Nobody Wants These Goddamn Data Centers. Trump's Blowing $17.5 Billion On Nukes To Power Them
Maybe the nuclear plants will all come online within a decade, on budget. Maybe atomic pigs will fly!
Americans are really, really not thrilled about the prospects of hundreds of new data centers being built so that AI can take their jobs, raise electricity rates, strain the grid, pollute the atmosphere, and suck up all the water. A recent Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they would oppose an AI data center being built near them, with just under half (48 percent) saying they would “strongly oppose” such a development. What’s more, opposition to massive data centers crosses party lines, with more than half of self-identified “conservative Republicans” opposed (compared, to be sure, to nearly three-quarters of “liberal Democrats” who also oppose building data centers).
Support Data Centers, Lose Elections
In Utah, hardly a bastion of wokeness, the Republican president of the state Senate, J. Stuart Adams, was turfed out of his long-held seat Tuesday thanks in large part to his support for a huge data center project. He lost the Republican primary to Stephanie Hollist, who appealed to voters angry over state and local officials who, like Adams, approved a “hyperscale” data center project called “Stratos” on 40,000 acres in Box Elder County, about 60 miles north of Salt Lake City. It’s not quite an evil James Bond-type corporation name, but close enough.
The New York Times reports that opponents of the data center “worried about how much energy it would consume and how its water usage would affect the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake, and accused state officials of granting the project generous tax breaks while ignoring the public’s concerns.” This is only the most recent election in which voters have chucked out state and local incumbents who supported new data centers.
In Box Elder County, two Republican county commissioners who voted to approve the project also lost their primaries. Both attributed the loss to their support for Stratos. The commission also recently voted to approve a 180-day (pfft!) moratorium on new data centers in the county, but the moratorium didn’t affect Stratos, and voting for the moratorium didn’t help the two Republicans who lost their seats.
Fun fact: It doesn’t seem that Adams won many voters over by barraging them with ads featuring AI-slop videos, not even the one showing him wrestling a lion, or the one accusing Hollist of taking money from George Soros. Who’d have thought! We would support requiring AI-generated campaign videos to disclose how much energy and water were wasted on making them.
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Finally Some Bipartisanship!
As more and more data centers are planned, the backlash is also building; as Grist reports, right now, the US has “more than 800 group working across 49 states to oppose some 1,500 planned data centers.” And people aren’t simply organizing against data centers, they’re winning the fight in many cases. A recent report from Data Center Watch found that in the past two years, US data center projects worth $64 billion have been blocked or delayed by citizen activism, and that’s just in the 28 states tracked by the project.
The study also showed that data center developers who claim they won’t be a drain on local power grids because they’ll build their own power generation — usually gas-fired generators — face even greater opposition due to the noise and pollution involved. Elon Musk’s xAI is being sued for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act by setting up unpermitted gas turbine generators in Mississippi to power the company’s data center in nearby Memphis, Tennessee. (Predictably, the Trump Department of Trump Justice has decided to weigh in on the case.)
Even in regulation-averse Texas, Gov. and friend of toxic chemical plants Greg Abbott has urged the state Lege to aggressively regulate the data center industry, and legislators in multiple state and local governments have proposed moratoriums on new data center construction.
Pause AI Data Centers Until We Figure Out What The Hell Is Going On
At the national level, this week Rep. Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey) called for “a national AI data center moratorium until we can find a way to ensure they don't harm our nation's air, water, and power bills.” Pallone isn’t the first Democrat to propose such a moratorium; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) went there before him. But as the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Pallone has the most direct sway over energy legislation.
New Jersey has had a lot of trouble bringing new clean generation online (and dirty generation, for that matter), but tech firms want to build data centers there anyway. Average home electric bills have shot up from about $91 per month to $140 a month in the last five years, and one of the first things Gov. Mikie Sherrill did after taking office in January was to impose a rate freeze on electricity bills.
Pallone said Wednesday that “Promises by the data center industry and Big Tech that these facilities will bring down costs have fallen flat,” and noted that proposals by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to speed up connections of new generation capacity will “take months, if not years, to come to fruition.” Given the widespread national opposition to AI data centers, Pallone said, it’s time for Congress to “take this political groundswell seriously with a data center moratorium.”
We assume that even now some Musk fan on Twitter is using Grok to create a devastating image of Pallone crying and beating on a Tesla with little baby fists while a hyper-muscular Elon Musk prepares to run him down in a gleaming chrome Cybertruck.
