into the military arm of the state, and their violence, which months before was clearly identified as terrorism, was legitimatised by the recognition of a state. And this legitimisation of Israeli state terrorism went hand-in-hand with the decades-long campaign to legally designate resistance to state terrorism as the real terrorism, a campaign which led us inexorably towards the genocide of Gaza.
Genocide. Another word reserved by the hegemonic media only for the victims of the imperial enemy, and not for those slaughtered by the imperial ally.
So for the western media, terrorism isn’t terrorism, genocide isn’t terrorism, and it’s not even genocide. Despite the almost universal belief of genocide scholars, holocaust scholars, and international legal experts that what has taken place, and continues to take place in Gaza, is a genocide, the term is almost never used. The Guardian can even write an article with the title ‘Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say’, and in the majority of its subsequent coverage, refer to it as a war. Their main hub for coverage of the genocide, ten months after that headline, is titled Israel-Gaza War. If they had the courage of their supposed progressive convictions, if the truly believed in experts, as all good liberals profess to do, they would accept the evidence they presented themselves, and refer factually to genocide.
They don’t because the western mind, in matters of imperialism requires dissonance. It requires references to “strikes” not terrorism, to “wars” not genocides and to “foreign policy,” not imperialism. This is especially true of the professional media mind which must filter, process and present the news from the imperial core. My guess is that some of the benign, consent manufacturing language is intentional, and some is simply the product of subconscious western supremacy and the dehumanisation of the periphery. Because to fully internalise the evil committed by the system you not only live within but help uphold would require the instant rejection of that system. And well, you’ve got bills to pay. The genocide can be the war if it means making that next installment on your mortgage.
As the terror attacks on Iran and Gaza continue, and as the genocide deepens, we’ll hear only of strikes and wars from a media class fully complicit in both.
The false promise of nuclear power
THE LANCET, Volume 408, Issue 10551p214-215July 18, 2026, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)01304-8/fulltext?rss=yes
Philip J Landrigana,b Send email to landrigp@bc.edu ∙ Brita E Lundbergc
By focusing narrowly on reactor operations, portraying reactor hazards as “extremely small”, and ignoring nuclear energy’s other dangers, Talha Burki’s World Report1 supports the mendacious narrative that nuclear power is a “safe, clean, and affordable” solution to both rising electricity demand and climate change.2
Uranium, the fuel of nuclear power, is radioactive and carcinogenic.3 It endangers health across the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Uranium miners suffer increased risk of lung cancer. Nuclear fuel production workers are exposed to uranium hexafluoride and radon.4 Reactor operators and nearby communities are exposed to radioisotopes; in the USA, 115 000 cancer deaths since 2000 are attributed to residence near nuclear plants.5 All reactors produce waste that will remain radioactive for millennia.6 Reactor decommissioning liberates this waste, exposing workers and communities.
Nuclear power is unique among energy sources in its potential for catastrophe—meltdown, fuel diversion, and weaponisation. A life-cycle analysis of 388 nuclear plants finds that all reactors, large and small, are susceptible to nuclear incidents.7
Nuclear power is not climate neutral. Nuclear power releases 66 g of greenhouse gases per kWh of electricity, which is far less than any fossil fuel, but more than any renewable. Most greenhouse-gas releases occur during uranium mining and milling.8
Nuclear power is neither cheap nor affordable. The levelised cost of nuclear energy has increased by 47% since 2009.2 Current economic analyses do not count health-related costs and underestimate construction costs. Construction of the most recent US reactor cost over US$35 billion,9,10 more than twice its original budget.
By contrast, the cost of renewables has plummeted. Since 2010, solar power costs have decreased by 90%, wind by 70%,11 and batteries by 99%.12
Nuclear power is economically viable only when it receives massive subsidies, tax breaks, and liability exemptions.Nuclear power is a dangerous distraction. It is time to move beyond it and invest in renewables.
References…………………………………………………………………………………….
What do you need to know to run a nuclear power plant?
13 July 2026 by Matthew Lockwood, By Siegfried Evens, Visiting Fellow, SPRU and SEG, https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergygroup/2026/07/13/what-do-you-need-to-know-to-run-a-nuclear-power-plant/
Governments around the world revisit nuclear energy as part of the race to net zero. But an important question often remains overlooked: how do we train the people who make nuclear technology possible?
