As it was said (and sang) in 1979, plutonium is forever…with thousands of years of radioactivity from nuclear fission (especially plutonium 239). Jeff Bezos—proving again that he is not Democracy’s friend—and his colleagues at Google are lobbying our Legislature to buy into the costly scam of small modular nuclear reactors. Proponents claim that this reactor model is safe (very unproven) and downplay that they want tax dollars to subsidize developing this typically costliest energy, so that we can have more data centers (hear those electric wires sing) and AI. (But don’t worry—if a Fukushima happens, the taxpayers help pay the cost, under the Price-Anderson act!) Oregonians voted against nuclear power expansion in 1980, unless a permanent waste repository were available. Guess what? No permanent repository is in sight. Think about it as you windsail near Hanford on the Columbia, or as you drive by the Trojan waste holding area on the highway through Rainier. Urge your state representative to not support HB2410 and your state senator not to support SB215 or SB216. (Right now, HB2410 is under review by the Ways and Means Committee, co-chaired by Kate Lieber and Tawna Sanchez—you can write them too!) TO LEARN MORE: Columbia Riverkeeper, which has been keeping its eyes on Hanford’s leaking tanks, firmly opposes such legislation (https://www.columbiariverkeeper.org/2025/keep-oregon-nuclear-free/). You can also track Oregon no-nukes activism at https://stopnuclearworkgroup.org. Re-energize with these 1979 No-Nukes favorites: “Plutonium is Forever!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce350CClJts) or “Power” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKJ_73_8kzo)

3 replies on “Plutonium is Forever… at State Capitol”

  1. The thing is – small modular reactors ARE safe. They’re in use in other countries just fine. And most designs are inherently meltdown-proof. And many new designs are coming out that are “recycling” reactors – they don’t produce radioactive waste, they reuse their used fuel.

    To have a Carbon-free future, we will need to embrace nuclear as “base load” generation.

    That said – the specific use case is horrendous. We really should NOT be pouring megawatts and megawatts of power at datacenters. “AI” needs to die. We don’t need to be feeding full cities’ worth of power at individual datacenter just to power automated art theft. It’s like the big companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc) have all decided “you know all those power reduction goals people/countries are heading toward? We’re going to wipe them all out in just a couple dozen datacenters.”

  2. I don’t know if everyone agrees they are safe..

    Especially around the Cascadia subduction zone. And there is no repository for the waste–that problem has not been solved by any means.

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