Move Fast and Glow Things
"The SMR revolution will be mythologized"
Between my morning cup of cacao and the grackles disputing in the trees above my grass roof, I read in ProPublica that a 31-year-old lawyer named Seth Cohen — five years out of law school—had convened a meeting at the Idaho National Laboratory to determine the future of nuclear safety in America.
The nuclear “Big Balls” czar that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) installed had no significant experience in nuclear safety law or policy. He did have opinions, however, and in Trumpworld, opinions are the new expertise. As Kara Swisher often reminds us, Silicon Valley techies are “frequently wrong, but never in doubt.”
When Idaho staff raised the matter of radiation exposure at a nearby site, Cohen offered a brisk geographic reassurance. “They are testing in Utah,” he said. “I don’t know, like 70 people live there.” A veteran staffer noted, with some delicacy, that there were also babies in Utah. “They’ve been downwind before,” Cohen’s DOGE assistant replied. The transcript of this exchange is one of the more illuminating documents produced by the current administration — not because it reveals anything surprising about the people now running things, but because it so perfectly crystallizes the malignant narcissist worldview: babies are a logistical footnote; Utah is sparsely populated enough to absorb whatever we need it to absorb; and the atoms are not going to split themselves.
Welcome to the nuclear renaissance. Please leave your no-threshold model at the door.
“It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”
Utah Has Plenty of Room for Your Waste
For those who came in late: the tech industry has a serious electricity problem. Training a single AI model consumes roughly as much energy as several small nations. A ChatGPT-powered Google search uses nearly 10 times as much energy as a traditional one. Jensen Huang’s new Blackwell GPU chip has been described by at least one technology writer as “nothing short of a doomsday device”—and not just to be pithy. It is a climate destroyer. Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions are up 30 percent since 2020. Google’s have risen nearly 50 percent over five years. So much for those heady Net Zero pledges of the new millennium.
At an AI energy summit in 2024, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered Big Tech’s official position on this inconvenience: “We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway.” He suggested it would be better to bet on AI to solve the climate problem than to slow AI down. The logic being, roughly, that the arsonist is also a firefighter, so let’s give him better matches.
The solution the industry has landed on, with the enthusiasm of people who have never actually had to live near it, is nuclear power. Reports Dave Borlach:
Borlach then goes through these claims and reveals each of them as fairy dust. Modular nuclear power is neither safe, clean, nor too cheap to meter. It is the opposite of all of those, by a large margin.
Microsoft is reviving Three Mile Island—yes, that Three Mile Island, the one that exposed millions of people to radiation in 1979, the worst accident in the history of American commercial nuclear power, with estimated long-term cancers and fatal birth defects at well over one million—to feed its data centers.
Amazon has pledged half a billion dollars to develop small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and OpenAI are queuing up behind them. The venture capital flowing into nuclear startups would, if invested in solar and wind, likely solve the energy problem before lunch. But solar panels don’t project the same techno-mythological grandeur as a cooling tower, and the techbros of Silicon Valley have always been more comfortable with the sublime than the practical.
I have some experience with this. In 1978, I sued to shut down the entire U.S. nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mines to waste repositories. The case went before the United States Supreme Court four times. We raised troubling constitutional questions about the health effects of nuclear energy and the ethical dimensions of a federal government that promoted nuclear power while actively concealing public health effects from the citizens it was irradiating. The justices said, in effect, “Look, we are just dummies, and this stuff is way over our heads, which is why Congress entrusted experts to make the call. Who are we dummies to second-guess the experts?”
I didn’t expect them to provide expertise in epidemiology or the curve of binding energy. I asked for their constitutional expertise—specifically the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of the right not to have the government expose you to physical harm without your consent. I lost.
Atoms continued splitting. Wastes continued accumulating. No state particularly wants to be Utah.
The NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” Cohen said.
Small Modular Minds
One of the things you get to do when you are POTUS is to appoint the people in charge of nuclear power and weapons (which, as the Iran War underscores, are one and the same). So it is, at the bidding of the nuke-obsessed tech bros and their trillionized presidential campaign war chests, both the current POTUS and several before him have stacked and padded safety offices at NRC and DOE with atomic cheerleaders whose attitude towards the health effects of ionizing radiation is a “‘hairy-chested’ approach.”
