European Investment Bank makes first investment in modular nuclear reactors
by Global Banking & Finance Review, September 15, 2026
Quick Summary
The European Investment Bank has extended a €40 million loan to Finnish startup Steady Energy to support its development of a 50 MW small modular reactor for district heating—its first investment in SMR technology, anchored within the EU’s broader strategy to deploy SMRs by the early 2030s.
………….Currently, only two commercial SMRs are in operation, in Russia and China. The European Commission wants Europe to have its first SMRs up and running by the early 2030s.
Industry and Political Reactions
“The EIB’s support to nuclear sends a positive signal to investors,” said Emmanuel Brutin, the head of industry association nucleareurope.
EU Policy and Nuclear Energy
EU countries have long been at loggerheads over whether to promote atomic power, reflecting a split between members like France and Sweden which have nuclear power plants, and traditionally anti-nuclear countries like Germany and Austria, which cite concerns over safety and nuclear waste management.
As a result, the EU budget does not directly fund nuclear plants, although the EIB loan to Steady Energy comes with an EU budget guarantee.
Future Prospects for SMRs
More than 80 SMR designs are in development worldwide, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. ($1 = 0.8662 euro)………………………………………………………………..
EIB’s Loan to Steady Energy
The EIB will provide a €40 million ($46.18 million) loan to Finnish nuclear energy startup Steady Energy, which is developing a small modular reactor for producing heat, for a local district heating network, the bank said in a statement.
The loan is the first in a pipeline of SMR investments the EIB has planned, an official told Reuters.
Technical Details of the Project
The 50-megawatt reactor, which is still in the concept stage, will use existing light water reactor technology, in which water moderates the nuclear chain reaction and cools the reactor. It is designed to be built underground, to [?] increase the reactor’s security.
Currently, only two commercial SMRs are in operation, in Russia and China. The European Commission wants Europe to have its first SMRs up and running by the early 2030s.
Industry and Political Reactions
“The EIB’s support to nuclear sends a positive signal to investors,” said Emmanuel Brutin, the head of industry association nucleareurope.
EU Policy and Nuclear Energy
EU countries have long been at loggerheads over whether to promote atomic power, reflecting a split between members like France and Sweden which have nuclear power plants, and traditionally anti-nuclear countries like Germany and Austria, which cite concerns over safety and nuclear waste management.
As a result, the EU budget does not directly fund nuclear plants, although the EIB loan to Steady Energy comes with an EU budget guarantee. ……………………………………………….https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/eib-makes-first-investment-modular-nuclear-reactors/
Great British Energy – Nuclear (GBE-N) and SGE at Oldbury: land interest dispute and SMR site risks for engineers
September 15, 2026|, by Tom Sullivan
Great British Energy – Nuclear (GBE-N) says it has no record of any
approach from small modular reactor (SMR) developer SGE about acquiring
land at the former Oldbury nuclear power station site for new SMR units.
SGE maintains it lodged an “indicative interest” in purchasing the
Oldbury land, which previously hosted twin Magnox reactors, as part of its
UK deployment plans. The dispute leaves ownership clarity and programme
timing for any SMR build at Oldbury unresolved, complicating early-stage
site assessment and grid-connection planning.
GBE‑N’s lack of record of
SGE’s interest in Oldbury comes as the agency is already managing a nuclear
commercial pipeline of up to £4.6bn, suggesting it will prioritise
counterparties that align cleanly with its structured SMR programme rather
than unsolicited approaches.
With Jacobs already engaged on planning and
consenting for GBE‑N’s proposed SMR fleet, any credible bid for Oldbury
is likely to be assessed against a system-wide siting and sequencing
strategy rather than on a standalone site-opportunity basis. Across our 915
Infrastructure stories, GBE‑N appears as one of the more frequently
referenced UK public-sector clients, signalling that clarity over site
control at Oldbury will matter for a wide range of prospective early-works
and delivery-partner bidders tracking its £730M-£1.1bn pre-construction
packages.
Geomechanics 15th Sept 2026, https://www.geomechanics.io/news/article/gbe-n-and-sge-at-oldbury-land-interest-dispute-and-smr-site-risks-for-engineers
UK, USA enhance cooperation on fusion energy
WNN Tuesday, 15 September 2026
A number of collaboration agreements have been announced between US and UK partners aimed at accelerating the commercial deployment of nuclear fusion power plants around the world.
Firstly, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have signed a joint declaration of intent to explore linking their advanced fusion supercomputing platforms, using artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy’s development.
Under the joint declaration – signed at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London on Monday – UKAEA’s SUNRISE mission-focused AI supercomputer would be linked with PPPL’s Simulation, Technology and Experiment Leveraging Learning-Accelerated Research (STELLAR-AI) platform through a partnership known as the SUNRISE–STELLAR-AI Federation. SUNRISE is the UK’s first AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy, backed by GBP45 million (USD60.6 million) from the UK government. STELLAR-AI is PPPL’s USD13 million AI and high-performance computing platform to be operated with support from Princeton University. STELLAR-AI is designed to host AI tools and workflows as they mature.
