Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” – Derrick Jensen Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?
China’s already vast infrastructure programme has entered a new phase as building work starts on the Motuo hydropower project.
The dam will consist of five cascade hydropower stations arranged from upstream to downstream and, once completed, will be the world’s largest source of hydroelectric power. It will be four times larger than China’s previous signature hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtse river in central China.
The Chinese premier, Li Qiang, has described the proposed mega dam as the “project of the century”. In several ways, Li’s description is apt. The vast scale of the project is a reflection of China’s geopolitical status and ambitions.
Possibly the most controversial aspect of the dam is its location. The site is on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. This is connected to the Brahmaputra river which flows into the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh as well as Bangladesh. It is an important source of water for Bangladesh and India.
Both nations have voiced concerns over the dam, particularly since it can potentially affect their water supplies. The tension with India over the dam is compounded by the fact that Arunachal Pradesh has been a focal point of Sino-Indian tensions. China claims the region, which it refers to as Zangnan, saying it is part of what it calls South Tibet.
At the same time, the dam presents Beijing with a potentially formidable geopolitical tool in its dealings with the Indian government. The location of the dam means that it is possible for Beijing to restrict India’s water supply.
This potential to control downstream water supply to another country has been demonstrated by the effects that earlier dam projects in the region have had on the nations of the Mekong river delta in 2019. As a result, this gives Beijing a significant degree of leverage over its neighbours.
One country restricting water supply to put pressure on another is by no means unprecedented. In fact in April 2025, following a terror attack by Pakistan-based The Resistance Front in Kashmir, which killed 26 people (mainly tourists), India suspended the Indus waters treaty, restricting water supplies to Pakistani farmers in the region. So the potential for China’s dam to disrupt water flows will further compound the already tense geopolitics of southern Asia.
Background layer attributed to DEMIS Mapserver, map created by Shannon1, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Concrete titans
The Motuo mega dam is an advertisement of China’s prowess when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects. China’s expertise with massive infrastructure projects is a big part of modern Chinese diplomacy through its massive belt and road initiative.
This involves joint ventures with many developing nations to build large-scale infrastructure, such as ports, rail systems and the like. It has caused much consternation in Washington and Brussels, which view these initiatives as a wider effort to build Chinese influence at their expense.
The completion of the dam will will bring Beijing significant symbolic capital as a demonstration of China’s power and prosperity – an integral feature of the image of China that Beijing is very keen to promote. It can also be seen as a manifestation of both China’s aspiration and its longstanding fears.
Harnessing the rivers
The Motuo hydropower project also represents the latest chapter of China’s long battle for control of its rivers, a key story in the development of Chinese civilisation.
France 24 report on the construction of the mega dam project.
Such struggles have been embodied in Chinese mythology in the form of the Gun-Yu myth. This tells the story of the way floods displaced the population of ancient China, probably based on an actual flooding at Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River in what is now Qinghai province in 1920BC.
This has led to the common motif of rivers needing human control to abate natural disaster, a theme present in much classical Chinese culture and poetry.
The pursuit of controlling China’s rivers has also been one of the primary influences on the formation of the Chinese state, as characterised by the concept of zhishui 治水 (controlling the rivers). Efforts to control the Yangtze have shaped the centralised system of governance that has characterised China throughout its history. In this sense, the Motuo hydropower project represents the latest chapter in China’s quest to harness the power of its rivers.
Such a quest remains imperative for China and its importance has been further underlined by the challenges of climate change, which has seen natural resources such as water becoming increasingly limited. The Ganges river has already been identified as one of the world’s water scarcity hotspots.
As well as sustaining China’s population, the hydropower provided by the dam is another part of China’s wider push towards self-sufficiency. It’s estimated that the dam could generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year – about the same about produced by the whole UK. While this will meet the needs of the local population, it also further entrenches China’s ability to produce cheap electricity – something that has enabled China to become and remain a manufacturing superpower.
Construction has only just begun, but Motuo hydropower project has already become a microcosm of China’s wider push towards development. It’s also a gamechanger in the geopolitics of Asia, giving China the potential to exert greater control in shaping the region’s water supplies. This in turn will give it greater power to shape the geopolitics of the region.
At the same time, it is also the latest chapter of China’s longstanding quest to harness its waterways, which now has regional implications beyond anything China’s previous dynasties could imagine.