What’s Trump Doing? Throwing $17.5 Billion At New Nuclear Plants For AI
In response to the allegedly insatiable demand for new electricity (which like other forecasts about new tech, may be exaggerated), the Trump administration this week announced a plan to offer $17.5 billion in loans to build 10 new giant nuclear reactors. Energy Secretary and former fracking company CEO Chris Wright said there was already “tremendous interest” from data center developers who might buy the power, as well as from utilities and energy companies that might seek the loans to build new nuclear power plants.
Hilariously, the Associated Press story cited with a straight face the administration’s fantasy that all 10 reactors “could begin construction by 2030 and become operational in the mid-2030s.” Yes, and we could also be zipping around in flying cars and letting Elon’s magic robots do all the scut work while we all enjoy universal basic income or starve because we got the robots but not the UBI.
The AP does at least note that the only two large commercial reactors built in the US since 1990, at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle, were “completed years late and billions of dollars over budget.” But the idea with the new loan program is to create some economy of scale by building all 10 of the new reactors using the same design as at Vogtle, Westinghouse’s giant AP1000.
“By building in volume and at multiple locations, we think we will create and stand up a large supply chain and build a lot of construction expertise,” Wright said. “We expect the timing and cost of these plants to well outperform what was done on Vogtle.”
Out of seven proposals from utilities and energy companies, the Energy Department will pick five, each of which will have two reactors per site. The loans will cover the purchase of nuclear equipment that needs long lead times to manufacture, but won’t cover the actual plant construction, which will be paid for by investors and then by ratepayers. Unlike previous nuke plants in the US, the reactors will be jointly owned by the utilities and by Westinghouse.
As ProPublica reported earlier this year, there are many, many reasons to be skeptical of the Trump administration’s rush to build lots of nukes, especially given the cavalier attitude of some of the DOGE lackwits who have been chopping away at regulations that are supposed to keep nuclear energy safe. Some of the top people installed by Trump at the Energy Department have virtually no experience with nuclear energy; instead, they’re close to big-money tech bros who want to move fast and break atoms. There’s little reason to trust Trump’s industry-captured nuclear regulatory regime any more than there is to trust health guidance from what’s left of the CDC under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
However, it’s also worth noting this counterpoint from Heatmap News founder and editor Robinson Meyer. He writes that if the new nuke loans actually work out as proposed — a huge “if” since we’re talking about the Trump administration — this isn’t an entirely crazy way to build up new nuclear energy. In other countries like France and China, using a common plant design has increased safety and kept costs down. And the two European countries with the lowest-carbon grids, France and Sweden, rely on nuclear for much of their energy.
Of course, nukes are far from the only way to green a grid and meet new energy demand for data centers. Clean energy ubernerd David Roberts has been beating the drum for meeting all that demand through building greater flexibility and efficiency into the power grid, so we make better use of the power generation and storage we already have, and by requiring data centers to shift their operations to make more efficient use of the energy they consume. He makes a powerful case that we can “meet this massive load growth without abandoning our decarbonization goals.”
Robinson also points out one of those Unintended Consequences that Trump, Wright, and company may not have noticed, so please don’t shout about it too much:
I hesitate to praise the project's climate bonafides at the risk of discouraging the Trump administration, but it is worth noting that if this project were to succeed, it would be one of the largest state-assisted build-outs of zero-carbon electricity in recent American history. But it would still take some time to arrive: These reactors aren’t forecast to come online til 2035.
Beyond that, he notes that the new loan program undercuts all the ballyhooed tech-bro excitement around “small modular reactors” that were supposed to revolutionize the nuclear industry by allegedly making it possible for data centers to simply truck in reactors producing a few hundred megawatts to power their operations. Instead, the Energy Department program pushes massive investment in the AP1000, a huge reactor that can power cities (or a few data centers that each have the power demand of a city). In a sense, it’s the big, proven reactor design that’s being made modular and sort-of mass-produced. If that remains the Trump nuke agenda, then a lot of the DOGE-driven cuts to the regulatory system, which were pushed through to accommodate an anticipated surge in small modular reactors, may end up somewhat moot.
Just don’t tell Trump that some liberals and climate change activists like nuclear energy because it doesn’t contribute to global warming.
[Grist / NYT / Heatmap News / AP / Heatmap / ProPublica]
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There's an ad showing on Virginia TV stations trying to convince people that data centers really aren't as terrible as everyone thinks, which is already a losing premise. But the most striking moment is when they tout that "many data centers use almost no water -- 96% of the time!" Gee, when they put it in such a weaselly way, it just leads me to think the ad writers found a statistic that said only 4% of data center operations are devoted to cooling the facility and tried to flip that around. It's about the hinkiest ad since "better living through chemistry."
No one is required to destroy our air and water. Keep track of the private corporations and their leadership who are taking advantage of the relaxed regulations and additional subsidies and include them when the crimes against humanity are punished.