Nuclear Power, You Sexy Thing
Will Arizona Jump on Trump's Nuclear Bandwagon?
A Man Who Loves His Job
Sec. of Energy Chris Wright, all grins, told a roomful of Republican leaders at the Conservative Climate Summit in Salt Lake City that he and Donald Trump were making “nuclear energy sexy again.”
The first time anything about radiation was considered sexy was in the 1950s during the Atomic Age, which dawned with the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.
After the novelty of astounding mushroom clouds on the horizon wore off, a frightening thing happened. Americans began dying of cancers that were consistently on the list of malignant tumors related to exposure to radioisotopes, like uranium-233.
If it wasn’t a fast-growing cancer like leukemia, contracted by children caught in the fallout and which killed them before their young life matured, it was the cancers that came later and then often in multiples of two or three emerging over the last years of one’s life and striking different parts of the body.
“I know exactly how many people have died from nuclear energy: Zero.” – Sec. Wright
In his climate conference presentation in October, Sec. Wright was not talking about the power and glory of nuclear weapons, but the blockbuster year he and Trump have had as they aggressively push to get nuclear-fueled energy not just in the mix of energy-producing sources but as a powerful tool for servicing the rabbit-paced growth of data centers.
Trump calls his agenda of expanding and growing the military and civilian use of nuclear technology a “nuclear renaissance.” Meaning not just to enhance the country’s internal needs but to become, as Sec. Wright has said, a global leader in the use, production, and export of next-generation nuclear technology.
“The world needs more energy to meet the AI challenge and drive human progress — and the United States is boldly leading the way,” said Sec. Wright at a September meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“The golden era of American energy dominance is upon us,” says Sec. Wright, who famously said to Fox News, “I know exactly how many people have died from nuclear energy: Zero.”
The Entire Fruit Family Is Affected
This is not a case of nuclear apples and oranges. Whether for bombs or utilities, they are both poisoned by some of the same radioisotopes. From medical x-rays to bombs and power plants, anything “nuclear” is a threat to life, by degree and longevity of exposure. Remembering that radioisotopes have a half-life — uranium-238’s is 4.5 billion years — in St. Louis, Missouri, there are families succumbing to cancers and birth defects caused by uranium waste leaking from corroded steel barrels into a park and creek.
The waste was dumped 50-plus years ago by a local chemical company working with the Manhattan Project during the three years it took to devise and test a successful atomic bomb.
Regardless of its past and aside from its sex appeal, nuclear power hasn’t been this popular since before the incidents that reminded the world that these electric power houses also have the means to kill: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
People Forget
The population is younger now, fewer people think of meltdowns and radiation when nuclear power is mentioned.
As pro-nuclear influencer Isabelle Boemeken (Isodope) effused, “We took that thing that terrified our grandparents, taught it manners, and turned it into humanity’s best friend.”
Pew Research finds six in 10 adults have a positive view of nuclear energy, with 59% of Americans in 2025 favoring more nuclear power plants, up from 43% in 2020. It is also true that most Democrats give positive responses to more solar and wind than nuclear power, yet by and large nuclear power is a bipartisan issue.
Arizona leaders who have made their pro-nuclear opinions known include Democrats Sen. Mark Kelly and Sen. Reuben Gallego, Democrat Rep. Greg Stanton and Republican congressmen Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, and Juan Ciscomani.
Will Arizona Join the Rad Rush?
Could 2026 usher the beginnings of a new era of next-generation nuclear technology in Arizona, where the country’s largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde Generating Station, has powered Arizona and portions of Texas, California, and New Mexico for 40 years.
Our neighbor to the north, Utah, is over-the-top about nuclear and has spent 2025 developing, approving, and partnering in nuclear state-private-federal projects, which is why Sec. Wright was the keynote for the Salt Lake City event.
“Operation Gigawatt” is the slogan for Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox’s push to make his state the nuclear power hub of the West.
“We are in an arms race right now. It’s an AI arms race with China and with Russia,” Gov. Cox said. “And we‘re losing that. If we don’t get nuclear right, we‘re in trouble.”
Data Data Everywhere
Arizona has grappled with the intensity of data centers keen to populate the state, primarily in Maricopa County. As shown on the map above, the data center industry roadmap is looking more like mobile telecom coverage.
The Phoenix area is one of the major hubs for these low-slung, bland buildings that are more like row after arterial row of cables, floor to ceiling and also in the ceiling. These are monster computer closets with patch panels and an insatiable appetite for energy and water, including the energy it takes to deliver all that water from its source to service.