That phrase, “‘hairy-chested’ approach,” was first used in 1946 by a member of Dr. Stafford Warren’s radiological safety team at Operation Crossroads, the test series where the battleship Nevada (the only ship to slip moorings and engage the Japanese during the Pearl Harbor attack) can be seen as a dark, vertical shadow ascending in the stem of the mushoom cloud. Dr. Warren, for those unfamiliar with Hiroshima’s dark history, was the medical officer who knew in advance the megadeath-scale harm and supervised the cover-up. The physician’s oath to “first do no harm” must have gnawed at him, but he rationalized about Hitler-something-something-Hirohito-something-something-Stalin…. In time, he would become our own Dr. Josef Mengele.
Warren’s Secrets
Dr. Stafford Leak Warren (b. 1896) was an early pioneer in the use of X‑rays and mammography. He was recruited as Chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Engineer District (the Manhattan Project), responsible for medical oversight and radiation safety for plutonium workers and for the first atomic test, Trinity, in July 1945. He also led a survey team to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the medical and radiological effects of the bombings. He then headed the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Medical Section and its human‑experimentation work. Warren’s team injected radioactive elements into at least 30-40 civilian patients at hospitals in Rochester, Chicago, Oak Ridge, and San Francisco, without informed consent or therapeutic intent, and some were tracked secretly into the 1970s via urine samples. These included 18 plutonium cases (e.g., Eda Schultz Charlton, “HP-3,” received 4.9 micrograms in 1945 but survived in chronic ill-health; Simeon Burkhart, “HP-1,” received 4.7 micrograms and died quickly—32 days), plus uranium, americium, and polonium—V. Putin’s umbrella tip of choice. Stafford Warren went on to become the founding dean of the UCLA medical school and “was an important public voice on radiation safety and the dangers of nuclear fallout,” according to his school biography. When he died in 1981, his widow donated his papers to the University’s Bancroft Library, unaware of the secrets they held.
Those papers showed that Warren, the Pentagon, and the AEC were aware of radiation injuries from very early on and discussed how to manage them—medically, legally, and in terms of public relations—while officially minimizing or denying any health effects. The files showed that there were internal debates over informed consent, secrecy, and whether human experiments should be continued, with the ultimate decision made to embed their work into classified weapons programs so that it could not be discovered.
We discovered those papers in 1982 during our class action on behalf of the National Association of Radiation Survivors (NARS), 473 U.S. 305 (1985). They provided documentary evidence that key officials, including Warren, knew more about radiation risks, injuries, and ethically questionable research than was publicly acknowledged—and that Warren and his team actively helped shape strategies for secrecy, damage control, and limited disclosure. Moreover, the files confirmed that, as Dr. John W. Gofman, medical director of Lawrence Berkeley Lab, had testified in our Honicker v. Hendrie case (1978-1982), there is no threshold below which radiation cannot kill. In human experiment after human experiment, the evidence piled up like cordwood—and was burned. Soon after our case reached trial, the FBI descended on Bancroft Library and placed Warren’s papers under lock and seal.
The tragedy created by ongoing nuclear secrecy since 1944 has continued to unfold, and cascade, with cancers caused by the nuclear fuel cycle to members of the general public—especially women and children and those with earlier damage or genetic predispositions—stretching into the multimillions, according to NRC admissions in impact studies and Federal Register notifications. None of Warren’s victims were ever compensated, and that pattern also continues into the present day, for atomic workers, veterans, and downwinders. Compensation might be construed as an admission of harm.
At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011, Japanese authorities, who had assured the public that there would never be an accident, imposed arbitrary boundaries to decide who would be recognized as a victim, dividing the victims among themselves. One of the downwinders, Akiko Morimatsu, told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2018:
“We believe these fundamental rights of existence are being violated: ‘not to be exposed to radiation’ and ‘to enjoy good health’ … Having lived through the Fukushima experience, we know that, whether for military or civil use, no one is safe from becoming a nuclear victim.”
The Five Percent Solution
One of the few safeguards medical personnel and health physicists with higher morals than Stafford Warren have been able to insert into law, including international radiation protection standards, was the ALARA principle. There is a wide-ranging international consensus from UNSCEAR to the International Commission on Radiological Protection that stochastic risk increases linearly with dose and that no level of radiation exposure is entirely risk-free. There is considerable evidence that at very low doses, the health risk increases superlinearly because cells not killed are more likely to mutate into cancers and birth defects.
ALARA stands for “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” Recognizing that there is no such thing as a safe dose, ALARA is an operations and maintenance standard that aims to minimize exposure to ionizing radiation through practical measures such as reducing time near sources, increasing distance, wearing film badges, and using lead shielding. It applies to everything from uranium mining to hospital X-rays.
