Nuking the Windmills

"Anti-Datacenter opposition is blocking billions of dollars for new server farms" 

The third episode of this remarkable season of South Park features addiction to chatbots, which is a real malady, and is growing. Whether the disease will last long enough to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is still an open question.

A.I. tools like ChatGPT are powered by vast data centers — warehouses filled with power-hungry computer chips — which already consume 4.5 percent of the electricity used in the United States. Over the next three or four years, that number is expected to double or even triple, to as much as 12 percent of electric demand by 2028. At present, about a quarter of data centers’ throughput is for A.I., but that could jump to more than 90% by as soon as 2030. McKinsey projects a 441% global increase in world data-center loads envisaged by 2030. The International Energy Agency projects that by that year, 4.25 years hence, A.I. will use 62% of all global electric supply. 

Industry analysts have long foreseen power as the Achilles heel of A.I., cloud computing, decarbonization, and indeed, automation in general. Some effort has been made to site new data centers close to existing power supplies like wind farms and hydro dams, but the exponential growth in demand, to say nothing of projected demand, is already outstripping supplies.

Anti-Datacenter opposition is blocking billions of dollars for projects across the U.S. and Europe — $64 billion in U.S. data center projects alone. Where the rabble once rallied against factories, warehouses, or retail sprawl, they’re now opposing data centers. Notwithstanding the ability of A.I. to spawn political polarity, “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment has been growing across all demographics. Local uprisings against server farms are bipartisan.

Republican officials raise concerns about tax incentives — 36 states provide subsidies — and energy grid strain — AI takes a fourth of Virginia’s electricity, with 40 GW (40 billion watts) of server farms proposed to meet projected growth. Colorado offers data centers a 3¢/kWh “economic development” discount — a taxpayer-borne subsidy — for 10 years. Where is DOGE when you need them?

Democrats tend to focus on massive resource consumption — especially cooling water — but also environment, health, the vastly greater number of jobs provided by renewables, and quality of life.

Where’s the Revenue?

In Ireland, the government has halted new server farm developments near Dublin after the IEA informed them centers could gobble up 32 percent of Ireland’s power by 2026. Moratoria on new data centers in Singapore and Amsterdam began in 2019. The Broligarchs are decrying the Luddites for their “symbol politics,” hoping to trigger FOMO reactions in more favorable countries, like the Emirates.

As cited by Data Center Dynamics, analysts from S&P Global project that data centers could require up to 3 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of methane gas by 2030. Methane is a climate crisis accelerant — 80 times more potent for global warming in the short term than carbon dioxide (approximately 25 times greater than CO₂ over 100 years, after which it decays to long-lived greenhouse gases). ExxonMobil announced plans to construct a 1.5-gigawatt methane gas-fired power plant exclusively to supply energy to data centers. The advantage is that gas power plants can be constructed relatively quickly (12–24 months) compared to SMRs and microreactors.

Amazon is building a facility in Indiana that will need the equivalent energy of a million homes. Meta is planning a data center the size of Manhattan. Alphabet and Microsoft each said they’d invest $75 billion to $80 billion in 2025. Meta said its capital expenditures for 2025 were estimated to run between $66 billion and $72 billion.

Another black swan on the pond is crypto. Led by VC billionaire David Sachs from his aerie in the EOB next to the White House, the US Treasury is quietly drifting off the fiat dollar standard and onto a token stablecoin, perhaps bearing the image of our golden Sun King. Keep in mind that cryptocurrency mining used up to 2.3% of US electricity in 2024. For comparison, indoor cannabis cultivation used ~1%, and is completely displaceable by outdoor farms.

Since the word from Washington is that wind machines spoil the view from golf courses and should be banned, Big Tech is turning to nuclear power, the darling of tax-and-spenders. The Trump Department of Energy has provided 16 data farm sites on DoE and DoD land to bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process and safety reviews. Public finance regulations (“red tape” in MAGA jargon) are also being shredded to secretly transfer data centers’ trillion-dollar costs to existing customers, a vast wealth transfer from ratepayers to utility shareholders and Big Tech companies.