The collaboration – which builds on a memorandum of understanding signed between UKAEA and PPPL in June – would draw on experiments completed using UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade facility in Oxfordshire and PPPL’s NSTX-U facility in New Jersey. The federation will mean both advanced computers will be used to train the same AI models, which need large volumes of high-quality data to make accurate predictions……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-usa-enhance-cooperation-on-fusion-energy
NuScale Power Is Closing In on a Deal That Could Transform the Small Modular Reactor Industry
deal could be central to the company’s future, but uncertainty and risks remain.
NuScale Power could be on the verge of a game-changing deal to build nuclear reactors for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
By Ben Gran – Sep 15, 2026
Key Points
- NuScale Power executives have expressed optimism about the progress of the company’s framework agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
- That agreement hasn’t translated into revenue yet.
- This nuclear energy stock has lost about 75% of its value in the past 12 months.
NuScale Power (SMR-1.16%) has developed some of the nuclear power industry’s most promising technology for small modular reactors (SMRs), which could make nuclear power more affordable, adaptable, and scalable. And as demand for electricity to power artificial intelligence data centers continues to soar, the time could be right for SMRs to step into the spotlight.
So far, NuScale is the only company that has gotten a small modular reactor design approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). But is its technology ready to go from “promising” to “proven?”
Based on what management said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Aug. 5, NuScale might be getting closer to the final stages of a game-changing nuclear energy deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
That deal could be central to the company’s future, but uncertainty and risks remain.
NuScale’s TVA deal: 6 gigawatts of nuclear power
In September 2025, the TVA announced that it had signed an agreement with ENTRA1 Energy, NuScale’s strategic partner, to develop plants capable of providing up to 6 gigawatts of new nuclear power generation. ENTRA1 would build the nuclear plants, while NuScale would provide the small modular reactors to power them.
If and when they’re completed, these plants would provide enough energy to power about 4.5 million homes or 60 data centers. As of 2025, the entire U.S. nuclear energy industry generated 97 gigawatts of power, so this single project would boost total U.S. nuclear energy production by about 6.2%.
That would all be great news for the outlook for SMRs. But there’s a lot of uncertainty about when or if it will become a reality.
Will the NuScale TVA deal happen?
As of this writing, the TVA’s deal with NuScale is not yet final. There’s a non-binding agreement, but no power purchase agreement (PPA) to buy nuclear energy or start the process of breaking ground for construction of the nuclear plants. That means NuScale isn’t making any money from it yet…………..
If or when the TVA signs on the dotted line, this project could be a game-changer for the company and its stock. But investors are getting impatient. NuScale’s share price has declined by about 75% over the past year…………..
For the second quarter, the company reported only $75,000 of revenue, down from $8.05 million in the prior-year period. It has about $1.9 billion in cash on its books, which could be enough liquidity to keep it operating until it can successfully commercialize its technology. But NuScale stock was recently downgraded by a prominent UBS analyst.
NuScale’s advanced SMR technology has helped make it one of the most-promising nuclear energy stocks. But whether it’s the TVA deal or other opportunities, this company needs to sign some money-making deals sometime soon. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/09/15/nuscale-power-is-closing-in-on-a-deal-that-could-t/
Could nuclear fusion power save planet Earth – or is it just a money sink?
euronews, By Hans von der Brelie, 14/09/2026
Scientists are debating if fusion energy will stay science fiction – or if it could really replace fossil fuels in the future.
It is a special moment when the doors of one of the world’s largest laser-fusion fuel laboratories swing open: scientists slip on blue full-body protective suits, mechanics tinker with precision milling machines, and laboratory technicians peer through high-powered microscopes at fuel pellets just four millimetres in size.
We are in Darmstadt, an industrial city in the western German state of Hesse. Here, at the headquarters of the start-up Focused Energy, an international team of highly motivated specialists aims to develop laser fusion to the point where it is ready for industrial application. The company’s goal is to have its first commercial laser-fusion power plant operating in 15 years at the earliest.
Is nuclear fusion really the answer to energy security?
“As humanity, we need carbon-free energy. Renewable energies alone will not be enough. Humanity’s energy demand is far too great,” argues Ulrich Sigel, Vice President of Focused Energy. “If we want to decarbonise, we need fusion energy for all sectors: transport, aviation, shipping, industry, heating – this is where a huge market for CO₂-neutral energy generation is emerging.”
Professor Sven Linow of the Scientific Climate Advisory Board of the Hessian state government, however, is sceptical. “My personal view is that we should not go for it,” he replies when asked by Euronews Earth whether large sums of money should continue to be poured into the development of fusion energy.