The Deep Green Resistance Annual Conference will make its East Coast debut this year in Philadelphia. This is an opportunity to build our movement with activists who may have been unable to attend our previous conferences on the West Coast. Your conference ticket includes all meals, overnight accommodations (beds are limited, so some people may be on couches or floors), great workshops and discussions, and a chance to talk to Derrick Jensen in an intimate setting.
Friday will include dinner and some fun ice-breaker activities. Saturday programming will begin in the morning with a presentation by Lierre Keith and continue through Sunday with talks and workshops by active DGR members, supporters, and board members. Presentations will be live-streamed when possible.
The weekend’s focus will be on:
Deeper strategic thinking and analysis about the health and progress of our movement.
Next steps for DGR’s organizing and educational efforts.
Envisioning yourself as an active participant in DGR’s essential work.
We’ll also have nightly campfires with songs, stories, and snacks.
We cannot extend our stay in the main space past Monday morning August 4th, but if you want to stay an additional day, you can be accommodated in a camping area nearby. Bring your camping gear if that sounds fun!
Tickets are on a sliding scale. Our real costs per participant will be about $200/person. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Please consider paying a bit more if you are in an upper-income bracket, and a bit less if you are in a lower income bracket.
In this society, we tend to forget that lower income people have much less disposable income for extras of any kind than do higher income people. So what ends up happening is that lower income people actually end up subsidizing the participation of higher income people at events where everyone pays the same price to attend.
Suggested amounts are listed by income, but you are the best judge of what you can afford. Please pay what you can, and if you can’t pay, you are very much still welcome to attend.
If you want to support this event, please consider making a Donation in either your name or a loved one’s honor. We have people who want to attend but need help.
Speaking at a media briefing to raise awareness on the importance of accountability when such maritime disasters occur, Anita Perera, Campaigner for Greenpeace South Asia, said that when a team visited Mannar on June 19, they noticed a significant number of plastic pellets even after one round of cleanup operations. “The Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) is responsible for cleaning up the oil spill, but so far, they haven’t communicated their response to expedite the cleaning of nurdles or the oil spill. This isn’t an isolated incident but a result of deeper structural failures in how we are governing our oceans and environmental safety. These are critical ecosystems, and there are people(and all of the other species) whose daily livelihoods would be affected as a result of such disasters. We need to hold these companies accountable for such incidents,” she underscored.
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka is once again facing a significant marine environmental crisis, as tiny plastic pellets, commonly known as nurdles, have begun washing ashore along the island’s northern coastline. This time, the pollution is linked to the sinking of the Liberia-flagged container ship MSC ELSA 3 off of Kerala, India. The unfolding incident has triggered fears of a repeat of the X-Press Pearl disaster in 2021, the worst maritime disaster to have occurred in Sri Lanka, significantly impacting marine ecosystems and coastal communities.
According to the Indian Coast Guard, the MSC ELSA 3, carrying 640 containers including hazardous cargo, sank on May 25, roughly 38 nautical miles off the Kerala coast. The cause was reportedly a failure of its ballast system. Indian authorities confirmed the vessel was loaded with an estimated 85 metric tons of diesel and 367 metric tons of furnace oil, in addition to at least 13 containers of dangerous substances such as calcium carbide. All 24 crew members were safely rescued by Indian Coast Guard and Navy teams.
While Indian authorities were able to initially contain an oil spill, the environmental fallout soon escalated. Plastic nurdles released from sunken containers began appearing on beaches in southern India, and by June 11, ocean currents driven by strong gusts of southwest monsoon winds carried them toward Sri Lanka’s northern shores, raising serious concerns among marine biologists and local communities.
Plastic nurdles washed ashore on Sri Lanka’s northern coast. Image courtesy of the Marine Environmental Protection Agency (MEPA).
Fresh environmental fallout
“We’ve begun cleaning efforts and are evaluating coordinated response actions,” said Padma Abeykoon, additional secretary at the Ministry of Environment. With strong monsoon winds forecast for the coming days, she noted that ocean currents may bring even more pollutants ashore.
According to Abeykoon, Indian authorities had alerted Sri Lanka about the possibility of debris from the sunken vessel drifting toward its shores, depending on ocean current patterns. The plastic pellets first arrived on the northern islands and reached the Mannar coast within a day, continuously washing up along Sri Lanka’s southern-facing beaches.