Renewables and storage are already 93% of US and 95% of world electric capacity expected to be added this year, and for good reason. Amory Lovins says, “The global nuclear enterprise adds in a good year only as much net capacity (additions minus retirements) as renewables add every two days. Renewables’ high speed and low cost have run off with the world power market… Anyone preferring a fossil or nuclear plant must be influenced by criteria other than cost, speed, and reliability.”

In the UK, funding of £2.5 billion has been set aside to support the construction of publicly funded small modular reactors (SMRs). Rolls-Royce’s selection in June 2025 as the preferred bidder for a prototype 470MW design forced the car company to peek under the hood and realize there was something being overlooked. It’s not a small thing, either.

Fuel.

Currently, global uranium production is around 140 million pounds annually, but under the present plan, demand will at least triple or quadruple by 2050. Utilities will need to find about 2.1 billion pounds of uranium through 2040. New mines have long development timelines (5–10+ years) and need significant capital investment to come online. Enrichment and conversion facilities must also expand.

Uranium Muscle Cars

The Rolls SMR, the muscle car of the line, will be roughly half the size of a standard light water reactor. Another competitor, Last Energy UK, plans a much smaller bug version for South Wales by 2027 — only 20MW, at a construction cost estimate of $40 million to $300 million per unit. There is an in-between SMR — the commuter SUV class — from Newcleo that will be 200MW. Rolls-Royce and Last Energy’s reactors are both designed to be fueled with low-enriched uranium (LEU) derived from abundant thorium ore. Newcleo’s is designed to be fueled with mixed oxide (MOX) fuel — recycled plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and decommissioned warheads.

“Abundant” may be misleading. How is LEU made? The supply chain is split broadly into four phases — mining, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication. Mining involves extracting uranium from thorium ore and crushing it into uranium oxide powder called “yellowcake.” Conversion gasifies the yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride, or “hex.” Enrichment spins the gas in centrifuges at extremely high speeds, which separates lighter Uranium-235 (fuel) from heavier Uranium-238 (armor-piercing shells).

Open uranium mine tailings piles. Native American children played in them. 
Companies mixed them with cement to make home foundations, sidewalks and schools.

It takes about 10 tons of refined uranium to produce one ton of nuclear fuel. As uranium mining exhausts the easy pickings, finding that 10 tons may mean removing 1000 or more tons of overburden, and that amount is steadily rising. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Australia has the largest mining reserves — 28% of the supply. Other exporters include Kazakhstan (14%), Canada (10%), Namibia (8%), Russia (8%), South Africa (5%), Niger (6%), China (5%), and Brazil (3%). While not as radioactive as pure uranium, much of the overburden and all of the mill tailings are radioactive and pose a significant health hazard as they migrate into rivers, wind-blown dust, wildlife, or even construction materials like cinderblock. 

 

The final stage is fabrication, where the gas is turned back into a powder and pressed into ceramic pellets, which go into fuel rods and assemblies. Those assemblies — about 3 to 5% U-235 for LEU — can sustain a chain reaction, boil water, and drive steam turbines to make electricity.

A standard nuclear reactor requires a million gallons per minute of fresh, filtered water. Mining thousands of tons of ore can take far more. 

Whether or not national AI-driven growth in total electricity demand has just emerged, AI-focused utilities and merchant generators may need to relearn that the same new resources that provide the cheapest bulk power (solar, wind, grid balancing by any of ten carbon-free methods, and efficient, timely end-use to free up existing resources) win in the marketplace by even more if deployed faster. Spiking demand would not reverse but reinforce those least-cost resources’ advantage: they’re mass-produced, less dependent on scarce, slow, special hardware, and relatively fast to site, approve, and build (at least where fossil-fuel interests haven’t poisoned local politics with campaigns of deception). Thermal power stations are the opposite, widely reporting surging schedules and budgets. As a result, renewables will make ~35% of 2025 global electricity (3.8× nuclear power’s share), then add several percentage points per year. Just in 2024, renewables added roughly 585–700–730 GW, and battery storage added 181–205 GWh and 74 GW of new capacity, while nuclear power added just 4 GW more than its 3 GW retirements — a nearly-irrelevant distraction. Deloitte estimates that with aggressive efforts and ahistoric success, nuclear power, mainly from existing assets, might meet about 10% of new US data-center demand by 2035 if it proves feasible and cost-effective.