I have studied how nuclear engineering education developed in the United States and Sweden between the 1950s and 1970s to draw lessons from history. The research shows that nuclear engineering did not emerge as a standalone field overnight. Instead, it grew through collaboration between physicists, chemists, mechanical engineers, materials scientists, and other specialists working together to solve complex problems they could not figure out on their own.
The study also reveals that the skills expected of nuclear engineers changed over time. Early training focused heavily on nuclear physics and radiation. As nuclear power plants became larger and more sophisticated, engineers increasingly needed expertise in areas such as heat transfer, materials performance, and reactor safety.
The comparison between the US and Sweden shows the importance of political culture in nuclear engineering. The United States built nuclear expertise through a decentralized network of national laboratories, industry, and emerging nuclear engineering departments. Sweden, meanwhile, pursued a more centralized model in which existing technical universities worked closely with state-led nuclear institutions.
The study is a reminder that nuclear expertise is something we actually have to organize as a society. And for a future in which nuclear power is built and used safely, we do not only need engineers with broad technical knowledge, but also the ability to address broader challenges related to safety, policy, economics, and society.
This research was published in the journal Nuclear Technology, accessible here.
University of Manchester and United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL) sign landmark nuclear partnership agreement.
Manchester University 3 Jul 2026
The University of Manchester and United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) formalising a wide-ranging partnership to advance nuclear science, grow the UK’s nuclear workforce, and strengthen the country’s position as a global leader in nuclear technology.
The agreement was signed at The University of Manchester by UKNNL Chief Executive Officer Julianne Antrobus and Professor Sarah Sharples, Vice President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
The MoU sets out a shared commitment to collaboration across decommissioning research, materials science, nuclear fuels and energy systems, waste management, and innovation — building on a relationship stretching back many years.
Julianne Antrobus, CEO, United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory UKNNL, said: “I am looking forward to our collaboration with the University of Manchester moving from strength to strength as we work together to develop the next generation of nuclear talent and technology.
“The 2024 Strategic Review gave us a clear direction: become the partnerships-led national laboratory that government and the sector needs. One of the most important things we can do in pursuit of that is to work strategically with the academic institutions that can genuinely help us deliver our mission.
The University of Manchester is one of those vitally important institutions. This MoU formalises a relationship that is already delivering world-leading science and growing the next generation of nuclear talent — and it signals our intent to do much more together. Our partnership with Manchester, alongside our recent agreements with CEA, Bangor University, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and Rolls-Royce, positions UKNNL at the centre of a network of world-class partners, so that we can deliver on our purpose: nuclear science to benefit society.”
Professor Zara Hodgson, Director of the Dalton Nuclear Institute, said: “I am delighted to see this MoU between UKNNL and The University of Manchester signed today. It provides us with a firm platform for a renewed and strengthened collaborative approach to serve the sector. Enabling our teams to work together more closely is a foundational step towards progress in vital research and innovation for a transforming sector and to achieve an accelerated pathway to nuclear expertise that the sector needs now, and in the future……………………….
The agreement also establishes arrangements for sharing facilities and expertise, including access to UKNNL’s Preston and Central Laboratory facilities for Manchester PhD students and researchers, and reciprocal access to University facilities for UKNNL staff……………………………………………………………………………………………
A track record of collaboration
The two organisations have an established history of joint working that is already delivering results for the UK nuclear sector, including published research in leading journals on nuclear fuels and materials, support for PhD researchers in next-generation nuclear technologies, shared personnel arrangements including visiting and honorary academic appointments, and the establishment of centres of excellence such as the Effluents Centre of Excellence and the PHLAME (Photonics and Laser Analysis of Materials and Environments) collaborative research group. https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/university-of-manchester-and-uknnl-sign-landmark-nuclear-partnership-agreement/
The new nuclear madness is climate criminality
“We build, own and operate micro modular nuclear power plants.”
No, they don’t. Last Energy has never built, owned or operated any sort of nuclear power plant, micro, modular or otherwise. But claims such as these simply aren’t questioned by politicians and the media. Rather, they are repeated.