In January 2026, billionaire tech-bro Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a DOE memorandum removing ALARA from all directives and regulations, citing a July 2025 Idaho National Lab report that recommended eliminating it below the 5,000 millirem annual worker dose limit. That 5,000 mrem limit, incidentally, was chosen based on a cost/benefit calculation that nuclear reactor operators should be protected at roughly the same level as a coal miner, logger, fisher, roofer or trash collector. Last month, the NRC proposed dropping ALARA’s Linear No-Threshold model and shifting all workers and the public to the 5,000 mrem limit, calling for “risk-informed” standards rather than actual cancer-preventive standards. This means that caregivers who administer barium enemas, X-ray techs, and workers in all phases of the nuclear power/weapons cycle, as well as downwinders and downstreamers for numberless generations, will no longer be actually protected, but will be suggested to be informed of the risk. Please, madam, read the fine print on your employment contract.
Who is Chris Wright? He founded Pinnacle Technologies, which pioneered hydraulic fracture mapping and helped launch commercial shale gas production in the late 1990s. He then founded Liberty Energy in 2011, which was valued at $2.8 billion as of February 2023, taking home $5.6 million per year as its CEO. In one of the more memorable moments of his pre-government career, in 2019, Wright drank fracking fluid to demonstrate that it was not dangerous—a stunt that tells you something about his relationship to risk. It’s a hairy-throated approach.
In January 2023, he said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” and claimed the climate movement was “collapsing under its own weight.” As Energy Secretary, he told an interviewer that “too little” atmospheric carbon dioxide is a “bigger risk” than rising CO2 levels.
Before his appointment, Wright served on the board of the nuclear technology company Oklo, working to create neutron microreactors that can operate for long periods without refueling. Oklo went public in 2023 via a SPAC merger with AltC Acquisition Corporation, founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Wright held unvested restricted stock units in Oklo valued between $250,000 and $500,000 while he was a director. This places Wright at the precise intersection of Silicon Valley’s AI energy ambitions and the new nuclear industry—he was literally a board member of Sam Altman’s nuclear startup before becoming the cabinet secretary who now regulates it.
In his first year, Wright cut more than $11 billion in energy grants, including $7.6 billion for clean-energy projects, slashed energy-efficiency regulations, and eliminated thousands of clean-energy and climate-science positions.
ALARA has been replaced, apparently, by ASTHMA: As Speedily as THe Markets Allow. Valar, a nuclear startup with strong Silicon Valley backing, called radiation limits the “top barrier to industry growth.” A DOE memo justified changing those limits by noting the cost savings on reactor shielding—savings of up to five percent. Five percent. The price of not giving Utah’s babies cancer is, apparently, five percent.
In Japan, investigators concluded that a cozy relationship between industry and its oversight body was a chief cause of Fukushima. Chris Wright called for more coziness.
The Carnegie Endowment has noted, with admirable politeness, that host communities near these new reactors may find themselves unable to obtain information about the environmental and health risks of living next to them, because the independence of the agency that was supposed to provide that information has been restructured away.
Sharon Squassoni, a research professor at George Washington University who has spent her career studying the nuclear industry, summarized the situation with a phrase that I suspect will age well: “These are champions of innovation who believe they can disrupt any technology. But nuclear power is a tough nut to crack.”
The crack, in this case, is not metaphorical.
From where I am I can watch the frigate birds ride the thermals in wide, unhurried circles, burning no fuel at all, generating no waste, requiring no cooling towers, no shielding walls, no DOGE lawyers, no exemptions from existing safety law. Their batwing design took evolution about 150 million years to optimize. They turn and corkscrew dive with eye-popping speed to snatch a flying fish in mid-leap. That tech is available for free. It does not require a gigawatt of electricity, a $100 billion investment, or a call from Jensen Huang. The birds do not care whether the NRC is independent. They simply soar on what the sun provides, which has been, for most of life’s history on this planet, enough.
The saying among the Broligarchs is “Move Fast and Break Shit.” There is an older Roman principle, “primum non nocere—first, do no harm.” It is, strictly speaking, a medical precept, but it has obvious applications to the question of whether to site an unshielded small modular reactor near a community that did not ask for one, whose babies are downwind, and whose regulator has been instructed to do whatever it is told.
The atoms are patient. They have been waiting four billion years. They can wait a little longer while we think this through. Unfortunately, the venture capitalists cannot.
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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 rather than 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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