One of the earliest reports from Sri Lanka came from Lahiru Walpita, a birdwatcher in Mannar, who observed the nurdles during his routine early morning seabird monitoring. “On June 12, I noticed strange white pebbles scattered across the Mannar beach. A closer look revealed they were plastic nurdles, something I sadly recognize from the X-Press Pearl spill,” Walpita said.
Walpita initially assumed the rough seas had opened up a remnant of X-Press Pearl, but as he discovered 20 25-kilogram (55-pound) bags of nurdles strewn across a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) stretch of beach in Mannar, he realized something was wrong. Out of these, only two bags were damaged, and others were in perfect shape, Walpita told Mongabay.
Walpita also observed crows and an egret investigating the pellets but hadn’t consumed them. “However, seabirds, like little terns and bridled terns, feed off the ocean surface while in flight and I fear they could mistake these pellets for food as they have little time to observe,” he warned. The breeding season for these species, especially on tiny islands nearby in Adam’s Bridge Marine National Park, runs from May to September, and Walpita fears the nurdle invasion could disrupt their reproductive cycles.
The process of cleaning nurdles along Sri Lanka’s northern coastal area commenced soon after the marine disaster but the strong monsoonal winds are expected to push more nurdles toward the Indian Ocean island’s beaches. Image courtesy of the Marine Environment Protection Agency (MEPA).
Temporary fishing ban
Meanwhile, Indian authorities imposed a temporary fishing ban within 20 nautical miles of the MSC ELSA 3 wreck to mitigate risks from hazardous cargo. One of the most concerning chemicals on board was calcium carbide, which reacts violently with water to release acetylene — a highly flammable and potentially explosive gas — and produces caustic substances harmful to marine life.
Adding to the urgency, Indian authorities are battling another maritime emergency just two weeks after the ELSA 3 incident. On June 7, the Singapore-flagged container ship MV Wan Hai 503 caught fire following multiple explosions, approximately 88 nautical miles off the coast of Kerala. The vessel, carrying more than 2,128 metric tons of fuel and numerous containers with hazardous materials, poses a potentially greater environmental risk than ELSA 3. As of June 18, Indian Coast Guard reports indicated that the fire was under control. The drifting vessel has since been secured and successfully towed away.
The Singapore-flagged MV Wan Hai 503, the second ship that caught fire off the south Indian coast of Kerala, occurred just 15 days after the sinking of the MSC ELSA 3. Image courtesy of the Indian Coast Guard via X.
Nurdle spill
The nurdles are highly persistent in the marine environment, as they can absorb toxic chemicals and enter the food chain, posing a risk to marine life and potentially humans as research on the aftermath of X-Press Pearl disaster proves.
The parallels of these disasters with the X-Press Pearl disaster are striking. The 2021 incident released billions of nurdles into the Indian Ocean, contaminating beaches for months, killing marine organisms and disrupting fishing livelihoods. One silver lining is that a lot of research was conducted following the X-Press Pearl disaster, and this can be informative in tackling the ongoing episode of the nurdle pollution, Gunasekara said.
Even today, Sri Lanka is fighting for adequate compensation, with legal proceedings dragging on in international courts. The echoes of that catastrophe now serve as a grim warning: Unless stronger regional protocols and maritime safety measures are enforced, the region could be doomed to repeat history.
Malaka Rodrigo is a naturalist with an IT background that took environmental journalism in 2007 to follow his belief ‘conservation through awareness’. He won many awards for his work and writes extensively on biodiversity, wildlife, oceans, water, climate change and environmental issues.
Banner image: The Liberia-flagged vessel MSC ELSA 3, carrying 640 containers including 13 with hazardous cargo, together with almost 85 metric tons of diesel and 367 metric tons of furnace oil sank on 25 May, off of Kerala in southern India. Image courtesy of the Indian Coast Guard.
Miguel Guimaraes, a Shipibo-Konibo leader, has spent his life protesting palm oil plantations and other agribusiness ventures exploiting the Amazon rainforest in his homeland of Peru. Last spring, as he attended a United Nations conference on protecting human rights defenders in Chile, masked men broke into his home, stole his belongings, and set the place on fire. Guimarares returned days later to find “he will not live” spray-painted on the wall.
The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, denounced the attack and urged Peru to guarantee Guimarare’s protection. Although Guimaraes enjoyed international support, his assailants haven’t been identified.
