The Coming American Atomic Utopia

The Rebranding of Nuclear Power

A NUCLEAR ARMS PACT BETWEEN THE US AND RUSSIA ENDED last week, sparking a cluster of media fears about a new arms race. It struck me as a kind of collective, post-traumatic stress response from a threat long gone. The Cold War ended over three decades ago. Today, we’re in something of a new arms race with China for AI dominance. What’s at risk now is China’s digital authoritarianism gaining favor in the world against weakening western liberal democracies.

For about a decade, a fierce AI race has been underway between the US and China, today’s global “hegemons,” as Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada implied they were at Davos this January. That race began with AlphaGo’s advances (Google/DeepMind), which publicly accelerated in 2016. Some called this China’s Sputnik moment. Today, Russia and Europe are relative stragglers in today’s fast-paced AI sprint—and the argument that Big Tech and the US government are making loud and clear is that whichever power integrates AI into its economy quickest and best is expected to retain (US) or gain (China) global economic and ideological dominance.

In the US, a handful of Big Tech companies operate, train and develop the world’s leading foundational AI products. Those Big Tech companies need data centers to run the AI processing chips that perform inference calls (search queries), train models, and develop new AI products. These data centers need a great deal of electricity to operate. The best AI growth strategy Big Tech has right now is scaling computing power, which just means ‘doing more of what they’re doing now.’ To scale up data centers, they need to scale up electricity, too.

In the fall of 2024, when nuclear energy stocks hit record highs, Clay Sell, CEO of X-energy, a Maryland-based advanced nuclear reactor company, said, “The only constraint on the US remaining the leader in artificial intelligence is power. It’s not land, it’s not chips, it’s power.”

Big Tech needs more power than the US grid has. A lot more.

During the last three years, since ChatGPT went mainstream, spawning several rival models, including China’s DeepSeek R1, Big Tech has become closely aligned with the US government and its national interests to remain the leader in AI.

Right now, the US dominates the global energy market, including nuclear power generation. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s count, the US has 94 nuclear power reactors in operation, zero under construction, and 41 have been shut down. China is on a fast-track to catch up with 58 reactors in operation, 32 under construction, and none shut down.

Nuclear energy progress in the US came to a screeching halt in 1979, but it didn’t happen overnight. A long history of shock and fear around nuclear power began with the Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic age. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cultural and ethical shock. Quotidian fears of nuclear holocaust enervated us during the Cold War. The geopolitical complexity of enforcing deterrence and non-proliferation, too, were exhausting.

By 1979, nuclear trepidation reached a fever pitch with a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, which eerily coincided with the release of the movie, The China Syndrome, featuring a similar incident. The news coverage mixed scenes from the movie with commentators’ explanations, blurring fiction and reality. It seared terror into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which, in turn, burned through the country. The PBS documentary, “Meltdown at Three Mile Island,” featured the recollection of Victor Stello, an NRC engineer who was in the congregation of a Roman Catholic mass that Sunday. Folks were still in a panic, and the priest offered the entire congregation “general absolution. ‘This is a sacrament reserved when death is imminent,’” Stello said. The event and the media around it scared the nation nearly to death.

But it was nuclear power generation that died. The rules created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to follow were so time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, private investors simply sought easier projects that were more likely to profit while they were still alive—and projects they had more confidence wouldn’t kill anyone.

After Three Mile Island in 1979, not a single reactor in the US was approved for construction.

Then, in 1986, the accident at Chernobyl worsened anxieties. That the fall of the Soviet Union came fast on the disaster’s heels likely wasn’t lost on US leaders. The devastation and the USSR’s dishonorable cover-up were the last blows to its collapsing empire. In 2006, Gorbachev wrote, “ The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl ... even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the main cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse five years later.” If the United States wanted to retain its hard-won position as the primary global leader of a world favoring liberal democracy, it would need to tread very carefully around atomic power.