Tucson residents shut down the early plans for Project Blue, apparently an Amazon AWS project, but it hasn’t gone away. Again, if you look at the map above you can see why: the West is wide open territory.
According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in two years more than half of the electricity used by data centers today will be for AI. “At that point, just AI would consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households,” reports MIT Technology Review.
What’s to Be Done as the Present Becomes Tomorrow?
To this electrified point, in late November Gov. Katie Hobbs announced a task force to develop a platform, strategy, and procedural guidelines for Arizona’s energy future.
Called Energy Promise, the task force reflects 30 voices representing the state’s environment and energy justice organizations, utility CEOs, union, city, county, and other state officials, lawyers, and industry lobbyists.
Among those advising on the next step for Arizona’s grid supply, Kristin Strobel, director of State Government and Industry Affairs for Microsoft, and Ellen Zuckerman, who heads up Energy Market Development, North and South America, at Google.
Google, like Microsoft, is a known entity in Mesa, where it recently opened a $600 million data center. Zuckerman and Strobel will be critical voices for understanding the still-unveiling future of data centers, cloud space, and AI — their interdependence and the ongoing, ever-growing reliance on what they and we need: electricity and certainly water.
Gov. Hobbs has given the task force a deadline of March 1, 2026, to come up with three plans that together, she says, will help plot the state’s energy solvency:
A policy framework for dealing with the onslaught of the data center “hyperscalers,” Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and META, and their impact on ratepayers. Maricopa County is the second-largest data-center hub in the US outside of Virginia. Pinal and Pima counties are in their sights.
An energy strategy that addresses the power sources now or soon to be available, “such as geothermal and advanced nuclear power.”
And a plan that will streamline infrastructure deployment “by cutting red tape related to the use of state lands.”
Administered by the governor’s Office of Resiliency, Maren Mahoney, OOR director, leads the task force and assures the public will have the opportunity to weigh in as the work continues into 2026.
Is AZ Leaning in the New Nuke Direction?
Gov. Hobbs isn’t the only state official interested in taking a closer look at what Sec. Wright has been hyping, as her expectations from the task force convey.
Arizona’s three primary utilities and Warren Petersen and Michael Carbone, state senate president and majority leader, respectively, have spent the past year in various stages of “advanced” nuclear power conversations.
Mostly when “advanced” is evoked that means the subject is about small modular reactors, the SMRs. The darling of the nuclear industry for at least 15 years but muted by Fukushima, 2025 could be its breakthrough year and fits well with the Trump administration’s preference for unchecked speed ahead. For feeding the hive of data centers, modular, scalable, and flexible to deploy SMRs generate a standalone volume of 300 MWe, approximately one-third the capacity of a traditional reactor or enough juice to power 300,000 homes.
The even smaller microreactors, shown in the illustration above, are also getting a boost as nuclear generation continues its ascent.
If all goes as envisioned by Trump, at least three SMRs will be deployed in the US and the switch flipped in the on position this coming 4th of July, America’s 250th birthday.
Trump’s big bang for America’s semiquincentennial celebration is contained in Executive Order 1430 as the Reactor Pilot Program, a DOE “pathway for advanced reactor demonstration to fast-track commercial licensing.” The goal is to “construct, operate, and achieve criticality of at least three test reactors” by the Independence Day deadline. DOE has chosen 11 companies to join the competition and work with DOE on private funding.
Utah is aiming to be part of that milestone with its partnership with SMR developer Valar Atomics.
In January, Arizona utilities APS, SRP, and TEP made the first of two submissions for a $900 million DOE opportunity to lay the groundwork for SMR deployment in Arizona. They have as good a chance as any of the utilities applying for the funding: APS manages the Palo Verde plant.
The winner of the grant — a holdover from President Biden’s IRA, which in this case aligned with Trump’s nuclear energy worldview — will be announced by the end of 2025.
Part of the funding is specific to fast-tracking the permitting process for establishing the SMRs. To help push the SMRs into Arizona territory, Carbone last February introduced HB 2774.
The bill, vetoed by Hobbs in April, would have removed “bureaucratic hurdles standing in the way of SMR deployment to meet growing energy needs, streamlining the permitting process for utilities and large technology companies with clean, reliable energy,” said the Arizona House leader.
Carbone said he would pursue similar legislation in the upcoming 2026 session.