— Amory B. Lovins, Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity: Managing the Risks (2025)

Tech Park

The UK has told Rolls-Royce it expects to order 40 more SMRs by 2050. The World Nuclear Association lists Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency, as being the largest yearly enricher at 27,100 tons per year, followed by Urenco, an EU company enriching 17,900 tons, China National with 9000 tons, and Orano in France, with about 7500 tons/year. Excluding weapons programs, that is enough capacity to fuel 2000–2500 standard nuclear reactors.

Combining two risky investment stories, nuclear and AI, each with basic weaknesses, doesn’t make them more convincing; it just turns one burstable bubble into two linked burstable bubbles.

— Amory Lovins

Assuming there are no accidents rendering vast areas of land uninhabitable for centuries, this Tech Bro vision of the future could be just a short South Park episode away.

But what does fuel cost? Imagine driving your Rolls to the gas pump and the sign says $278 per gallon. Your Rolls gets 5 miles per gallon. Most nuclear plants in the US and elsewhere would have shut down long ago were it not for the fact that consumers, including utilities, don’t pay for enrichment. Taxpayers do. Utilities also don’t pay for insurance, either, but that is another story.

The fuel services market worldwide is dominated by state-owned supply companies and by state-owned utilities. Nonetheless, supply limits force them to charge between $300 million and $500 million for an average one-year reload. It can fluctuate significantly due to supply chain, regulatory, and market variables — more in Western countries, less in China and Russia. Spot uranium prices have more than tripled over the past four years, reaching as high as $107 per pound in early 2024. Forecasts indicate that uranium prices could rise from current levels to as high as $135 per pound in 2026 — $300,000 per ton of uranium ore.

If you ask a Tech Bro, he would tell you not to worry. With robots and A.I.-assisted engineering, the production cost of fuel will drop dramatically. I can’t help picturing a dog chasing its tail.

There is another bright spot with echoes of South Park 27.3. The unprecedented demand for LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok in 2023–2024 prompted a rush to build more data centers. However, if AI and cloud computing demand plateaus (due to energy constraints, high costs, lagging demand, or limited ROI), the Tech Bros may face significant overcapacity.

Some of my Stanford students who tried various modern AI offerings then chose to avoid them as superficially enticing, sometimes useful, but ultimately feeling like addictive substitutes for critical thought — dulling skills, weakening imagination, and obscuring personal creativity. These students want a tool to enable their efforts, not a usurper to supplant them and add unknowable amounts of error. I know the plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence,” but consistently seeing such mixed reactions in this capable young audience makes me more skeptical about a vast untapped consumer market for the AI tools now offered.

— Amory Lovins

In 1995–96, internet usage was growing so fast — sometimes doubling in just 100 days — it was transformed into a media meme, triggering a stampede to overbuild optical fiber networks, with ten-fold growth just in 1996–2000, much of it debt-financed. In 2002, 97% of that fiber was dark. Maybe you don’t remember the names — Global Crossing, Worldcom/MCI, Enron — because by 2002 they had all filed for bankruptcy. Others — Level 3, Quest, Lucent, Ciena, Corning, JDS — were acquired, absorbed, or liquidated for pennies by late entrants like Verizon and AT&T that chose to go with satellite technology.

Many analysts now warn that overbuilt infrastructure could lead to a GPU glut and ghost server farms, similar to the fiber catastrophe or early semiconductor busts. The three main US credit-rating agencies warned in 2024 that despite potentially “strong benefit potential” to utilities building new supplies to power data centers, “the potential for inaccurate load increase forecasts” could create “substantial credit risk.” Smaller players will be washed out. Over a few decades, Amory Lovins warns, compounding uncertainties could become far greater — perhaps a million-fold. The longer the lead time (e.g., nuclear), the greater the risk of project collapse on an epic scale or disasters later from shoddy workmanship. As real-world limits set in, our budding ChatGPT springtime romance may descend into a long AI winter that has us searching for just enough watts to charge our phones and watches.

I asked ChatCPT what she thought about it. She said, “If global nuclear power demand keeps rising and supply remains tight, future nuclear power prices may be higher and more volatile than in the past. Would you like me to help you write a business plan?”

 

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky, and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs, and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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