Hoping Kansas will get ‘advanced’ nuclear energy? Careful what you wish for in the Age of Damocles.

A nuclear plant radiation protection sign warns members of the public away from the site. (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

Swords or ploughshares?

That’s the dilemma that has plagued us since the sudden dawn of the nuclear age. Should we split atoms for peace or to rain destruction on our enemies? In the space of a single human life we’ve done both, killing hundreds of thousands in two atomic bomb attacks on Japan and then building nuclear reactors to provide light, power and medicine.

Radioactivity was discovered just more than a century ago, when Wilhelm Roentgen detected X-rays. In high school textbooks, most of us saw the ghostly radiograph of his wife Anna’s skeletal hand with wedding band, “Hand mit Ringen.” The image — the first X-ray — prompted Anna to remark, “I have seen my own death.” In 1913, science fiction writer H.G. Wells predicted both nuclear power and weaponry, in “The World Set Free.” In 1938, the trio of Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann were first to recognize that uranium atoms split when bombarded by neutrons. When physicist Leo Szilard confirmed fission, according to author Edward A. Friedman, he said ”the world was headed for sorrow.”

In 1939, Szilard and Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising that fission could be used to create a powerful new bomb. The scientists feared the Nazis were already working on such a device, and their letter helped spur creation of the secret Manhattan Project, which eventually resulted to the test firing of the first atomic bomb in a remote part of New Mexico in 1945. Three weeks later came the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The Cold War began shortly after, and by 1949 our former allies, the Soviets, had their own nuclear weapon, too.

Later we created nuclear weapons stockpiles ready to kill hundreds of millions more and built dozens of nuclear generating plants to provide about 20% of the American electrical supply. One of those plants, Wolf Creek, owned by two regional utilities, has been online in Kansas since 1985.

Now comes a firm founded by one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates, with the lure of bringing “advanced” nuclear power to Kansas. TerraPower announced a partnership last month with the state’s Department of Commerce and Evergy, one of the owners of Wolf Creek, to explore placing a natrium reactor somewhere in the utility’s service area of eastern Kansas.

TerraPower is already building a $4 billion pilot natrium reactor site in Wyoming, with half of the funding from the US Department of Energy. Some of the projected energy may power AI data centers. The company promises clean and safe power through its innovative technology, which uses molten salt (natrium is Latin for sodium) to cool the 345-megawatt reactor instead of water, as is done at Wolf Creek and every other commercial nuclear plant in the U.S.

A few Kansas communities in Evergy country have already tossed their hardhats in the ring to host the natrium reactor, including my home city of Emporia. The city commission, along with the county board and a regional development association, signed a letter of support for the project. Commissioners in Coffey County, home to the Wolf Creek plant, have also expressed interest, as have officials in Hutchinson.

TerraPower claims it will only place reactors where they are wanted, but there’s not been time for any substantive public discussion yet on the issue. Nobody asked Kansans whether we want a second nuclear plant or not. Another firm, Deep Fission, is working with an undisclosed partner to place reactors at the bottom of mile-deep holes in Kansas to supply power-hungry AI centers, but it’s not answering questions about details or whether it has sought state approval.

The gold rush for new nuclear is on.

We are, according to current U.S. policy, on the verge of a “new nuclear renaissance.” Old fears spawned by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are receding in popular memory. There is now public and bipartisan support for expanding nuclear power, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

It is understandable why leaders in a community like Emporia — which logged the state’s highest unemployment following the closure of Tyson meats — would find TerraPower’s projected 1,500 construction and 500 permanent jobs attractive.

But those vying to bring TerraPower jobs to their communities might want to cool their enthusiasm long enough to consider the safety and security risks presented by natrium reactors.

These risks were described to me by Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group. Lyman is an expert on nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and safety and security. He’s also one of the authors of “Fukishima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster.”

“I have signifcant concerns,” Lyman said, “related to safety and security as well as for the economics. … It’s inexplicable to me why there’s so much enthusiasm for this type of reactor.”

When I spoke with Lyman on Tuesday, he’d just finished monitoring a multi-day Nuclear Regulatory Commission advisory committee meeting reviewing the preliminary safeguard assessment of the TerraPower’s Wyoming reactor.

It is important to note that TerraPower refused my repeated requests for an interview. “TerraPower will have to politely decline participation in this opportunity at this time,” public relations specialist Brooke Leader said on behalf of the firm.

The problems with the natrium reactor, Lyman said, are inherent in the design of any sodium-cooled reactor. The molten sodium bursts into flame upon contact with air or water, he said, and these types of reactors have historically been expensive to build and prone to leaks. But, he said, the most worrying thing about the natrium reactor is that it uses fuel enriched to up to 20% of the isotope Uranium 235. This fuel is called HALEU, for high assay low enrichment uranium, and it’s just below the threshold for weapons-grade material.

Conventional nuclear reactors use fuel that is between 3 and 5% enriched.

Natrium reactors require HALEU to make them smaller and more efficient, Lyman said, but there is no domestic source of this fuel available in the quantities needed. In addition, security at natrium reactors would have to be beefed up compared with conventional reactors, because HALEU is attractive to terrorists and rogue states. Enriching uranium to 20% represents most of the effort required to make weapons-grade material.

In addition, there’s the problem — inherent with every reactor currently operating or planned in the United States — that there’s no long-term storage solution for spent fuel. Work on the Yucca Mountain geologic repository was halted in 2010. All waste is stored on-site, in cooling ponds and dry casks. It will remain hazardous for much longer than there has been recorded history — tens of thousands of years.

We can’t even keep the government running year-round or provide reliable food and health care to our poorest Americans. How can we expect to keep the distant future safe from us?