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/06/28/the-new-nuclear-madness-is-climate-criminality/
From reviving ‘dead’ reactors to building new ones large and small, an atomic epidemic is running rampant, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Many of us have been asking ourselves the same question recently. Why does there seem to be a collective taking leave of all senses gripping politicians everywhere when it comes to nuclear power?
And why is the media lapping up the nonsense and hype and repeating the plethora of false promises (to put it politely) being spewed by nuclear companies — new and old?
Here’s an example from Last Energy, a US nuclear startup hoping to build 20 megawatt pressurized water reactors. According to Nation Cymru, who receives Last Energy’s press materials, a statement on the company’s website reads: “We build, own and operate micro modular nuclear power plants.”
No, they don’t. Last Energy has never built, owned or operated any sort of nuclear power plant, micro, modular or otherwise. But claims such as these simply aren’t questioned by politicians and the media. Rather, they are repeated.
Last Energy — brilliant name, as it will be “last”, if it even goes forward at all — was created by Titans of Nuclear podcaster Brent Kugelmass. They have a pilot project underway in Texas for a 5 megawatt version of the four 20MW “micro-reactors” they want to build in a small community in South Wales, where I am speaking this week.
One of my discussants there, Debra Cooper, co-chair of the Bridgend Green Party, made an acute observation about the company in their early public meetings, poorly attended fiascos that have abruptly stopped. It appeared that not only does Last Energy have no experience with nuclear reactors, they are not that familiar with how British electricity works.
“Their PowerPoint Presentation computer indicated that it had low power and the panicked presenters rushed around fiddling with various wires,” Cooper reported of an early public meeting with Last Energy officials in 2025. “Eventually they ascertained that they had not switched on the plug point at the wall.”
The company also exemplified that patronizing approach we are so familiar with of the “benevolent” corporation that will not only deliver jobs but give back to the community. Such is the arrogant ignorance of companies such as these that First Energy spokespeople assured the good people of Llynfi Valley in Wales that they will graciously fund food banks.
“When I pointed out to them that what locals needed was a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, without having to rely on food banks, this appeared to surprise them,” Cooper wrote. The proliferation of food banks is a tragic reminder of the scale of poverty and food insecurity across the country, not solved by adding more food banks but by addressing the root cause.
Stateside, we have an atomic epidemic among US governors, Republicans and Democrats alike, who are falling over each other in their eagerness to welcome new nuclear reactors into their states. Mostly, it’s the so-called small modular reactor (SMR), almost all of which are, like Last Energy, lacking a certified design or commercial buyers.
But some are willing to revive the dead — Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Duane Arnold in Iowa and Palisades in Michigan — and others are happy to accept the same fate as Georgia and welcome Westinghouse back into the game.
The Trump administration has announced it will sink $17.5 billion of taxpayer money into the formerly bankrupt Westinghouse for 10 new full sized AP1000 reactors. This, it is claimed, is in order to “speed the development of 10 new large nuclear reactors to meet the skyrocketing power demand from massive data centers,” reported the Associated Press.
Why pouring money into Westinghouse — now actually wholly owned by two Canadian companies, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco Corporation — would speed up a process that has already proven to take lamentably long, is nowhere explained.
The only Westinghouse AP1000 project to complete in the US at all, at Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years to get here and soared in cost from a predicted $14 billion to at least $35 billion. But these problems were not caused by a lack of money.
The project received $12 billion total in federal loan guarantees, more than 68% of what is now being offered to likely six different utilities to build 10 more AP1000s.
The utilities rumored to be lined up to collect the dough, if not actually deliver the reactors, are Dominion Energy, DTE Energy, Entergy, PSEG (Public Service Enterprise Group) and WEC Energy Group.
Westinghouse’s other two-reactor project, the AP1000s at V.C.Summer, collapsed mid-build, contributing to the company going bankrupt and almost taking down its then Japaneses parent company, Toshiba, with it. Utility executives were convicted of crimes and went to jail. But now there are even efforts to revive this financially catastrophic debacle.
The project received $12 billion total in federal loan guarantees, more than 68% of what is now being offered to likely six different utilities to build 10 more AP1000s.
The utilities rumored to be lined up to collect the dough, if not actually deliver the reactors, are Dominion Energy, DTE Energy, Entergy, PSEG (Public Service Enterprise Group) and WEC Energy Group.