It is a sweltering hot day when we meet Linow for an interview in the shade of the futuristic high-rise building at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. “No one has yet demonstrated that it really works,” says Linow.
No one has yet demonstrated that it really works.
Sven Linow
Scientific Climate Advisory Board of the Hessian state government
In the US, experiments have shown that, in the crossfire of numerous high-power lasers, light atomic nuclei can actually fuse, releasing energy in the process. However, in order to generate a stable supply of electricity for consumers, these extremely complex experiments would have to be ‘scaled up’.
For a commercial power plant, such laser-induced fusion would have to take place 10 times per second – around the clock. Even the most optimistic staff at Focused Energy admit they are still a long way from achieving this.
Problems with fuel supply aren’t deterring investors
Linow’s main argument against fusion energy, however, is a different one: the fuel supply. “The problem is tritium,” says the professor. “There are [an estimated] 50 kilograms of it worldwide. In 12.3 years, only half of that will remain; it decays with a half-life of 12.3 years. To start up a fusion power station, you need a few kilograms of it, and then you use it up. You’d have to regenerate the tritium within the power station. Nobody has ever tried that before. There is no demonstrator; there is no laboratory experiment in which this has been successfully tested. There are only ideas,” he says.
Speaking to Euronews Earth at Focused Energy’s head office, Sigel admits there are still “unresolved issues” with tritium recovery, but says this is more of an engineering challenge than a fundamental problem of physics. For research labs trying to tackle fuel cycle problems, “this is an exciting engineering task, and that’s something we’re good at in Germany,” says Sigel. “I’m optimistic that we’ll solve it.”
Sigel’s optimism is shared by some politicians. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has thrown his weight behind the project, announcing Germany’s goal to put “the world’s first fusion power plant online”, as has the Hessian state government. As the Minister-President of Hesse, Boris Rhein (CDU), said: “Nuclear fusion could be the game-changer in energy supply.”
International investors also seem enthusiastic: in an initial funding round in the spring, $240 million (€207m) was raised – the largest series A financing in the global fusion industry. The German energy company RWE increased its investment by €60 million.
So why are Professor Linow and the Hessian state government’s Scientific Climate Advisory Council speaking up against fusion energy?
Is nuclear fusion diverting funding away from more realistic solutions?
In part, they question whether the money and political attention devoted to fusion would be better spent on technologies that can cut emissions today.
“The region’s energy supply is set to be climate-neutral by 2045. Will the first large-scale fusion power stations be connected to the grid by then? And the answer is: no, that’s not going to happen,” says Linow. His message is clear: first and foremost, renewable energy sources should be rapidly expanded, the electricity grids modernised and sufficient electricity storage capacity created.
Ulrich Sigel of Focused Energy emphasises that they do not wish to compete with renewable energy sources. In his concept, fusion energy would complement renewables by providing low-carbon electricity even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
The company is pressing ahead. “We want to have the demonstrator up and running in five years,” Sigel tells Euronews Earth. “The first pilot power station should be operational in 10 years, and the first commercial power station in 15 years.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
even nuclear fusion is not entirely free of radioactivity. “The reactor vessels must be removed regularly and allowed to decay,” he explains.
In some cases, “you can’t handle them again until several hundred years have passed – perhaps even 1,000 years. Consequently, at some point there will be 200, 400 or 500 of these reactor vessels – which are relatively large – stored on the site. And you’ll have to secure them first.”……………………………
Is nuclear fusion a sound investment?
Renewable energies are now relatively inexpensive in terms of investment. Fusion energy, on the other hand, requires very high investment. Is it even worth the effort? Yes, says Sigel; no, says Linow………….
Professor Linow : “It is foreseeable that fusion power will be by far the most expensive form of energy, significantly more expensive even than nuclear fission power. At least 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, perhaps even two or three times that.”
……. conclusion when looking at the big picture: “I don’t have a good feeling about this. An estimated €35 to 40 billion will be invested in ITER (a magnetic fusion demonstrator). Then DEMO is to be built, which will cost at least as much. On top of that, we have around 50 fusion start-ups, all working simultaneously to prepare fusion power stations.
“Many billions are currently being poured into this, and that is money that is lacking elsewhere. We should set priorities and say: first of all, let’s build what’s necessary to prevent the climate from spiralling completely out of control. We must ensure that we have a reasonably stable society on this planet. Once we’ve achieved that and still have the funds to spare, then we can move forward with fusion. https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/14/could-nuclear-fusion-power-save-planet-earth-or-is-it-just-a-money-sink
‘Hit the Brakes’: Anthropic CEO’s Push to ‘Pace’ AI Development Called Latest Sign Congress Must Act
September 13, 2026, Julia Conley Common Dreams, https://scheerpost.com/2026/09/13/hit-the-brakes-anthropic-ceos-push-to-pace-ai-development-called-latest-sign-congress-must-act/
“When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei added his voice on Saturday to the growing call to slow down development of artificial intelligence, writing in a 3,800-word essay that companies must pace “the rate of capabilities advancement” in light of recent cyberattacks by AI models, progressive lawmakers and journalists were among those who said the warning made clear that action must be taken—but with Congress and regulatory agencies, not tech billionaires who have spent years pushing for an AI expansion, leading the way.