The immediate risk with a natrium reactor, Lyman said, is fire.

Molten sodium “is a highly reactive material, so you have to keep it away from the air and water at all costs,” Lyman said, “or you could end up with a sodium fire. And having a nuclear reactor where the coolant itself can catch on fire just sounds like a bad idea. It really is. So they have to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent any exposure of the coolant to air or water.”

This adds a level of unneeded complexity, he said. Even though TerraPower claims that natrium reactors are safer than light water-cooled reactors, Lyman said just the opposite is true. The time to respond to accidents is much shorter, he said, and there is no containment structure — the familiar dome-shaped vessel — as additional backup to contain leaks.

“The Department of Energy is trying, with Congress’s help, to stimulate and stand up a whole production program for this kind of (HALEU) material,” Lyman said. “But the demand is very unclear. The investments are on the order of billions and billions of dollars for an infrastructure to make this fuel. It’s a risky proposition, and it’s not clear that TerraPower is going to have the amount of fuel it needs just for the first plant.”

Because TerraPower would not speak to me, I will rely on author Edward A. Friedman, in his 2025 book “Nuclear Energy: boom, Bust, and Emerging Renaissance,” to make the case for next generation reactor technology.

“The promise for successful realization of (advanced) technology was significantly enhanced with the groundbreaking of the TerraPower sodium-cooled natrium reactor,” Friedman writes. Bills Gates’s company, TerraPower, began construction June 10, 2024, at Kemmerer, Wyoming,  “of the natrium fast-neutron, liquid sodium-cooled reactor (SFR) that uses an associated liquid salt storage system. This fail-safe, small modular reactor (SMR) will be the first model in the world for cost-effective replacement of a coal-fired power plant with a nuclear reactor.”

The reactor is expected to become operational in 2030.

Gates hopes for hundreds of coal-to-nuclear transformations in the future, according to Friedman. Indeed, the vision of replacing fossil fuel that drove Gates to found TerraPower in the first place.

“There’s no scenario in which we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere and the world stops getting hotter,” Gates wrote in his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

“The hotter it gets, the harder it will be for humans to survive, much less thrive,” Gates wrote.

Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source, he said, that can reliably deliver power day and night through any type of weather on a large scale. It’s also one of the few practical ways to bring electricity to the poorest of countries, such as those found in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to energy is highly correlated to wealth and happiness.

“It’s no secret that nuclear power has its problems,” Gates wrote. “It’s very expensive to build today. Human error can cause accidents. Uranium, the fuel it uses, can be converted for use in weapons. The waste is dangerous and hard to store.”

Yet, nuclear represented our best hope of stopping global warming, he claimed. There was nothing more important than halting the rise in temperature if we were to avoid catastrophe.

Recently, Gates has changed his tune on climate.

In a memo to COP30, the United Nations climate change conference scheduled for next week in Brazil, Gates abandoned his previous “net zero” views. He criticized “doomsday” climate scenarios and suggested that people will be able to “live and thrive” in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. It’s time to put “human welfare” at the center of climate strategies and improving agriculture and health in the poorest countries.

“Climate change is a serious problem,” he said, “but it will not be the end of civilization.”

The memo sounds like nothing short of a retreat from climate activism from a man who had spent personal billions on a quest for net zero. In the case of his push for advanced reactors, Gates may have been so driven by his desire to stop global warming that he swallowed the nuclear pill.

His sudden redirection must be having some effect on TerraPower, the company he founded. But his memo will have no effect on the U.S. delegation to COP30, because there will be no official American presence there. Donald Trump had already pulled the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. The world has now blown past the agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius limit on global warming, with more climate suffering to follow.

Trump recently directed the United States to resume nuclear weapons testing, something we haven’t done since 1992. There is not yet a name for this arms race, but it is on as surely as the seas are rising. I am reminded of Damocles from Greek mythology, who was taught the dangers of power by the sword dangling above. So let us call this the Age of Damocles, because nothing is happy for those wracked by anxiety.

It is no coincidence that we embrace a new arms race at the same moment we accelerate the regulatory process to approve and deploy new types of nuclear reactors that use disturbingly enriched fuel. While nuclear proponents like Friedman dismiss opposition to nuclear power as an artifact of the Cold War and media misinformation, there were reasons for those fears. Troubling issues remain.

Opposition to nuclear power that curbed the U.S. nuclear power program from the 1980s until recently was based not only on fictional movies like 1979’s “The China Syndrome” but in real-life accidents like Fukishima in 2011, in which an earthquake and tsunami shut down the power grid and made it impossible to cool the reactors. More recently, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, has caused alarm because it’s been damaged and sometimes cut off in the ongoing war with Russia. Movies that might contain some inaccuracies, such as the 2019 HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” are not causes of our nuclear jitters but expressions of them.

This is the global context in which we find ourselves pondering whether a new type of nuclear energy is good for Kansas or just a costly experiment that will risk accident or murderous mayhem. We live in a new period of global instability, one driven by all the old forces — greed, ignorance, haste, denial — that have plagued us since the ice receded. The communications from TerraPower have been carefully curated to present a sanitized version of a techno billionaire philanthropist’s dream of a nuclear renaissance.

I’m cold to the idea of spending billions on nuke plants to power, in large part, electricity-hungry AI data centers. It seems immoral when so many Americans go hungry and are without health insurance. Beyond that, there’s just too many unanswered questions about next-generation reactors.

But I’m opposed to the TerraPower plan for a natrium reactor in Kansas not because of the unknowns — where, how much, how long? — but because of what we do know. The HALEU fuel, in the amounts needed, presents an unacceptable risk of nuclear proliferation.

Let us not unknowingly beat our ploughshares into swords.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.