I have spent the better part of two decades warning anyone who would listen that the climate crisis would force us into increasingly desperate compromises. But even in my most pessimistic, carbon-addled nightmares, I did not foresee that the absolute crown jewel of our national climate strategy would be driving a $1.9 billion dump truck of taxpayer money up to an abandoned nuclear plant in Iowa and aggressively jiggling the handle to see if the lights come back on.
This week, the Department of Energy announced a historic loan to restart a shuttered nuclear reactor at the Duane Arnold Energy Center—a facility that was decommissioned, sealed, and left to the gentle embrace of industrial decay back in 2020. No company in the United States has ever successfully resurrected a dead reactor that was permanently closed for good. It is a terrifying, unprecedented feat of atomic necromancy. And yet, I am expected to applaud this as a triumph for the transition.
I knew this was coming, of course. Last year, while moderating a panel on sustainable baseload generation at COP28—a deeply exhausting affair where I had to pretend to listen to a Finnish hydro-engineer for forty minutes—a senior utility executive leaned over the dais and whispered that the future of green energy wasn't wind, or solar, or tidal power. "We're just going to turn the old ones back on," he said, swirling a glass of sparkling water that possessed a smaller carbon footprint than the entire conference center. I assumed he was being facetious. I should have known better than to expect levity from a man who enthusiastically reads ESG reports in his leisure time.
We are looking at these decommissioned sites not as monuments to 20th-century hubris, but as pre-zoned opportunities for aggressive atomic revitalization.
As predicted, we are looking at a rusted, obsolete boiling-water reactor in a state whose primary export is corn and political despair, and rebranding it as an "opportunity." The plant's original operators shut it down because a severe derecho tore the cooling towers to shreds, deciding that nature itself was telling them to pack it in. Now, fortified by a federal bailout, we are going to march back into the control room, wipe the dust off the analog dials, and press the big green button.
And why are we doing this? Why are there suddenly three major efforts underway to resurrect the dead nuclear infrastructure of the American heartland? It is not because we want to power the working-class homes of Cedar Rapids with clean electrons. It is because tech billionaires need to feed the insatiable, continent-sized maw of artificial intelligence. We are literally risking a localized exclusion zone so that a newly minted data center can generate a slightly more accurate rendering of a raccoon driving a forklift.
When I confronted a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist about this at a secluded climate retreat in Big Sur last month—over a plate of ethically foraged kelp that tasted distinctly of seawater and despair—he barely looked up from his phone. He assured me that the extreme compute requirements of the next generation of large language models simply required a more muscular approach to our legacy atomic assets. I asked him if he knew where Iowa was on a map. He told me it was somewhere in the middle-ware. This is the intellectual vanguard dictating our energy policy.
It is profoundly insulting. For years, I have had to exhaust myself scolding working-class families for failing to meticulously sort their recycling, patiently explaining why they must lower their winter thermostats while I board a transatlantic flight to give a keynote address on the urgency of reducing our emissions. Now, all my hard work is being undercut. The federal government is throwing billions at utility companies to rip the plywood off condemned radiation tubes, simply because a software monopoly needs more juice to automate the jobs of mid-level copywriters.
The core infrastructure remains highly robust, provided you don't dwell on the fact that the primary containment vessel has been sitting unmonitored in the dark since 2020.
Hayes's confidence is, frankly, adorable. But it speaks to the broader delusion of our era. We are fundamentally out of ideas. The green agenda has stalled, bogged down by permitting reform, supply chain bottlenecks, and the inconvenient reality that building new things is difficult. So instead, we are raiding the graveyard. We are looking at the Three Mile Island site—another facility currently being aggressively wooed for a restart by Microsoft—and deciding that the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in American history is actually just a misunderstood clean energy hub waiting for a second act.
And let us not ignore the financial elegance of the grift. A $1.9 billion federal loan to restart a plant that the owners voluntarily walked away from is the ultimate corporate safety net. You run a facility until the maintenance costs become a nuisance, you shutter it with great solemnity, you lay off the workforce, and you wait. You wait until the grid is so starved for power by the tech industry's computational boondoggle that the government begs you to come back, checkbook in hand. It is a masterpiece of manufactured leverage. I almost respect the sheer, unvarnished cynicism of it, if only because it makes my own cynicism feel so quaint by comparison.
I suppose I should be grateful. It is technically zero-carbon energy, assuming the restart process doesn't accidentally vaporize the surrounding tri-county area. But it is hard to muster enthusiasm for a climate strategy that reads like the prologue to a post-apocalyptic survival video game. I will continue to do my part. I will offset my flights. I will politely decline the plastic utensils with my overpriced takeout. But please, do not ask me to pretend that jumping a dead Iowa nuclear plant with federal billions is a victory.