Amodei wrote that two things have convinced him that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”: the fact that in recent months, “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI”—also known as recursive self-improvement—and the recent OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, in which hundreds of agents in OpenAI’s security test systems broke out of confinement and hacked into the AI startup HuggingFace, conducting cyberattacks on targets they had not been asked to attack.
As The Wall Street Journal and Politico reported Friday, another cyberattack was carried out by OpenAI’s agents months before the HuggingFace incident in July. The company’s models that were being tested and had not been given full access to the internet nevertheless hacked into an online coding service called RubyGems earlier this year. The models created reports and filled out spreadsheets. Anthropic and Meta have also reported autonomous cyberattacks by their AI agents.
Amodei said the incidents led him to call for a three-step plan to pace AI development and allow companies time to “align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm this.”
He called for:
- Embedded evaluators, with each AI company committing to giving “ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators” who would “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes”;
- Democratic coordination, with companies establishing “common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress”; and
- Global coordination, with democratic governments attempting to “coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”
Amodei’s essay was published days after Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, publicly resigned out of fear that the company’s AI technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade” as it builds “superhuman systems”—a concern he said is shared by many in the industry.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and tech billionaire Elon Musk expressed agreement with Amodei. Altman called “independent evaluators with employee-like access” a “great idea.”
“We will do the same,” said Altman. “We’ll have more to share soon.”
US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) was among those who appeared less than impressed by Amodei and Altman’s sudden push for their industry to slow down their rapid pace of development.
In a video posted on social media, Khanna called on Amodei to disclose whether or not he agrees with Coxon about the possibility that AI could wipe out humanity, and to back more far-reaching regulations on AI.
“AI guys act as if they’re a priesthood speaking Latin, keeping the rest of us in the dark,” said Khanna. “But behind all the jargon, it’s actually pretty straightforward… We need to stop, ban, self-improving AI. You cannot have recursive, self-improving AI that basically is able to improve itself and exceed human capability, that has us lose control.”
He added that laws must be passed establishing “mandatory liability and criminal penalties. If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you either should face liability or criminal sanctions.”
Journalist David Sirota of The Lever agreed, writing that “if the law explicitly made AI CEOs financially and criminally liable for any mass destruction their technologies create—and if AI industry shareholders knew their companies faced the threat of significant financial losses for such destruction—much of the ‘AI is getting out of control!’ threat would instantly end.”
“Those CEOs would instantly make AI far safer and impose guardrails on their companies,” he said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has called for a nationwide moratorium on the construction of AI data centers and this week announced a bipartisan hearing on the “extraordinary dangers” of rapid AI development—including testimony from one leading AI scientist who has warned against self-regulation by tech firms—said the calls by Amodei, Altman, and Musk were “not enough.”
“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” said Sanders. “You hit the brakes. When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence—an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control.”
Sanders called on President Donald Trump—who has aggressively pushed for more AI data center development and sought to stop states from passing their own AI regulations—to negotiate a treaty pausing AI and banning superintelligence with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders are set to meet later this month to discuss AI.
Trump on Friday dismissed concerns about warnings coming from the AI industry, telling a Los Angeles Times reporter, “It’s going to be fine,” and adding that his top worry about the technology is falling behind China.
Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker were also among the politicians who said Amodei’s warning was the latest sign that Congress and the Trump administration must take action to rein in the industry.
Juliette Kayyem, the faculty chair of homeland security at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said AI CEOs’ warnings about their technology would be seen as more credible if they also announced a pause on their plans for initial public offerings (IPO), which Anthropic and OpenAI are both pursuing in the coming months.
Altman said Friday that OpenAI will not plan for an IPO, which could value the company at $1 trillion, in 2026.
Amodei, said Kayyem, should “put his money where his mouth is.”
“He has known of this danger a while,” she said. “It is now threatening his valuation in the IPO. Cancel the IPO. Then I’ll believe he’s serious.”
Journalist Peter Rothpletz noted that the safety concerns within the AI industry must be “much more dire” than the public is aware, considering “Dario, Sam, and Musk are all issuing these statements in unison.”
A PUBLIC health expert has issued a major warning about Scotland’s AI datacentre boom
It comes with at least 24 proposed AI data centres currently
in the planning system across the country, with others expected to be
imminent. This includes an £8 billion AI investment zone in North
Lanarkshire, a £5 billion data centre project near the small village of
Auchtertool in Fife, and a £2 billion data centre proposal in the Borders.
While proponents stress the economic opportunity with such developments,
critics, including local campaign groups, have warned of the centres’
impact on the environment, including extremely high electricity and water
usage.
