Peter Barus writes: “I have quite a lot of information about the nuclear power/weapons industry, and the AI industry, and a lot to say about them,” which is central to his volunteer work with the Veterans for Peace Uranium Weapons Working Group.
JACKSONVILLE-Even after generations dealing with the atomic industry, the town of Vernon was pretty much on its own in negotiating with the wave of government contractors across America, targeting somewhat battered parcels of land.
Nuclear power left its indelible mark, and maybe it’s a lucky break if there’s a market for it. A small, rural municipality has to take what they can get. When the nice people with the advance team have gone, what they could get is all that will remain.
Vernon, of course, is not alone and not at fault, when it comes to the impacts arising from local decisions. The plant could have been anywhere blessed with similar geographical features. And, as with all defunct nuclear plants, for thousands of years those impacts will remain.
Now is not too late to participate in shaping our collective future, even under pressure, at this later-than-you-think date. The scope of discussions has shrunk, but not necessarily the scope of the plan.
Even as various components of the proposition have faded from attention, some important ones were not even in play. Reading the succession of news reports, glaring omissions have multiplied while talking points sound more and more like it’s a wrap.
We’re left wondering if it’s a “community-centric” collaboration that’s driving the discussion, or a business plan.
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We don’t seem to have got our heads around the larger context. The massive build-out of data centers across the country — we now have 4,767 of them — is locally controversial. But nationally, the controversy hasn’t quite caught up with the overall phenomenon driven by, let’s call it, the “Military-Industrial-Nuclear-AI-Surveillance Complex” (MINASC).
At this stage we’re being focused on immediate local concerns like rising electric bills and water use, given the unprecedented amount of electricity that AI-surveillance needs for its growing thousands of shopping-mall-sized hard drives. And that extraordinary demand is where so-called “small” reactors come in.
Among the glaring omissions is the fact that not one of these small modular reactors (SMRs) is running in the USA, and for very good reasons: They are more dangerous, and they would create more (and more radioactive) waste, in more locations, than the leaking, senescent jalopies now endangering so many places. Instead of reducing the unacceptable risk of cancer, heart disease, and infant death, SMRs would distribute it.
Here is where AI comes in, with its promise of demand for energy that could save the nuclear industry from the inherent bankruptcy that has been draining the public coffers since its beginning. A marriage made in, well, the Pentagon, at a guess. Because the other deadly byproduct of nuclear reactors is atomic weapons.
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Locally, in line with the “community-centric” gambit of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), we’ve been treated to “community-centric” waste siting; a contractor from Texas floating “plans for battery storage, a small-scale nuclear reactor, and a data center,” as reported by VTDigger; and, more recently, just the batteries (community-centric lite).
Although we’re told nothing has been set in stone yet, and the proposition seems to change with each new focus group, there is obvious momentum behind the Vernon project despite its vague and changing outlines.
On the other end — like the powered-land opportunity of the defunct Quindaro Power Station in Kansas, which is set out like succulent investor-bait — things are also vague and shifting in Vernon. But taken together, the VY site’s future begins to look a lot like Harriman Reservoir around the Glory Hole in a spring thaw.
A government (DOE) contractor specializing in “converting former industrial areas into energy development sites with a focus on solutions to the growing AI and digital infrastructure demand” doesn’t fly by the seat of the pants. At this scale they must operate like super tankers, never straying from the sea lanes covered by insurance.
And, just like a big ship won’t be going out for a pleasant afternoon’s whale-watching, if the plan has actually been reduced to just a storage-battery facility, the question of viability comes in.
A storage battery installation is just one component of the tightly integrated “energy development site.” In the old blind-men-and-the-elephant story, each thought he was describing the whole animal when all he could feel was a leg or the trunk.
Vernon was offered a whole elephant, then parts of an elephant. But DOE and its contractors are committed to the elephant business.
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So here’s how they formulate all this. For each sector, be it nuclear, military, AI, or energy, deal-breaking problems are impeding further development.
Accordingly, they’ve come up with a circular set of “solutions”:
Nuclear problem: Nuclear power fails the cost-benefit analysis, the carbon emissions test, and public health and safety requirements.
• AI’s energy demand solves nuclear’s cost-benefit failure.
• The $2 trillion budget for “modernizing” (translation: totally replacing) the nuclear arsenal trumps nuclear’s “green” alternative failure.
Military problem: Atomic bombs come only from reactors.
• Replacing the nuclear arsenal requires nuclear reactors.
• AI guidance and targeting requires new weapons systems.
AI problem: AI demands orders of magnitude more energy than is now available.
• “Small” modular reactors (are said to) promise quick, cheap, portable power.
Energy problem: Fossil fuels are heating up our planet, disrupting the weather.
• Nuclear is (claimed to be) a renewable energy resource.
Convenient how each new problem seems to be a solution to the previous one. But that’s more characteristic of networks. Networks are made of nodes and connections, and some nodes, called hubs, have a lot of connections.
In a network even a hub is a node. That’s not what we’re faced with now. We don’t have a problem made of smaller problems that just need to be cleverly arranged in order for everything to work.
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What we’re dealing with here is a categorical error. It’s a category of problems, each with several intractable drawbacks.
So far we’ve been talking about different problems. But they’re all aspects of one big thing.
The word “problem” implies a solution. But the solution to a set of intractable problems can’t be the problems it’s made up of, no matter how they’re stacked. Adding them up just complicates everything.
This is where people often start talking about “synergy.” But fixing one part of a broken system only changes the way it doesn’t work.
Instead, maybe we should think about predicaments. When each untenable situation props up the next, they add up to a predicament, not just another problem. A predicament is an untenable situation. It has no solution.
That’s not synergy. That’s checkmate.
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Maybe these “workshops” or “panels” — whatever they’re called — are actually focus groups designed to move the original stated purpose of “the successful siting of a federal consolidated storage facility (CSF) for spent nuclear fuel,” as reported in The Commons.
That stuff stays hot for millions of years. “Data” centers will be obsolete in less than five, according to their creators. But they serve to alleviate some of our quite legitimate concerns about the permanent mess that’s been dumped on our communities. A mess that is now shown to be causing an epidemic of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and infant mortality, a partial list.
Meanwhile, radioactive materials are crisscrossing the country on trucks and trains, through villages and towns whose first responders have no training in the event of a radiologic accident. The current administration has ordered a doubling or tripling of production and near-abandonment of safety regulations.
People operating under contract to a government with such an agenda have compelling reasons to close the deal, whether “community-centric” or arbitrary.
People with other interests — such as a viable future for southern Vermont, if not the world — face the critical question of whether we’re too late.
If we can see through this game and start playing as if it matters, maybe not.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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