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We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres

What is certain, though, is that the land cannot withstand these centres’ immense demand for water. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.

In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

Guardian, Mon 29 Jun 2026

When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.

The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”

This isn’t a story about AI, she says. “That genie is out of the bottle: it’s here, it’s an effective tool, you can use it or not,” Brockovich says matter-of-factly. This is about the massive structures being built to house the vast computing facilities AI requires. These datacentres, she says, stretch over “hundreds and hundreds of acres”. In May, Utah gave approval to a centre twice the size of Manhattan.

Some of the emails Brockovich gets from people near datacentres express genuine bafflement: “Why did I not know about this? How did this construction just start? Why am I now getting a notice from the city council that this has already passed when I didn’t even have a voice in it?” Others reflect concerns about the impact of the centres: “What about our resources? What’s happening to the water? Who’s paying for all this energy and am I going to foot that bill? What will the future impact on health be from these monstrosities? What’s going to happen to the wildlife?”

From the emails, Brockovich built a map of significant AI datacentres in the US that are either operational or under construction, overlaid with locations where community members have emailed in concerns. This open-source document is chilling: as of 24 June, 33 AI datacenters have been completed and are operational, 68 are under construction and 41 are proposed. And there had been 7,005 reports submitted through the online form, which is to say, all that is known about them is what people have seen. As a post on her Substack blog is headlined: “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?”

“It’s happening in every US state, multiple counties, rural areas, ranches, farms and neighbourhoods. People watch nature because they respect it, they need it. And they’re watching it being destroyed,” says Brockovich. She has heard from people saying: “I’m concerned this is where the bald eagles nest,” “I’m watching wildlife disappear,” “I’m seeing dead animals.” Some communities learn about a centre months after it has been approved; others don’t hear anything about them and watch as a vast building emerges.

What is certain, though, is that the land cannot withstand these centres’ immense demand for water. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.

“People are reporting bill spikes,” Brockovich says, reading an email from someone who says their monthly water bill went from $22 (£17) to more than $350 (£265). The threat of these centres is about more than money – it feels existential. “How will the water use disrupt the balance of nature? People are asking: “What will happen to us?”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..After Hinkley, she worked on other environmental pollution cases against PG&E related to hexavalent chromium, the chemical that contaminated Hinkley’s water. More recently, she has focused on Pfas (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), “forever chemicals” that are a component in firefighting foam used heavily on US military bases. Pfas have been linked to health problems, including fertility issues and some cancers. In 2017, communities living near military bases reported worrying levels of these chemicals in their drinking water.

Brockovich’s renown is plainly the reason people email her when they have concerns. This is what led her to north-west Georgia last year, where staggeringly high levels of Pfas were found in the water and the wider environment. It was believed that they came from carpet factories that used stain-resistant chemicals. The major carpet factories say they complied with all regulations and no longer use Pfas. She is still supporting people there with their campaigns.

Unlike toxic chemicals leaking into water, nothing about datacentres is discreet. Signs that might be subtle one day – an absence of birdsong – the next day will be a centre up and running at full volume. “It really becomes about the noise, the decibels,” Brockovich says. People will write to her and say: “We’re going insane 24/7,” “It’s got to stop,” “It’s humming, it’s hissing, it’s buzzing.” She says: “It’s generators. It’s increased electric bills. It’s power surges.”

These structures are appearing without the consultation you would need to erect a new sports hall, as if people won’t notice. But people certainly will notice, because the buildings are vast. It feels like a step into post-democracy, which is a tech bro fantasy, a world in which laws and regulations have been obviated. The big tech companies seem to have blueprinted their fantasy and started building it.

Alternatives are now being mooted. “People are talking about putting them at the bottom of the ocean,” says Brockovich. “They’re talking about having barges and putting the datacentres there, using waves as the energy in cooler climates. Elon Musk wants to put them in space.” But with innumerable Earth-based datacentres already built or in the works, this feels like puff – the future you could have had, had you not sleepwalked into the one that has arrived.