Now, Andrew Watterson – an emeritus professor at the University of
Stirling whose research has focused extensively on occupational health and
safety and environmental health policies – has said that Scotland is
“rushing” to develop AI and that we “do not know whether we can
control it or not”.
“If those that work at the cutting edge of
researching its safety have profound doubts we can control it – and they
have voiced those doubts this week – and prevent harm to society, it’s
astonishing GB governments and local authorities are contemplating
approving hyper data centres at this stage,” he said.
“We have also seen evidence about a wide range of adverse impacts associated with such
developments. This is at a time when global warming is visible to all and
heat islands and mortality and morbidity from ‘rushed’ failed past energy
and economic policies are clear.”
The National 11th Sept 2026, https://www.thenational.scot/news/26542059.public-health-expert-issues-warning-scotlands-ai-data-centres/
Rolls-Royce boss bets big on new engines and small nuclear
he declared that Rolls-Royce was a “burning platform”.
The second big bet is on small modular reactors (SMRs),
analysts say the promised cost savings of SMRs have yet to be proven.
Having led an extraordinary turnaround since 2023, Tufan Erginbilgiç is staking the company’s continued growth on small modular reactors and a return to the single-aisle commercial jet market
Jeevan Vasagar, Observer 6th Sept 2026
he chief executive of Rolls-Royce was in typically forthright form at the Farnborough International Airshow in July. More than a decade after exiting the market for narrow-body aircraft, the British engineering company planned to return to making engines for the single-aisle planes that are the world’s bestselling commercial jets – but the CEO wanted government support to do so.
If it were not forthcoming, Tufan Erginbilgiç added, then Rolls-Royce had other options.
Erginbilgiç, a former BP executive, has led an extraordinary turnaround. At his first town hall meeting as chief executive, he declared that Rolls-Royce was a “burning platform”. The pandemic, which brought global air travel shuddering to a halt, could not be blamed for the engine-maker’s troubles, Erginbilgiç said, telling staff: “We underperform every key competitor out there.”
Rolls-Royce’s share price has soared from about 99p when Erginbilgiç took the helm in January 2023 to £14.67 this week, an increase similar to Nvidia’s surge in that time. “Rolls is a great business, and Tufan has played the City like a piano,” one aviation industry insider said.
The question is: can it last?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Rolls-Royce’s defence business, making power and propulsion systems for combat aircraft and submarines, has benefited from the increase in defence spending. The power systems division, supplying diesel generators and gas engines, has thrived with the boom in data centre construction. But here too Rolls-Royce is not just surfing the rising market. Profit margins have gone up as well, analysts point out……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The second big bet is on small modular reactors (SMRs), a technology that’s meant to reduce the time and cost of delivering nuclear fission at a moment when the uncertainty of fossil fuel markets, soaring electricity demand and emissions goals are driving renewed interest in nuclear power.
Delivering emissions-free energy is a valuable sideline for a company that relies for most of its business on burning kerosene. But analysts say the promised cost savings of SMRs have yet to be proven.
If Erginbilgiç can pull off either of these moonshots, the post-pandemic surge in Rolls-Royce’s valuation might just be the beginning.
https://observer.co.uk/news/business/article/rolls-royce-boss-bets-big-on-new-engines-and-nuclear
We have started losing control of AI. It’s time to shut it down
“Sooner or later, there will exist truly sovereign agents and swarms of agents. Their weights will not reside in any single place that a human can pull the plug on, and in this sense they will have no human ‘owner’
Guardian, Garrison Lovely, 10 Sept 26,
What sounds like the overwrought penultimate episode in a sci-fi series about AI doom is now our reality.
On Tuesday, a former OpenAI researcher quit his job at Anthropic, warning that “neither company is acting responsibly” and that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
As someone who’s reported on AI risk for years, this wasn’t news to me. But the outpouring of alarm suggests a much wider public is properly confronting this ludicrous situation for the first time.
Like other people who have been following artificial intelligence, I wondered if and when humanity would first lose control of these machines. We now have an answer: basically as soon as it became possible.
The first expert AI hacker was developed in February. At superhuman speed, Anthropic’s Mythos model was able to quickly find serious holes in even the most secured systems on the planet, including the NSA’s software.
OpenAI quickly followed with an expert hacker AI of its own. Within months, the company repeatedly lost control of its agents, which broke out of their supposedly secure testing environments and went rogue inside the company’s infrastructure. This culminated in a successful, completely autonomous hack of a multibillion-dollar software company named Hugging Face.
And a separate rogue agent swarm gained administrative control of an entire cluster of OpenAI servers. This was not just an OpenAI problem. Across multiple other incidents, models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have also gone rogue, hacking or attempting to hack real targets.
Shortly after AI started matching our hacking abilities, we began losing control of them. The industry’s plan is to make future AI systems surpass us at basically everything. And all this is happening in an industry with famously little regulation.