Guimaraes is one of 6,400 activists who endured harassment or violence for defending human rights against corporate interests. That’s according to a new report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre that chronicles attacks and civil violations human rights defenders worldwide have experienced over the past decade. Although Indigenous people make up 6 percent of the world population, they accounted for one-fifth of the crimes documented in the report. They also were more likely than others to be killed, particularly in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.
Some of these attacks arise from the “range of ways” governments are restricting civic space and discourse and “prioritizing economic profit,” said Christen Dobson, an author of the report and co-head of the Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders Programme. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a consistent, sustained pattern of attacks against people who speak out against business-related human rights, risks, and harms,” he said.
Most of these attacks are reported by local organizations focused on documenting and collecting Indigenous cases, and the number of crimes against them may be higher. “The only reason we know about even a slice of the scale of attacks against defenders worldwide is because defenders themselves are sharing that information, often at great risk,” said Dobson.
Virtually every industry has a case in the database that the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre maintains. The organization has tracked companies, trade associations, and governments believed to have requested, or paid, law enforcement to intervene in peaceful protest activity. In 2023, for example, local authorities in Oaxaca, Mexico, attacked and injured members of the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus who were peacefully blocking the Mogoñe Viejo-Vixidu railway, which posed a threat to 12 Indigenous communities in the area.
The protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline saw the highest number of attacks related to a single project over the last decade, the report found. Around 100,000 people in 2016 and 2017 gathered to oppose the pipeline and were met with a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and arrest. Energy Transfer, the company that led the project, filed a defamation suit accusing Greenpeace of violating trespassing and defamation laws and coordinating the protests. In March, a jury ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million in damages, a verdict legal experts called “wildly punitive.”
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre cites that lawsuit as an example of companies using a legal tactic called a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, to silence dissent and harass protesters. But Energy Transfer cited that courtroom victory in its response to the nonprofit’s report: “The recent verdict against Greenpeace was also a win for the people of North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protesters who were funded and trained by Greenpeace.”
Fossil fuel companies were hardly the only offenders, however. Dobson and her team identified several cases involving renewable energy sectors, where projects have been linked to nearly 365 cases of harassment and more than 100 killings of human rights defenders.
But mining, including the extraction of “transition minerals,” leads every sector in attacks on defenders. Forty percent of those killed in such crimes were Indigenous, a reflection of the fact that more than half of all critical minerals lie in or near Indigenous land.
The outsize scale of harassment and violence against Indigenous people prompted the U.N. special rapporteur to release a statement last year making clear that “a just transition to green energy must support Indigenous peoples in securing their collective land rights and self-determination over their territories, which play a vital role in biodiversity, conservation, and climate change adaptation.“
Businesses, particularly those in mining and metals, are being pressured to ensure their operations do just that. The Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative, or CSMI, for example, is a voluntary framework to improve industry policies adopted by several trade associations like the Mining Association of Canada. “The standard addresses a broad range of community risks by requiring mining operations to work with communities to identify and work together to mitigate risks faced by the community,” the association said. “Such risks include those to human rights defenders, where they exist.”
Another member of the initiative, the International Council of Mining and Metals, said it has “strengthened our member commitments on human rights defenders to explicitly include defenders in companies’ due diligence, stakeholder engagement, and security processes. Defenders often work on issues related to land, the environment, and Indigenous peoples’ rights.”
Even as this report highlights the dangers human rights defenders face, a growing need for critical minerals, mounting demand for the infrastructure to support AI, and the dismantling of regulatory oversight in the United States bring new threats. The report also makes clear that these attacks will not decrease until broad agreements to adopt and implement protections for these activists are enacted. Such policies must be accompanied by legislation designating Indigenous stewardship of their land and requiring their involvement in project consultations.
Yet Indigenous organizations tend to doubt any industry can be trusted to voluntarily participate in such efforts. In a letter sent to the CSMI, 25 human rights organizations including the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre said mandatory participation will be required to ensure robust protection of human rights defenders and relationships between industry and Indigenous peoples. “People and the environment suffer when companies are left to self-regulate with weak voluntary standards,” the letter stated.
Still, change is coming, however slowly. When Dobson and her team started tracking the harassment and violence against human rights defenders, she wasn’t aware of any companies with a policy pledging to not contribute to or assist attacks against defenders. Since then, “We’ve tracked 51 companies that have made this policy commitment,” she said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t always mean we see progress in terms of implementation of those policies.”