ENTER VOGTLE UNITS 3 AND 4, ATOMIC ENERGY’S NEXT NIGHTMARE. The new design for two units at the Vogtle plant in Waynesboro, Georgia, the Westinghouse AP-1000, was initially sent to the NRC in the spring of 2002. It took over a decade for the design to get official approval to break ground, which it finally did in 2013. Another ten years would pass before Unit 3 was ready to connect to the grid, with Unit 4 connecting a year later in 2024. The lengthy project went monumentally over budget and, in 2017, Westinghouse went bankrupt.

The NRC regulations kept changing while Vogtle 3 and 4 were trying to make progress, and it didn’t help that the energy sector ecosystem was anemic. Given the nuclear power economy had been stagnant since 1979, there was a dearth of both skilled workers and leadership with experience. There was no supply-chain infrastructure. Everything associated with Vogtle 3 and 4 had to be built from the ground up. They were reinventing the atomic wheel.

Passive safety was the new design’s key selling point. The AP-1000 could cool itself for about three days without human intervention or a power source. With the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl haunting the project, passive safety was integral for investors and the public. In 2009, mid-stride, or so they thought, the design had to undergo a major overhaul when the NRC suddenly decided to factor in the events of September 11th. Now the AP-1000 had to be able to withstand a direct hit from an airplane.

And then, in 2011, the Fukushima plant was hit by a tsunami.

The NRC’s final regulatory revisions for the two Vogtle AP-1000s arrived later that year.

After such a lengthy debacle, you’d think investors wouldn’t touch nuclear ever again.

Instead, there’s a nuclear renaissance.

ATOMIC ENERGY IS GETTING A BRAND OVERHAUL funded by Big Tech in alignment with the US government. A series of executive orders in May of last year were intended “to usher in an American nuclear renaissance,” wrote Michael Kratsios, White House chief advisor on science and technology. The objective is to reach the goal of expanding nuclear capacity four-fold, from 100GW to 400GW, by 2050. In August of last year, the Department of Energy’s “Reactor Pilot Program” selected eleven advanced nuclear reactor projects to be fast-tracked through NRC regulations in order for at least three small modular reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026.

Now, bright branding campaigns pitch the public anew on nuclear. It’s good for the economy, they say. It’s good for the creation of new jobs. And it’s carbon free!

In a Google branding video that finesses the image of a partnership between the tech firm, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Kairos Power, TVA’s CEO, Don Moul, tells us with steady confidence, “It’s not just good for Google, it’s good for TVA’s ten million customers—and it’s good for the United States.”

I’m fascinated by the palimpsest of history that flashes in my mind’s eye when I’m watching the bright, happy little videos hawking Google sustainability with Kairos in Tennessee—from the birth of the atomic age, to the legendary role of the city of Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project, to Kairos Power, the advanced nuclear energy company and its ties to the historic Ernest O. Lawrence lab at Berkeley, along with its partnership with the latest powerhouse of American innovation in science and tech, Google. None of that history, of course, is there.

The radical, rapid change to nuclear’s reputation—from its birth as Death, the Destroyer of Worlds to this carbon-free godsend of sweetness and light—is giving me whiplash. I grew up in the latter stages of the Cold War. As a kid, I knew where the nearest fallout shelters were. I remember Chernobyl and can sing “99 Luftballons” in the original German (a pop-song about the tragic nuclear holocaust in our future). I lived within miles of San Onofre, California, when one of the units at SONGS leaked radioactive contaminants into the air and water. When Fukushima melted down, the massive radioactive cloud crossed the ocean and hit the beach for a week where I ran every morning, breathing in deeply and hard. Edison and the NRC said it was fine, but was it? Is my suspicion about the new boosterism for nuclear just a post-traumatic stress response from an anti-nuclear era gone by?

To find out, next time, I’ll be diving in further into the history and hazards. What fears are overblown and which are legitimate? I’ll ask what the utopian narratives are leaving out that would be good for the energy sector (and all of us) to include. Because accidents happen. Wild weather events hit. Tectonic plates shift. And there’s the pesky reality of human nature to consider. Speed, greed and the tendency to sweep mishaps under the rug or lawyer up could be of concern when we’re talking about a massive expansion of hyperscale data centers powered by little nuclear reactors everywhere owned and operated by private corporate interests.