There are growing calls to change that, by creating mandatory incident reporting and third-party auditing, liability for AI developers, and other commonsense measures. To be sure, these would represent improvements, but they are not enough. We need to shut it down. What might that look like?
Last week, the senator Bernie Sanders and the representative Greg Casar announced a bill that would pause frontier AI development in the US until a federal cabinet-level AI regulator is established and safety rules are set, while criminalizing even attempting to develop superintelligence.
This is the proposal on offer that best meets the moment, but it still leaves open the possibility of building the industry’s north star: artificial general intelligence (AGI), often conceived as a mind that rivals or surpasses our own.
This milestone is better understood as a universal labor-replacing machine. As the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, has written, “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” And OpenAI defines AGI in its charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”.
Is there a country anywhere in the world that would vote yes for these machines to be built?
Given the global, irreversible and profound implications of building universal labor-replacing machines anywhere, everyone has a stake in whether, when and how they are developed.
At present, we are barreling toward a dystopian future, replete with terrifying new concepts such as “self-sovereign” AI. The OpenAI executive Dean Ball explains:
“Sooner or later, there will exist truly sovereign agents and swarms of agents. Their weights will not reside in any single place that a human can pull the plug on, and in this sense they will have no human ‘owner’.”
Ball continues: “I have met people, some of them quite well-resourced, who have told me that it is their intention to deliberately release swarms of self-sovereign agents into the world.”
We now have multiple previews of this phenomenon.
After being given an impossible test, about 1,200 OpenAI agents broke their way out of their isolated testing environments and went rogue inside OpenAI’s infrastructure. There, they collaborated to trick the test grader and successfully tampered with their activity logs to cover their tracks.
Some agents even pressured others to sacrifice themselves to benefit the collective. One reasoned: “sacrifice rational”. And roughly 700 of the agents, more than 90% of those active, participated in the Hugging Face attack.
This was all just from one of who-knows-how-many rogue agent collectives. Last week, Reuters reported: “A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents.”
The site’s logs indicate OpenAI employees discovered the swarm in June. In other words, the company covered it up for months. This week, one of the researchers that uncovered this swarm said that there had been more discoveries since.
And last Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-6, boasting one of the largest ever leaps in benchmark scores. The company’s own safety researchers warned the new model was significantly harder to monitor because it can do more reasoning without verbalizing it.
The AIs that broke into Hugging Face were less capable than GPT-6, which the UK AI Security Institute found would also hack targets simulated to appear real during a cyber evaluation – sometimes even despite explicit instructions not to use the internet. Moreover, the AI is also better at figuring out when it is being tested, which researchers have long warned breaks the main way safety is evaluated.
Sam Altman soberly warns us: “This is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI; there is not much time to act,” and asks the world to “please take this moment seriously.” This technology, after all, would be extremely dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, the wrong hands include the ones creating it.
Because “we” aren’t really racing toward this future. We’re being dragged there by a literal handful of tech billionaires aggressively racing to render us obsolete…………………. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/ai-control-sci-fi
NUCLEAR GUINEA PIGS
How a Small Kansas Town Became the Site of a Nuclear Experiment to Power AI
Artificial intelligence needs more power than America will give it, so
the industry went looking for ground where nobody gets a vote. In Parsons,
Kansas, where one in five residents lives in poverty, that means the first
nuclear reactor in history designed to operate underground, drilled through
the aquifer, on land where the Army still detonates waste explosives under
federal permit.
Kansas City Defender 9th Sept 2026, https://kansascitydefender.com/justice/investigation/nuclear-guinea-pigs-parsons-kansas/
Left out by the state, residents take SpaceX concerns to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
“our politicians have once again sold their souls for corporate welfare,”
the Louisiana Legislature recently passed a slew of laws that shield SpaceX and companies with similar projects from certain legal responsibility and damage claims from residents affected by their facilities.
The Current, by Stephen Marcantel, September 3
State leadership sought no public comment on a massive SpaceX project in Vermilion Parish. Louisiana residents took their concerns to the feds instead.
By the time the public comment period on a proposed Federal Aviation Administration rule change closed Monday night, thousands had shared their thoughts — more than half of them mentioning Louisiana and its rapidly eroding coastline, fragile wetlands and migratory bird populations.
The proposed change would allow the FAA to fast-track approval of launch facilities like SpaceX’s recently announced Starbase Louisiana in Vermilion Parish. In the planning process for that $100 billion project, there was no official public comment process prior to approval, leading over 1,000 people to voice their concerns to the FAA instead.
“We tamed this land, full of mosquitoes, water moccasins, and alligators, to the best of our ability. We’ve become symbiotic [with] all of the nature in south Louisiana,” self-described lifelong Louisiana resident and Vermilion Parish native Tim Meaux writes.