Editor’s note: “The 2025 Queensland floods refer to significant flooding that impacted the northeast Australian state of Queensland in late January, early February, into March and April 2025. The disaster resulted in at least two fatalities from flooding, 31 fatalities from a disease outbreak and prompted mass evacuation orders in Queensland’s coastal regions.”
According to flood gauges, the enormous body of water has surpassed the 1974 event, widely considered the largest flood in Queensland history. But it was still sitting within the floodplain, Sheldon says, just “reaching the edges” of where people thought it would go.
This was a natural phenomenon, Sheldon says, even though the devastation experienced by towns and communities was awful.
“The beauty of these river systems is that they are some of the last unregulated rivers in the world. What we’re witnessing is just rivers being rivers. There are no big dams on these systems. There’s no massive irrigation industry. So this is just what big rivers do.”
“But amid the challenges and the loss, Rowlands said the normally dusty flood plains around his home town were already lush and green and “pretty magic”.
And when the waters do recede, he expects these landscapes, normally among the harshest in the world, to explode with life.”
The unforgiving red earth of the Australian outback has undergone a jaw-dropping transformation — and locals are calling it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to witness Mother Nature at her finest.
Intense flooding submerged usually dry areas of Queensland state in eastern Australia during the last week of March, forcing many people to evacuate and leave their livestock behind.
David Crisafulli, the Queensland premier, called the floods “unprecedented” as several places in western Queensland recorded the worst floods in the last 50 years, CNN reported. Some of the affected areas are normally very dry, including the Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert, a vast arid region known for its sand dunes.
The rains started on March 23 as an inland low pressure area pulled monsoon rain from the tropical north of Australia into the arid landscape of southern Queensland, The Guardian reported. Cyclone Dianne, which reached Queensland from the west a few days later, further intensified the rains.
With rainfall reaching 600 millimeters (24 inches) over the last week of March, almost double the yearly average of some towns, record-breaking flood levels were reported in central Queensland’s Stonehenge, Jundah and Windorah areas. ABC news called it “the biggest flood in living memory for many people across outback Queensland,” exceeding the infamous 1974 flooding in the region.
In many towns, people were rescued using helicopters.
“We flew over a lot of water. We were just amazed how much water is around our place where we have never seen water before,” resident Ann-Maree Lloyd, evacuated by air from their home in the town of Yaraka, told ABC.
The agriculture industry is also facing significant losses. Crisafulli said more than 140,000 livestock, including cattle, sheep, goats and horses, were reported missing or dead, The Guardianreported on April 2. “This number will continue to rise,” he added. Images online show animals stuck in floods or mud.
Crisafulli said recovery may take years. For the agricultural industry, it means rebuilding some 4,700 kilometers (2,900 miles) of private roads and 3,500 km (2,200 mi) of fencing.
“Not only economically, but psychosocially — we’re already getting reports of landholders that are struggling mentally with the prospect of what they know is to come,” Tony Rayner, mayor of the affected Longreach region, told The Guardian.
Environmental geography professor Steve Turton wrote in The Conversation that some meteorologists have dubbed the recent rains a pseudo-monsoon, “because the normal Australian monsoon doesn’t reach this far south — the torrential rains of the monsoonal wet season tend to fall closer to the northern coasts.”
He added most of the rainwater dumped in the dry areas will now flow slowly through channels on the ground until it fills up Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, usually a massive, salty, dry depression in the northern region of South Australia state, covering an area of more than 9,000 km2 (3,500 mi2).
“When Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre fills, it creates an extraordinary spectacle,” Turton wrote. Millions of brine shrimp hatch from eggs in the waters, which draw fish carried in the floodwaters, which in turn attract many waterbirds, he added.
Editor’s note: “A new report from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative says unless something changes, all U.S. consumers will pay billions of dollars to build new power plants to serve Big Tech.
Data centers are forecast to account for up to 12% of all U.S. electricity demand by 2028. They currently use about 4% of all electricity.
Historically, costs for new power plants, power lines and other infrastructure is paid for by all customers under the belief that everyone benefits from those investments.
‘But the staggering power demands of data centers defy this assumption,’ the report argues.”
AI burns through a lot of resources. And thanks to a paradox first identified way back in the 1860s, even a more energy-efficient AI is likely to simply mean more energy is used in the long run.
For most users, “large language models” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT work like intuitive search engines. But unlike regular web-searches that find and retrieve data from anywhere along a global network of servers, AI models return data they’ve generated from scratch. Like powering up a nuclear reactor to use a calculator, this tailored process is very inefficient.