Westinghouse’s other two-reactor project, the AP1000s at V.C.Summer, collapsed mid-build, contributing to the company going bankrupt and almost taking down its then Japaneses parent company, Toshiba, with it. Utility executives were convicted of crimes and went to jail. But now there are even efforts to revive this financially catastrophic debacle.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, himself a former nuclear (and gas) executive, assures us as his nose grows ever longer, that it will all be different this time around with likely “dozens of these built going forward.”
Have small modular reactors been forgotten, given their poor economies of scale and absence of certified designs, upfront factories and commercial interest? Not according to the state governors embracing this expensive fantasy.
SMRs have turned into today’s atomic fad toy — a nuclear Labubu! Everyone wants one — or most likely more than one; some of these reactors are as small as 10 megawatts. One by itself might be able to power a smaller data center but the main thrust is to build hyperscale and AI-focused data center campuses.
This means that SMRs are actually intended to meet a need we don’t need; energy (and water) guzzling AI mega data centers, designed to enrich tech bros and impoverish the rest of us, fiscally, environmentally and morally.
But the nuclear nuttiness is by no means confined to English (or Welsh) speaking countries.
The Swedish parliament, known as the Riksdag, has just voted to reclassify uranium mines as not a nuclear facility. This allows for the radioactivity they release and the waste they create— and mainly leave behind— to be treated like any other mineral.
There was no science behind this thinking, just a deeply undemocratic rationale, as a World Nuclear News article explained: “With uranium mines no longer regulated as nuclear facilities, uranium extraction will no longer require explicit municipal consent.” Sweden had already lifted its uranium mining ban in January 2026. Needless to say, the uranium companies are jubilant.
Just as bad, and arguably madder, the Riksdag also “voted in favor of the government’s proposal to amend Sweden’s environmental code to enable the expansion of nuclear power in more places on the coast,” the WNN article said.
There is a new political phenomenon known as “climate hushing”, but building reactors on coastlines when, due to our failure to address climate change adequately or in time, sea-level rise is an inevitability, is climate criminality.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder and executive director of Beyond Nuclear. She is the author of No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War , published by Pluto Press and also available on Amazon.
Israel rebrands scheme to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians as ‘Freedom of Movement Plan’: Report
Tel Aviv is intensifying its efforts to depopulate Gaza and replace the strip’s Palestinian inhabitants with Jewish settlers
News DeskJUN 29, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-rebrands-scheme-to-ethnically-cleanse-gaza-of-palestinians-as-freedom-of-movement-plan-report
Israel has rebranded its controversial plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza, dropping the euphemism “voluntary migration” and replacing it with “Freedom of Movement Plan,” Israeli media reported on 29 June.
Channel 13 reported that Israeli security officials and the Mossad have been instructed to stop using the term “voluntary migration,” which has drawn condemnation as a thinly veiled reference to Israel’s effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian residents.
According to Channel 13, Israeli officials believe that rebranding the initiative name could make it easier for foreign governments to support the plan.
The officials “expressed optimism that the change in terminology could help shift those countries’ positions and revive the plan after earlier setbacks,” the channel added.
Israel has lobbied multiple countries to accept large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza as refugees, including South Sudan, Chad, the Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya.
Tel Aviv has also proposed sending Palestinians to the breakaway region of Somaliland. In December, Israel became the first UN member state to recognize Somaliland’s independence from Somalia.
Last week, the new head of Israel’s National Security Council, Shmuel Ben Ezra, convened an urgent meeting with defense establishment officials to discuss the issue of “encouraging the voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
In a meeting attended by Israeli military and Shin Bet security service officials, Mossad officials said that no countries have agreed to accept Palestinians from Gaza.
An Israeli defense official who spoke with Haaretz said that the revival of the plan to expel Palestinians from the strip may be connected to quiet agreements reached recently between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.
The official added that the US may agree to the Israeli plan as “compensation for painful concessions” that Washington imposed on Israel as part of its deal with Iran.
Since the start of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has sought to cleanse the strip of Palestinians while presenting the effort as a humanitarian initiative.
On 28 October 2023, Israeli culture magazine Mekomit published a leaked document issued by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence recommending the occupation of Gaza and total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The document recommended that Israel evacuate the Gazan population to Sinai during the war, establish tent cities and new cities in northern Sinai to accommodate the deported population, and then create a closed security zone stretching several kilometers inside Egypt.
