Beyond Nuclear International
The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked
Politicians who push small reactors raise false hopes that splitting atoms can make a real dent in the climate crisis, writes Andrew Nikiforuk in the Tyee
Premier Danielle Smith proposes that nuclear power could be “Alberta’s next energy frontier.” To that end, she recently created a “nuclear engagement survey panel” to figure out how to propel economic growth in her province.
According to Smith, nuclear generators will not only help power scores of artificial-intelligence data centres in rural Alberta but also help to double oil production from the oilsands.
The promise of nuclear power “means affordable power, reliable supply and low emissions that strengthen our grid while fuelling growth,” said the premier. “It means new jobs and opportunities for Alberta workers and communities.”
The province is specifically betting on small modular reactors, or SMRs, because they, as a United Conservative Party release put it, “have the potential to supply heat and power to the oilsands, simultaneously reducing emissions and supporting Alberta’s energy future.”
Smith’s government has already given the oilsands giant Cenovus Energy $7 million to study the matter.
Smith isn’t the only premier with nuclear ambitions. New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Ontario all think the future lies in splitting atoms. Prime Minister Mark Carney has thrown the weight of the federal government behind Ontario’s Darlington New Nuclear Project. So far the feds have invested nearly $1 billion to advance this experimental small modular reactor.
Read MoreAll the president’s yes-men?
The NRC commission looks poised to rubber-stamp “Cowboy Chernobyl”, write Paul Gunter and Linda Pentz Gunter
Donald Trump loves a yes-man. What we are now waiting to learn is just how many of those yes-men are sitting on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The agency was ordered late last year by the then White House and Elon Musk-created US Department of Government Efficiency, to effectively accelerate and “rubber stamp” reactor license approvals in order to fulfill the White House’s reckless directive, contained in four executive orders issued last May, to license new reactors at lighting speed.
On December 1, the NRC proudly announced that its staff had completed their final safety evaluation for the Bill Gates company TerraPower’s small modular reactor design in record time, in keeping with the make haste mandate from the White House. The NRC staff had concluded that “there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing the construction permit.”
Jeremy Groom, acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, even bragged how the NRC staff “finished our technical work on the Kemmerer review a month ahead of our already accelerated schedule, as we aim to make licensing decisions for new, advanced reactors in no more than 18 months.”
What we are now waiting to find out, likely sometime this month, is whether the five NRC commissioners will indeed grant a construction license to a patently dangerous reactor design (we are using the term “dangerous” here under their own definition since all of us already know that every nuclear reactor design is inherently dangerous and the so-called new ones haven’t changed that reality.)
Who will be calling those shots, however, has now been significantly reshuffled by the Trump administration.
Read MoreNavajo lands at risk
New proposal is extraction not remediation, warns the Navajo group, Dooda Disa
More than 500 abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) contaminate the Navajo Nation, and genuine cleanup is urgently needed. But cleanup must be grounded in strict environmental oversight, transparency, and full community consultation. A proposal now being advanced by Navajo Nation EPA (NNEPA) Executive Director Stephen Etsitty, in partnership with DISA Technologies, is being marketed as AUM remediation when DISA’s High-Pressure Slurry Ablation (HPSA) system does not clean up Navajo land—it extracts uranium for commercial sale while leaving radioactive waste behind.
Etsitty told the Albuquerque Journal he was “really excited” that the process could “accelerate the cleanup” and said “the Navajo Nation is investing roughly $3 million” in a commercial-scale test —all of which is misleading. Even calling HPSA “remediation” is whitewashing, because the technology is strictly a uranium-extraction process.
On January 6, 2025, he introduced Resolution ENAC-12-2025-049 at the Eastern Navajo Agency Council (6) that asks the Navajo Nation to enter into a commercial partnership with DISA in order to apply for DOE critical-minerals grants—an extraction initiative, not a cleanup program. It provides no site information, no environmental safeguards, and no cost details, yet seeks approval for a commercial partnership structured around uranium extraction rather than cleanup.
The Truth About DISA and HPSA
In 2023, the EPA commissioned Tetra Tech to test HPSA on waste from three Navajo AUM sites: Old Church Rock Mine (OCRM), Quivira Church Rock-1, and the Cove Transfer Station (CTS-2). Over two weeks, small batches of contaminated waste were run through a pilot-scale HPSA unit. The system blasts rock with high-pressure water to create slurry, then separates it into a coarse fraction and a fines fraction. The fines—about 17% of the material—contain 80–95% of the uranium and radium that DISA intends to ship to the White Mesa Mill and sell to Energy Fuels. The coarse fraction is waste that remains radioactive and may be left onsite, buried, or sent to a disposal site that does not exist.