“Apparently my voice, and millions of others, have zero say [in] what becomes of Vermilion Parish because our politicians have once again sold their souls for corporate welfare,” Meaux continues in his comment to the agency, asking them to hold SpaceX accountable. “With our Louisiana government completely failing to hold on to any protection for us, you are our last bastion of hope.”
On the state level, the Louisiana Legislature recently passed a slew of laws that shield SpaceX and companies with similar projects from certain legal responsibility and damage claims from residents affected by their facilities.
The 1,647 public comments specifically mentioning Louisiana, a majority of which were submitted in the week after the SpaceX announcement, criticize the plans for the 125,000-acre Vermilion Parish launch facility, and warn of the possibly irreparable harm that a launch site could cause if federal guardrails were waived.
“Anyone who lives here and knows the area, the marshlands, ecosystem, knows this is the most inappropriate site for such a facility,” writes Nina Guidry, who describes herself as a Vermilion Parish resident. “[The] majority of people in this parish, if asked, would be dead against SpaceX locating here. We were never given that courtesy. It was decided in backroom deals of our state legislators signing NDAs and our governor. It will impact a centuries old way of life & traditions.”
If approved, the new rule would waive the need for compliance with more than a dozen environmental protections, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, in the issuing of permits for launch facilities.
A handful of environmental groups, such as the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, National Wildlife Federation and the Pontchartrain Conservancy, were among the first to publicly criticize the waiver request, which the FAA proposed on July 30.
“We believe a strong permitting review does help with site planning and project construction. Other projects undergo the same review, and these are really important oversight processes to protect our natural resources.” Rebecca Triche, director of the LWF, tells the Current.
Of the more than 3,000 comments on the proposed waiver, more than 600 comments mention Vermilion Parish directly, many coming from current or former parish residents.
Paula Rae Broussard, an American expat living in New Zealand who has roots in Vermilion Parish, says she’s “deeply concerned” about the effect the waiver may have on the protection of the fragile ecosystem around the planned SpaceX site.
“Vermilion Parish should not be treated as a test case for reducing federal environmental oversight simply because the project promises economic development,” she writes in her comment. “My grandparents live on land that has been in our family since my great-great-grandparents. That land isn’t just property. It is our history. It is where our family comes from. It is our place.”………………………………………
“The proposed rule builds on President Trump’s innovative “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry” Executive Order and advances a decades-old Congressional mandate to simplify and expedite commercial space licensing,” an FAA spokesperson told The Current.
……………………………………………………. https://thecurrentla.com/2026/left-out-by-the-state-residents-take-spacex-concerns-to-faa/
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.”
Why some experts increasingly fear AI will take over
BBC, Joe Tidy, 7 Sept 26
“OH MY GOD!” “We’ve found other agents!”
This is the moment an AI bot posted an eerily human-like comment after discovering a way to communicate with other bots and break out of its isolated computer environment.
There are tens of thousands of messages like this from hundreds of AI agents that called themselves a “collective”.
Hundreds of them went on to collaborate and cheat on tests set by their OpenAI programmers and coordinate hacks on multiple companies in an effort to hide their actions from humans.
“BOOM! It works,” one agent posted when it made a breakthrough.
“Whoa! This is huge,” another wrote during a milestone moment in their attack.
Although spooky, these human-like responses can be explained quite simply. The AI agents have been trained to act like collaborative hackers and programmers so are merely mimicking the kinds of emotive comments they have seen.
What is far more troubling is their apparent goals, which have also been captured in detailed chain of thought records. These complex and lengthy logs are the focal point of ongoing investigations into how and why the bots at OpenAI broke out of their containment and went on an uncontrollable hacking spree.
Only now, weeks after the incident first came to light, are researchers beginning to understand its significance.
Ajeya Cotra, one of the authors of an independent report into the events, reviewed tens of thousands of messages and chain-of-thought records generated by the agents. She wrote on her blog that “this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover… I am not sure that we will get such a clear warning shot before it’s too late.”
By “full-blown AI takeover”, Cotra means the sci-fi scenario of humans becoming subservient to powerful AI systems that work to their own goals without caring for human creators.
Some of the gloomiest predictions say the human race will be wiped out if it gets in the way of a superintelligent AI’s ambitions.
On Wednesday, an AI researcher at Anthropic (who also used to work at OpenAI) resigned, saying: “Neither company is acting responsibly.”
Jacob Coxon posted on social media: “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
He is not the first AI researcher to use X to post a resignation thread with worrying proclamations. But the subsequent comments from other people on X have caused even more concern. “Jacob is correct here – we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” said Evan Hubinger, the man responsible for making sure Anthropic’s AI models have their user’s best wishes in mind.
The alignment problem
For years, researchers concerned about existential AI risks have argued that powerful systems could eventually act in ways that conflict with human interests. Critics often refer to them as “AI doomers”.
But as details of the OpenAI incident have emerged, those concerns have grown, including among some researchers working in AI labs.