The expelled Palestinians would not be allowed to return to any areas near the Israeli border.
The plan stated the government must launch a public relations campaign that will promote the expulsion of Palestinians in a way that does not damage Israel’s reputation.
The deportation of Palestinians from Gaza must be presented as a necessary humanitarian measure to receive international support, the document added.
Such a deportation could be justified if it will lead to “fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected number of casualties if they remain.”
Since that time, Israeli bombing has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, according to a tally by the Gaza Health Ministry. However, independent estimates of the death toll are much higher, reaching into the hundreds of thousands.
Over a million Palestinians in Gaza are displaced and living in tents after Israeli bombing destroyed their homes.
Nuclear powered shipping – a golden future or unrealistic claims?
There was little in the way of caution at the conference, save for the odd nod to safety, seemingly when someone remembered there were members of the press in the room. But is atomic energy really the answer to decarbonising shipping? Underneath it all there was an undertone of not really believing what they were saying, and an element of ‘will they find out what we’re not saying’.
Nuclear scientists are split on the ability of fourth generation nuclear reactors to decarbonise shipping, but the drive for funds is leading to ever greater claims
Nick Savvides, Europe correspondent
Keeping politicians and politics away from the technical decisions necessary to develop nuclear power was how one professor described the path to nuclear nirvana.
Jan Emblemsvåg, a professor, speaker and organiser for a recent meeting on Nuclear Power for Shipping, at the Technical University of Norway (NTNU), believes that politicians will stymie the work of engineers.
But professor Emblemsvåg was, like his fellow delegates, very optimistic about the future of nuclear ships, as long as politicians kept their noses out of the technicians’ business. That gave the conference room an upbeat feel.
There was little in the way of caution at the conference, save for the odd nod to safety, seemingly when someone remembered there were members of the press in the room. But is atomic energy really the answer to decarbonising shipping? Underneath it all there was an undertone of not really believing what they were saying, and an element of ‘will they find out what we’re not saying’.
As it happened, a quick chat with Dr Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, and author of the April 2024 paper, “Five Things the ‘Nuclear Bros’ Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors,” was certainly fuel for thought.
The paper outlined what the protagonists for nuclear energy, and in particular small modular reactors (SMR), didn’t want you to know. An SMR is defined as producing 300MW of power or less.
Unsurprisingly, Dr Lyman said: “Nothing has changed since 2024, the same challenges outlined then remain in the reactors of today.”
Dr Lyman’s report was written about land-based reactors, but he says it is just as pertinent for ship-based SMRs.
The report discusses the five major claims made for SMR technology; that they are more economical than larger reactors; they are safer; that they reduce radioactive waste; they are more reliable and resilient; and are more efficient than large reactors.
Economies of scale
Building SMRs should in theory be cheaper with lower capital costs, but that doesn’t mean they are more economical, argues Dr Lyman: “What matters more when comparing the economics of different power sources is the cost to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and that depends on the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity, as well as the costs of operations, maintenance, fuel, and other factors.”
Economies of scale can also mean that larger units are more economical than smaller ones and SMR developers claim up to 80% cost reductions through the mass production of SMRs. Dr Lyman, however, cites a 2018 University of Cambridge, department of engineering study, that put cost savings due to mass production at 30% at most.
Safety
Safety is said to be a major advantage of SMR technology, they are smaller, have less radioactive material and generate less heat than their larger pressurised water cousins.
Not so, said Dr Lyman: “The so-called passive safety features that SMR proponents like to cite may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate.”
Lack of testing
None of these reactors have been tested on land or at sea, but Dr Lyman told Seatrade Maritime News: ”The complex, issues associated with fluid flow, and heat transfer and heat distribution in these reactors, they have absolutely no idea that they would be able to operate safely on land, much less on a ship.”
He added: “I would not be comfortable with deploying SMR’s on ships, there are many more challenges at sea than on land.”
Moreover, some molten salt reactors can generate significant quantities of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, which cannot be contained within the reactor and could “diffuse throughout your entire ship,” putting crew at risk and contaminating the cargo.
Early attempts to develop a molten salt reactor used charcoal absorption beds in an attempt to capture the tritium, which eventually led to the abandonment of the technology. The used charcoal had to be treated as nuclear waste and disposed of appropriately.