For Brockovich, this is all a distraction. The first thing she wants is a case-by-case moratorium on approving datacentres. ( (She is collating these cases through her open-source mapping site and says councils vary in the action they are prepared to take, according to how surprised by, or receptive to, local complaints their officials are. Many states are only now stopping to consider whether there should be state-level regulation and oversight of datacentres – and, if so, what implications that would have for local decision-making and autonomy.

This takes time. Seventy-nine municipalities in the US have so far have issued moratoriums, many immediately being hit with lawsuits for breaking their original deal. Pauses have been introduced in Georgia, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina – one introduced in Maine was then vetoed – but these are early interventions against tech behemoths.

When I ask Brockovich about the political climate – a president committed to AI and blatantly dismissive of environmental concerns – she is careful to stress that opposition to datacentres is bipartisan. She knows from her work fighting Pfas, though, that a change in administration can make an enormous difference to the success of these campaigns. In the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, a clean-up operation was announced by the Pentagon. However, this plan has quietly been delayed by Donald Trump’s Department of Defense: in some areas, it won’t start until 2039.

Yet the nature of Brockovich’s campaigning is not to go straight to the top and demand policy change, but rather to build lawsuits from the ground up. Victory, to her, is won by way of a pragmatic to-do list. To start, she would go to local government and say: “I’d like to see an environmental-impact report. I’d like to see how you propose to power all this. Are you going to build your own power? Are you relying on our already strained resources?” She says: “Let’s get that information first and then have a town hall meeting where the people can be a voice in it.” She has a degree of confidence that the law still has teeth. “Lawsuits aren’t settling for $333m any more; they’re settling for billions,” she says.

Brockovich’s datacentre work goes beyond the US; she has been contacted by people in Australia, India, Scotland and Ireland. There is already a moratorium on any more datacentres in Dublin; even by 2023, such centres were accounting for a fifth of Ireland’s electricity usage. “This is a planetary thing,” she says. “It’s overwhelming. We have to have some courage to show up, and it’s difficult to do that when you’re up against forces that have all the money and all the intelligence and all the bandwidth in the world.” She, meanwhile, is “getting too old for this, by the way. I’m in my legacy phase. I have six grandchildren.”

She is smiling. All that may be true, but even if this is her final campaign, she won’t walk away until it’s over. She can beat this – she just can’t beat it on her own. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/29/were-up-against-forces-that-have-all-the-money-in-the-world-erin-brockovich-on-her-battle-against-ai-datacentres

July 1, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment

The Nuclear Reactors Coming to a Small Town Near You

As a disruptive new nuclear power project embeds itself in Parsons, Kansas, residents are divided on whether it’s worth the potential risk.

The New Republic Finn Hartnett, June 16, 2026

Parsons, Kansas …… With a population of about
9,600 ………

 ……………………………………The Parsons Sun had it first: a deal struck between industrial park board members and the nuclear company Deep Fission. A first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor was coming to the park. “I saw it on Facebook, and I thought it was a joke,” Marjorie Reynolds, a home nurse who lives in the area, said. The public was not informed before the deal was completed: Even county commissioners were only told “a week or two” prior, according to Commissioner Terry Weidert. “They just announced it in the newspaper December 4, like it was a done deal,” anti-nuclear activist Ann Suellentrop said. “So arrogant and so dismissive of the public.”

Park officials said they could not inform the public because they were under nondisclosure agreements with Deep Fission and the Department of Energy. “You’ve got intellectual property that … they like to keep under wraps,” Reams said. “If you’re the DOE, it’s a national security risk. It’s an energy project that has national implications.” Zaleski concurred, arguing that the agreement with Deep Fission was a standard one. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles in this industry,” he said.

Holger Meyer, a particle physics professor at Wichita State University with a background in nuclear energy, said the public should have been informed regardless. “There sometimes are good reasons for the desire for nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “But this isn’t something that just impacts the land it is on. It impacts the entire county—the entire region.… There is obvious public interest.”

It didn’t matter. Five days later, park officials, executives of Deep Fission, a smattering of locals, and roughly 40 TV stations gathered in the park for a groundbreaking. Parsons may not have liked it, but it was going nuclear.

Founded three years ago, the California-based start-up Deep Fission was thrust into prominence last August, when its reactor project became one of 11 selected as part of Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.” The pilot program, created by executive order, fast-tracks the companies’ ability to receive commercial operating licenses. The stated goal at the time was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026; one already has, and the DOE claims two more are on track. Deep Fission is not among them.