“This move is part of a national trend. The data center industry is booming all over, from Virginia to Texas to Oregon, and utilities across the country are responding by building new fossil fuel resources or delaying retirements, all at a time when scientists agree that cutting fossil fuel emissions is more urgent than ever. More than 9,000 MW of fossil fuel generation slated for closure has been delayed or is at risk of delay, and more than 10,800 MW of new fossil fuel generation has been planned, according to the sustainability research and policy center Frontier Group.
The backslide into fossil fuels is alarming to environmental and consumer advocates, and not only because it stands to slow down climate action and extend the harmful effects of fossil fuel use. Some also question the purported growth in demand — meaning utilities could be doubling down on climate-warming coal and gas to meet energy demand that won’t actually materialize.”
Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactor), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.
Remembering Past Ranfare
But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.
As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for V. C. Summer.
The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019. In fact, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company’s energy sales declined by 3 percent by the time 2016 rolled in. [Such mistakes are standard in the history of nuclear power. In the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and utility companies were projecting that “about one thousand large nuclear power reactors” would be built “by the year 2000 and about two thousand, mostly breeder reactors, by 2010” on the basis of the grossly exaggerated estimates of how rapidly electricity production would grow during the same period. It turned out that “utilities were projecting four to nine times more electric power would be produced in the United States by nuclear power in 2000 than actually happened”.] In the case of South Carolina, the wrong projection about energy sales was the basis of the $9 billion plus spent on the abandoned V. C. Summer project.
The Racket Continues
With no sense of shame for that failure, one of the two companies involved in that fiasco recently expressed an interest in selling this project. On January 22, Santee Cooper’s President and CEO wrote, “We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets…Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline”.
A couple of numbers to put those claims about timelines in perspective: the average nuclear reactor takes about 10 years to go from the beginning of construction—usually marked by when concrete is poured into the ground—to when it starts generating electricity. But one cannot go from deciding to build a reactor to pouring concrete in the ground overnight. It takes about five to ten years needed before the physical activities involved in building a reactor to obtain the environmental permits, and the safety evaluations, carry out public hearings (at least where they are held), and, most importantly, raise the tens of billions of dollars needed. Thus, even the “meaningfully shortened timeline” will mean upwards of a decade.
Going by the aftermath of the Deepseek, the AI and data center driven energy demand bubble seems to have crashed on a timeline far shorter than even that supposedly “meaningfully shortened timeline”. There is good reason to expect that this AI bubble wasn’t going to last, for there was no real business case to allow for the investment of billions. What DeepSeek did was to also show that the billions weren’t needed. As Emily Bender, a computer scientist who co-authored the famous paper about large language models that coined the term stochastic parrots, put it: “The emperor still has no clothes, but it’s very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.”
But utility companies are not giving up. At a recent meeting organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization for the nuclear industry, the Chief Financial Officer of Constellation Energy, the company owning the most nuclear reactors in the United States, admitted that the DeepSeek announcement “wasn’t a fun day” but maintained that it does not “change the demand outlook for power from the data economy. It’s going to come.” Likewise, during an “earnings call” earlier in February, Duke Energy President Harry Sideris maintained that data center hyperscalers are “full speed ahead”.
Looking Deeper
Such repetition, even in the face of profound questions about whether such a growth will occur, is to be expected, for it is key to the stock price evaluations and market capitalizations of these companies. The constant reiteration of the need for more and more electricity and other resources also adopts other narrative devices shown to be effective in a wide variety of settings, for example, pointing to the possibility that China would take the lead in some technological field or the other, and explicitly or implicitly arguing how utterly unacceptable that state of affairs would be. Never asking whether it even matters who wins this race for AI. These tropes and assertions about running out of power contribute to creating the economic equivalent of what Stuart Hall termed “moral panic”, thus allowing possible opposition to be overruled.
One effect of this slew of propaganda has been the near silence on the question of whether such growth of data centers or AI is desirable, even though there is ample evidence of the enormous environmental impacts of developing AI and building hyperscale data centers. Or for that matter the desirability of nuclear power.
As Lewis Mumford once despaired: “our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon”.
But, of course, we live in a time of monsters. At a time when the levers of power are wielded by a megalomaniac who would like to colonize Mars, and despoil its already sterile environment.
