You Have the Right to Remain Stupid

April 26, 2026. We’re at the fortieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which seems as good a time as any to shred safety regulations and invest in untested nuclear reactor designs. That’s certainly what Wall Street thinks, judging by Friday’s successful IPO of the nuclear reactor company X-Energy. Despite the fact that the company has never built an actual working reactor, its stock zoomed to close 27% up, giving it a notional value of $11.9 billion and further enriching multi-billionaire investor Ken Griffin to the tune of $300 million.. Amazon is a major backer, drawn by faith that a nuclear solution to the power-dearth crisis braking the data-center frenzy is at hand.

Smaller is Not Safer

X-Energy has been working for years to develop a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) and has applied for a license to build four of them next to a Dow Chemical facility on the Texas Gulf coast. These power plants would be Small Modular Reactors. But despite company claims, “small” does not equate to “safer.” The X- Energy design runs on so-called TRISO fuel, consisting of “pebbles” of enriched uranium encased in ceramic and carbon layers. Allegedly, this makes them impervious to a meltdown such as ignited the Chernobyl catastrophe. The Energy Department calls TRISO “the most robust fuel on earth”. That is why X- Energy’s design for its Xe -100 reactor does not feature a concrete vessel to contain leaks of lethally ,radioactive fission products such as cesium 137 in the event of a meltdown. Such containment vessels, many feet thick and lined with steel, have been mandatory in existing US reactors, and was fatally absent in the Chernobyl design.

With Every Data Center, Your Very Own Radioactive Waste Pond

Edwin Lyman, Director, Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is one of the dwindling band of technically informed critics of nuclear hype. For years, he has been patiently deconstructing the BS enthusiastically pumped out across the political spectrum, from the Oval Office to the AI complex to the climate warriors in big enviro NGOs, all of whom hail the “clean” power promised by “new” nuclear technology. “Why is the US so anxious to unlearn the lessons of the Chernobyl Disaster” he asks, alluding to the Chernobyl plant’s lack of a leak-proof steel-reinforced concrete structure, ominously matched by a similar omission in the X-Energy design (as well as another project using a different technology sponsored by Bill Gates.) The developers call this “functional containment.” “TRISO fuel is not nearly as robust as its promoters claim,” he writes “and there is significant uncertainty about how it will perform in certain types of accidents. Indeed, X-energy’s own accident analysis shows that the fuel could exceed the maximum safe temperature by several hundred degrees Celsius. The company has simply not made the case at this preliminary stage that the reactor can be safely operated without a containment.” He also discusses the non-cost-effectiveness of small modular reactors, for which parts will presumptively be mass produced in factories, rather than custom-built on site (hence the “modular.") But such economies of scale can only come with years of manufacturing experience. Nor will SMRs generate any less lethal waste, as claimed by proponents. Instead, data centers powered by their very own SMRs should look forward to housing their own highly radioactive waste depositories. For the next 100,000 years

These cogent arguments have apparently had zero effect on the SMR claque, still less on Trump. “It's a hot industry, it's a brilliant industry," he gushed as he signed a slew of executive orders voiding fifty years of safety regulation in May, 2025. There has been little public outcry over the Administration’s initiatives, endorsed as they are by a broad swathe of ignorant opinion. So it should come as no surprise that the effects of Chernobyl and the 2011 triple meltdown at Fukushima tend to be similarly brushed aside. For example, The Conversation news site has marked the anniversary by celebrating the “wilding” of the 1000 square mile radioactive exclusion zone around the ruined reactor that allows “wildlife to flourish.”

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