Waste, however, was an issue that was brushed aside as irrelevant by panellists at NTNU, who considered the costs associated with radioactive waste as “minimal”.
Radioactive waste disposal, “is something the nuclear industry promised they could solve 80 years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet,” noted Dr Lyman.
Finland is the one country where there has been “progress toward a geologic repository for very small amounts of fuel,” said Dr Lyman, but no other country has achieved that. In fact Finland has consent to build the Onkalo repository a geologic repository on Olkiluoto Island.
It has a capacity for 6,500 tonnes, stored in copper canisters for 100,000 years at a depth of 400-450m. After 100 years the repository will be permanently sealed.
Storing radioactive waste
No other country has the capacity to sustainably store radioactive waste, “Is stored where it’s being generated,” explained Dr Lyman, “So it’s unrealistic for them to brush off the issue of waste. Any shipping company that is going to start using nuclear reactors is going to have to have a plan and a programme for the long-term management of waste.”
Moreover, some fuel types, such as TRISO will generate as much as 10 times the volume of waste compared to a light water reactor.
“Any shipping company that claims it’s going down this path without having the parallel commitment for management and storage of waste, which would generally require a license, in whatever country that storage facility is going to be, is just, they’re living in fantasy land,” claimed Dr Lyman.
Neither could those costs be mitigated by leasing a reactor as some industry figures have suggested, companies might be suggesting that they will collect spent fuel and handle the waste, but unless they have a credible plan for dealing with that waste it is not a realistic option.
Dr Lyman pointed out that spent fuels are initially stored in “swimming pool type structures” where the waste is cooled, this is expensive and can take five to 10 years to cool. Following that the costs for dry storage are comparatively small, but monitoring will continue indefinitely, so the expense will be ongoing.
Eventually the cost of storage will likely fall on the taxpayer, but even there it is uncertain whether governments are willing to take on the cost of storage.
“In the United States, the law requires the federal government to take title of spent nuclear fuel after a certain period of time. And, you know, the US government famously reneged on its commitment to take over [waste management] in 1998.It has not happened yet.”
Ultimately, the utility companies that continue to store spent fuel have sought damages from the federal government for the hundreds of millions of dollars that they have spent over nearly three decades in storing nuclear waste.
Reactor designs are yet to be proven
None of the proposed SMR designs have yet been tested and proven, though the US Department of Energy launched a Reactor Pilot Program that is meant to “Expedite the testing of advanced reactor designs”.
Launched in 2025 the programme that aims to test three designs which will go critical outside the Idaho National Laboratory on 4 July this year.
To achieve the aim of going critical Dr Lyman points out that no company has built a reactor.
“These aren’t actual power producing machines. They’re just really an array of fuel in an experimental apparatus,” explained Dr Lyman, but that’s not the hard part.
“The hard part is the engineering, the power conversion system, understanding the thermal hydraulics and all the other effects, all those take time, and if you’re trying to do that quickly, especially with novel concepts and materials, it’s a recipe for failure,” he concluded.
According to Lyman the Reactor Pilot Program is a rushed job that the Trump administration is pushing, but he says it lacks durability.
Moreover, the high-assay low-enriched uranium, known as HALEU, is uranium enriched to contain between 5% and 20% of the fissile isotope U-235, these fuels need more mined uranium to produce the fuel.
Uranium mining uses in situ leaching methods where a solution of water, sulphuric acid and hydrogen peroxide is used to dissolve uranium, before purifying and drying the fuel into a concentrated powder known as yellowcake.
More conventional mining methods crush uranium ore into a slurry before dissolving the uranium with sulphuric acid.
Uranium mining is ecologically unsustainable, and costly, particularly in lives lost with some 7,800 uranium miners dying of lung cancer according to data from the Pooled Uranium Miners Analysis.
Effectively, from mine to wake to waste nuclear energy must clean up its act, and it needs to take safety and security seriously too if it is to achieve the kind of break through its proponents claim.
Currently, added Dr Lyman, “There’s no path between the situation today and what you would need to do to have an international safety and security regime for shipboard SMRs and commerce,” noted Dr Lyman.