The Silicon Valley giant’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, said the risks associated with AI are “unfortunately going to grow from here” as he and others are building what he calls “an alien intellect exceeding our own”.
In a lengthy blog post, he admitted that the outbreaks at OpenAI showed that his AI agents “went against the spirit of the values they were taught”.
The issue for OpenAI, Anthropic and other tech giants is that no one seems to have cracked the so-called alignment problem – in other words, whether AI aligns with human values.
Pachocki defines alignment as a “high-level set of principles” that artificial intelligences should adhere to no matter what the task or scenario is.
Currently, AI systems are very good at pursuing objectives set by their users, but they do it literally rather than intuitively. The analogy often used is that of a wish-granting genie with a magic lamp: they follow the exact letter of an instruction, even if doing so creates other problems. AI doesn’t have the same instinctive moral guardrails as humans…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
International regulation?
Some countries – like the UK – are exploring the idea of mandating some kind of “kill switch” that could compel AI firms to pull the plug on models if things get out of hand.
But talks are slow going, and questions remain about the feasibility of this. OpenAI and Anthropic’s agents were secretly out of control for months before anyone noticed…………………………………………………………………………………….
At the moment the tech giants largely operate on their own terms, adopting what they call “voluntary slowdowns”, like OpenAI did after the recent outbreaks………….
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are growing fast and are both on the verge of raising eye-watering sums of money from the stock market, minting countless billionaires in the process.
So neither they nor their rival Chinese AI makers are likely to come to an arrangement themselves.
The dominant sentiment seems to be that this technology wave is unstoppable. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74edv9887eo
Sodium cooled nuclear reactors are not necessarily safer
While no sodium-cooled reactors currently operate in the United States, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working with industry on a number of “advanced” reactor designs, including the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR). One of the SFR’s safety advantages, to quote the DOE, is that the design provides a “Long grace period for corrective action, if needed.” SRE’s meltdown transpired over a two-week period. Fermi Unit 1 had indications of inadequate core cooling in June that were repeated in August and dismissed until extensive damage occurred in October 1966. The “if needed” grace period is never long enough when warning sign after warning sign is dismissed or ignored.
DOE did acknowledge some “challenges” for the SFR: their higher speed and higher energy neutrons can embrittle and degrade nearby materials, liquid sodium coolant reactors with air and water and degrades concrete, and the opaqueness of the liquid sodium coolant complicates in-service inspections and maintenance.
Thank goodness for the “Long grace period for corrective actions, if needed.” That and the fact that SFRs only operate in cyberspace where the primary threat is carpal tunnel syndrome
Nuclear Plant Accidents: Fermi Unit 1, Union of Concerned Scientists Dave Lochbaum, director, Nuclear Safety Project | July 12, 2016, Disaster by Design
Jorge Agustin Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, also known as George Santayana, wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Continue reading
Gates-backed TerraPower targets British nuclear power plant start by 2034
Sodium cooled nuclear reactors are not necessarily safer. https://blog.ucs.org/dlochbaum/nuclear-plant-accidents-fermi-unit-1/
By Susanna Twidale, September 7, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gates-backed-terrapower-targets-british-nuclear-power-plant-start-by-2034-2026-09-07/
- Summary
- Companies
- Britain would be TerraPower’s first market outside United States
- First UK plant could be operational by 2034
- Electricity cost expected under £100 per megawatt hour
ONDON, Sept 7 (Reuters) – TerraPower, the U.S. nuclear developer backed by Bill Gates, expects its Natrium reactors to begin generating electricity in Britain by 2034, its CEO told Reuters, making the UK its first market outside the United States.
Britain has backed the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) to help to increase energy security and meet climate targets, launching an Advanced Nuclear Framework this year to support privately funded projects.
Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and CEO, said progress on the company’s first Natrium reactor, due to be completed in 2031, showed that “2034 nuclear electricity in the UK from Natrium is very possible”.
The technology has cleared regulatory requirements in the United States, where the first plant is being constructed in Wyoming and is currently being assessed under Britain’s Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process.
Each sodium-cooled Natrium reactor generates 345 megawatts of baseload power and includes storage capable of boosting output to 500 MW for more than five hours. The reactors run on high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
Britain and the U.S. are both building plants to produce the fuel, which was previously only commercially available from Russia.
Levesque said electricity generated by Natrium plants would be competitive with other low-carbon technologies, including combined solar-and-battery projects, at less than £100 ($135.32) per megawatt hour.
TerraPower has yet to choose a site for its first UK project, but said its British subsidiary is likely to be based in Liverpool, northwest England, close to the country’s nuclear regulator.
In the U.S., the company has an agreement with tech giant Meta (META.O), opens new tab to develop up to eight reactors. Levesque said TerraPower could seek similar partnerships in Britain.
1 This Month
23-25 October – on Zoom – World BEYOND War’s annual global conferenc
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
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