This rapid schedule is possible in part because Trump has overhauled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since the start of his second term, relaxing regulations and inspections to meet demand from data centers.

In May 2025, the president ordered the theoretically independent NRC to submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and cut the annual hours spent on nuclear inspections by an estimated 38 percent. Hundreds of staff members have since departed the agency, and the two remaining Democrats on its board have expressed fear they could be fired after Democratic Chair Christopher Hanson was canned last year. Suellentrop warned that the NRC will be “gutted” if Trump continues to get his way. “The DOE will rubber-stamp whatever he wants, and to hell with people’s safety, their health, the environment,” she said.

………………….For advocates of Deep Fission, the government’s promotion of the project is evidence of its safety.

But others warned against such implicit trust. Meyer said “industry interest” was behind the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear power. “Environmental regulations are being dismantled in all areas,” he said. “It’s clear that nuclear safety isn’t prioritized by the Trump administration.” Kent Rowe, a retired professor of aeronautics and anti-nuclear activist from near Parsons, stated that the Deep Fission project was “a scheme to bury [reactors] haphazardly and worry about consequences later.”

A March letter signed by 11 state attorneys general condemned the DOE for creating an exemption allowing certain nuclear projects to skip previously mandated environmental reviews. Paul Gunter, director of the group Beyond Nuclear, said he was concerned the exemption would allow Deep Fission to bypass proper safety measures.

“There should be no question about whether or not a novel nuclear technology without a designed reactor containment system can avoid an environmental review for potential severe accidents and the long-term consequences,” he said. When asked whether Deep Fission would indeed be exempt from the review, a DOE spokesperson said, “No determination has been reached.”

While the other nuclear companies in Trump’s pilot program are working on more or less traditional reactors, Deep Fission is getting weird with it, forecasting a reactor it has described as both “discreet” and “bespoke.” A laudatory Forbes profile on company founders Richard and Liz Muller outlines the plan: “Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes.” (The profile fails to note some less savory details from Richard’s past: He was a vocal global warming skeptic until 2012, and has been criticized for taking research funding from the oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch.)

A small, scalable reactor is Deep Fission’s Theranos-esque goal, perfect for supporting Silicon Valley’s new obsession: AI data centers. Seventy in-house reactors can power one data center, according to Forbes. Deep Fission has been open about a desire to “meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” with a system “designed to scale modularly.” They have already seduced the likes of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who owns an 8 percent stake in the company.

Speed is one of the company’s core tenets, which is concerning to some critics. Deep Fission’s website proudly states its reactors take an “estimated six months” to build, and the company told Parsons in December it aimed to have a test reactor running by July. “We have to build fast enough to meet data center demand before they decide to go with something else,” Liz Muller told Forbes.

It turns out, though, that building a nuclear reactor is quite difficult. The company now will not say when its test reactor will be ready, and is unsure on whether it will be able to open a commercial reactor at all. Deep Fission recently completed a test well in Parsons 6,000 feet deep and eight inches in diameter. That may sound impressive, but it’s far smaller than the mile-deep, 30 to 50 inch–wide borehole that will be needed for the real thing.

While a white paper sent to the NRC gives insight into the proposed reactor blueprint, Deep Fission’s design is not final yet. The company has not submitted a preliminary safety analysis to the DOE, nor applied for the NRC license it will need to sell energy, according to federal officials. Deep Fission declined to speak with The New Republic for this piece, with vice president of communications Chloe Frader citing the “active registration process.”

Reams said Deep Fission was never going to hit the deadline it set for itself. “I think even if it had gone perfectly, they probably wouldn’t have hit July 4,” he said. As to why the company may not be selling its energy anymore? “They weren’t sure [of] all the P’s and Q’s that they had to make sure were covered,” Reams said. “It’s been a learning process for them.”

…..some have been vocal in their opposition to Deep Fission, particularly Reynolds, who founded a local group called Prairie Dog Alliance for the express purpose of fighting the development. In a matter of months, Reynolds has assembled a hodgepodge of community members, among them farmers, business owners, activists, and professors. (Suellentrop, Meyer, Rowe, and Gunter have all been in contact with the group.) Prairie Dog Alliance now boasts over 500 Facebook followers and about 15 members who attend regular meetings.