No modern SMR has been built or tested, there is no regulatory regime and issues such as safety and security remain open, with International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring needed to make certain that nuclear fuels “are not diverted”.
Existing SMR companies, “Need to attract capital to be able to actually build their reactors. And now you have this multiplicity of vendors who are all competing, and that’s compelling them to make more and more unrealistic claims to try to attract attention and making promises and ambitions that are not realistic,” claimed Dr Lyman.
Responding to professor Emblemsvåg’s claim that politicians were the roadblock for developing nuclear powered ships Dr Lyman argued that politicians were critical to the future of nuclear-powered ships. “The only way nuclear is going to get accepted is if politics drives the process, which is what we’re seeing now [with the Reactor Pilot Program]….There has to be massive government support, that’s the only way some of these plans are going to happen.”
Words Matter: What does “De-Confliction” Even Mean?
The blind acceptance of confusing words and terms we don’t understand also dulls our thinking, dulls our reporting and plays into the hands of the governments, who are involved in this negotiation process, and who want to limit and control scrutin
The blind acceptance of confusing words and terms we don’t understand also dulls our thinking, dulls our reporting and plays into the hands of the governments, who are involved in this negotiation process, and who want to limit and control scrutiny. .
June 22, 2026, Kathy Gannon Substack, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/22/words-matter-what-does-de-confliction-even-mean/
The statement that came out of the first day of meetings in Switzerland between Iran and the United States announced a number of committees or cells, including the “de-confliction” cell.
What does that even mean?
Merriam-Webster offers up one definition: “The coordination of flights, maneuvers, etc. between groups especially in areas where overlapping operations are occurring in order to reduce the risk of accidents or incidents.” Or the same dictionary offered up as an example of how it would be used: “Deconfliction is how friendly forces keep out of each other’s way,” John Bolton.
Now that’s even more confusing because according to the statement, this cell is between the parties, presumably Iran and the United States, as well as the Lebanese republic. Yet the statement went on to say this Deconfliction cell will be “facilitated by the mediators to ensure the adherence of the termination of the military operations in Lebanon as per the MoU.”
Yet neither Israel nor Hezbollah is part of this “deconfliction” cell, even though they are the ones carrying out military operations and as a result would seem critical to any termination of those operations.
Presumably even as the statement avoids saying it, and until now the reporting hasn’t cleared up the confusion, Iran would represent Hezbollah and America, Israel.
Presumably Iran would rein in Hezbollah and the United States would rein in Israel. That seems a big ask, likely more for Washington, than Tehran. Until now the U.S. has failed to stop Israel’s bombing campaign. The question then is: How is this cell that neither includes Israel or Hezbollah, going to “ensure the adherence of the termination of the military operations in Lebanon as per the MoU.”
It is a bit of a mystery how the Merriam Webster dictionary use of “deconfliction” applies to this conflict. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah fit the definition of “friendly forces.”
It’s also disappointing that, until now, news reports covering the statement have offered little to no understanding of this “deconfliction” cell, which is tasked with ending regional conflicts, a key component of the MoU, which must be settled before any peace deal is reached.
Many of the news reports have put quotes around the word “deconfliction” presumably because its definition is difficult to explain, vague or not understood, yet its official so it is used __ without explanation, but with quotes.
But Words Matter.
Words have meaning and the increasing readiness to use words and terms without explanation, or without calling out distortions makes us all less informed. It also distorts our understanding of events, of progress or failure.
It is no longer even clear who is responsible for success or failure and that is problematic because it allows those who negotiate in poor faith to deflect or avoid blame.
The blind acceptance of confusing words and terms we don’t understand also dulls our thinking, dulls our reporting and plays into the hands of the governments, who are involved in this negotiation process, and who want to limit and control scrutiny.
This MoU itself has often been defined by misleading, vague or confusing terminology. In the initial stages it was referred to as a peace agreement by mediators, who announced the MoU and repeated in news reports. It is not. It is not even an agreement.
It is simply a 60-day pause in fighting, while the thorny issues that have, until now, prevented a peace agreement are discussed with the hopes that it will eventually lead to a peace agreement.
As the pause and negotiations begin, it seems a a new wave of confusing, self-serving terminology is being used to obscure what work is being done, who is doing it, and whether real progress is occurring.
1 This Month
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- September 2026 (184)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (375)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 