Read MoreTime for a course correction?
M.V. Ramana warns that the nuclear threat does not hold the power to mobilize people as it once did
Ever since the world learnt of nuclear weapons in 1945 following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the necessity of abolishing them has been widely recognized, starting with the very first resolution of the United Nations. People around the world have worked to eliminate the nuclear threat since then.
The capacity for mass destruction has grown manifold since 1945 and is possessed by many more countries. Between them, nuclear weapon states possess close to 10,000 nuclear weapons and have invested in efforts to assure that these weapons remain destructive and usable. Threats to use nuclear weapons have been bandied about with regularity, including by Russian officials and Israeli officials. U.S. President Donald Trump has called for resuming nuclear weapons testing. Countries are also trying to expand nuclear energy, which would increase the capacity of countries to make nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are not the only way states can kill people. These weapons, as peace activist Ray Acheson has argued, “are part of the spectrum of institutionalized violence” and operate “at the intersection of patriarchal, racist, colonial, and capitalist oppressions”. To indulge in a pun, we should not confine nuclear disarmament to its own silo.
On this spectrum of state violence are militaries and the weapons they wield. States are continuously expanding the capacity to engage in militarized violence. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure in 2024 reached US$2.7 trillion, “completing a full decade of consecutive annual rises” with “more than 100 countries” increasing their military expenditures.
Even as one might trace these increased expenditures to specific events—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are examples—there is also continuity. As the historian E. P. Thompson argued in response to the military buildup under U.S. President Reagan: “The long waves of the armourers do not move in phase with the waves of diplomatic confrontation. Each international crisis legitimates the process, and strengthens the upswing”.
Read MoreTrump regulators ripped
Rushed approval of Bill Gates’ reactor comes with risks, writes Brett Wilkins with Common Dreams
A leading nuclear safety expert has sounded the alarm over the Trump administration’s expedited safety review of an experimental nuclear reactor in Wyoming designed by a company co-founded by tech billionaire Bill Gates and derided as a “Cowboy Chernobyl.”
On December 1, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it has “completed its final safety evaluation” for Power Station Unit 1 of TerraPower’s Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, adding that it found “no safety aspects that would preclude issuing the construction permit.”
Co-founded by Microsoft’s Gates, TerraPower received a 50-50 cost-share grant for up to $2 billion from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The 345-megawatt sodium-cooled small modular reactor (SMR) relies upon so-called passive safety features that experts argue could potentially make nuclear accidents worse.
However, federal regulators “are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features,” according to Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear power safety director Edwin Lyman.
The reactor’s construction permit application—which was submitted in March 2024—was originally scheduled for August 2026 completion but was expedited amid political pressure from the Trump administration and Congress in order to comply with an 18-month timeline established in President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14300.
Read MoreThe SMR boom will soon go bust
Excessively hyped small modular reactors are living on borrowed time, writes Ben Kritz in The Manila Times
One sign that the excessively hyped concept of small modular reactors (SMRs) is now living on borrowed time is the lack of enthusiasm in the outlook from energy market analysts, whether they are individuals such as Leonard Hyman, William Tilles, and Vaclav Smil, or big firms such as JP Morgan and Jones Lang LaSalle. None of them are optimistic that the sector will be productive before the middle of next decade, and the more critical ones are already predicting that it will never be, and that the “SMR bubble” will burst before the end of this one. My frequent readers will already know that I stand firmly with the latter view; basic market logic, in fact, makes any other view impossible.
In a recent commentary for Oil Price.com, one of the rather large number of online energy market news and analysis outlets, Hyman and Tilles predicted that the SMR bubble will burst in 2029. They based this on the reasonable observation that power supply forecasts are typically done on a three- to five-year timeframe. The fleet of SMRs that are currently expected to be in service between 2030 and 2035 simply will not be there, so energy planners will at a minimum omit them from the next planning window, and might decide to forget about them entirely. Deals will dry up, investors will dump their stocks or stop putting venture capital into SMR developers, and those developers will find themselves bankrupt.
That is an entirely plausible and perhaps even likely scenario, but the SMR bubble may burst much sooner than that, perhaps even as soon as next year, because of the existence of the other tech bubble, artificial intelligence, or AI, an acronym that in my mind sounds like “as if.”
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