Some locals say Prairie Dog represents the majority opinion. Librarian Heather Fouts estimated that “at most 25 percent” of residents support the nuclear project. “I would say most of Parsons is against the reactor,” echoed Beachner, who recently joined the group. “But I also feel … nobody believes they can do anything.” In contrast, Zaleski and Parsons Sun editor Hannah Emberton cast Prairie Dog as a vocal minority.

The group forced a public meeting with Deep Fission in March after rejecting private talks. There have been a handful of meetings since, but Prairie Dog still wants more transparency. Member Jill Blankinship said the March meeting was “turned into a meet-and-greet”; at a later May in-person meeting where company officials took questions, participants were made to write them down ahead of time. Deep Fission also promotes a “community advisory group” in Parsons, which has no public facing presence at the moment, though Deep Fission says has met twice.*

Deep Fission is also drilling its boreholes at the edge of the Roubidoux aquifer, an underground water source that’s part of the larger Ozark system. While Parsonites get their drinking water from nearby Lake Parsons, the Ozark system is used for commerce, farming, and rural water districts all over the shop. “If something did happen, there’s potential that it could contaminate groundwater, which then contaminates the Neosho River, which goes … all the way down to Oklahoma,” Blankinship said. “Thirty-six towns, all kinds of people.”…………..

There’s also the issue of nuclear waste. Deep Fission’s founders said in April they wanted to just abandon their spent fuel rods underground after each reactor’s six-year lifespan. “Instead of pulling them out of the hole, they’ll pour in a mix of cement and rock to seal it all in place,” the Forbes profile states happily. Activists called the idea dangerous. 

A month after the Forbes piece, Deep Fission seemingly changed its tune. Chief Operating Officer Mike Brasel said in a May public meeting that the company will only leave spent fuel underground temporarily and that “we do not plan on disposing fuel down in that hole.” While the federal government is “contractually required to take the fuel,” Brasel said, Deep Fission aims to have a recycling or disposal facility in place before its boreholes begin to collapse in “40 to 50” years.

By then, things could already be going very wrong. Reynolds’s doomsday scenario is that radiation poisoning of the city’s soil and water will turn Parsons into something akin to Picher, Oklahoma, a small town 35 miles away. Once a bastion of lead and zinc mining, the town underwent dangerous corporate practices that caused irreconcilable environmental damage to the land; Picher was soon declared uninhabitable, and the municipality was officially dissolved in 2013.

In the event of a disaster, Deep Fission is seeking liability insurance under the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies the company in the event of a nuclear accident, providing costs fall above a certain threshold. “They’re going to … look for being indemnified from an accident that they’re saying will never happen,” Gunter said. “That’s a clear no-confidence vote.”…………………………………………………………..https://newrepublic.com/article/211643/nuclear-reactor-parsons-kansas-safety

June 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s ‘nuclear bros’ race to deliver US atomic revival 

 At a factory in Texas, Matt Loszak is building a new type of nuclear reactor he
hopes will allow the US to reclaim leadership in an industry dominated by
Russia and China. “Our goal is to ship hundreds and possibly thousands of
reactors every year,” the 35-year-old founder of Aalo Atomics said as he
inspected components for the Aalo-X, designed to power AI data centres.
Aalo is one of several US start-ups planning to switch on new reactors this
month ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Donald Trump to mark the
250th anniversary of America’s independence.

Antares Nuclear and Valar
Atomics have already announced they have achieved “criticality” — the
moment a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. Radiant Nuclear
and Oklo told the FT they were in the final stages of receiving safety
clearances under Trump’s pilot programme, which aims to have at least
three test reactors reach criticality by the target date. Many of the
founders leading the charge are under 40 and come from outside the nuclear
industry, while some have ties to the Trump administration. Backed by
Silicon Valley, they say small reactors can help meet soaring electricity
demand from AI data centres.

 FT 18th June 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/0d074795-e54a-41d7-9c97-baf2bd6deb94

June 20, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment