No Timmy, We Have A Nuclear Reactor at Home

Arizona is growing. Our summers are getting hotter. We need more
electricity. Our communities need more revenue. But we also need to
protect our water sources. The question is not whether we need power
and sources of revenue—it is how we get it, and who it serves.
Some lawmakers at the state capitol want to build Small Modular
Reactors, or SMRs. These are a new kind of nuclear plant. They say
SMRs will provide clean, reliable power for data centers and new
technology.

I agree that nuclear power has come a long way. Modern reactors are
safer than the ones built decades ago. But that does not mean they are
right for Arizona. For a desert state with limited water, an uncertain
fuel supply, and a need for power now, SMRs may be one of the worst
choices we could make. Isn't it strange that these folks want your
vote in November for a plan that will not deliver for another decade
at the very least? That sounds rather like how Wimpy from Popeye buys
lunch.

No Working Model Exists

First, no commercial SMR has ever been built in the United States. The
companies pushing them say they will be ready in ten or fifteen years.
But building the very first one always takes longer and costs more
than promised. Meanwhile, we would be gambling on a technology that
has never been proven to work in a desert environment. And nuclear
plants need huge amounts of water. In a state where every drop counts,
that is a dangerous bet. Even with so-called "closed loop" cooling
systems, we simply do not have a working example to tell us if the
water usage will drain our limited resources.

Some proponents have suggested using SMRs to power desalination plants
to clean up brackish groundwater for cooling. That is what we called
in the Army a "self-licking ice cream cone"—a solution that exists
only to sustain itself. Building SMRs to clean up groundwater to cool
SMRs seems rather silly. Even if there is excess energy, we still have
to account for the recharge rate of these brackish aquifers. If we
draw water faster than it recharges, wells go dry. And when wells go
dry in rural Arizona, we get land subsidence, cave-ins, and destroyed
infrastructure. That is not a solution—it is a new problem.

The Fuel Comes from Russia

These reactors require a special type of fuel called HALEU. The United
States does not make it yet. The first American facilities are
supposed to open around 2030—if everything goes perfectly. Until then,
we would have to buy this fuel from Russia. That timeline does fit,
since a reactor approved today will need a decade minimum to be ready
for fuel. But because we do not have these fuel facilities running
yet, we also do not know the quality or quantity that will be in place
by the time these SMRs come online. That leaves Russia as a fail-safe
to protect an extremely expensive investment.

Let that sink in. The same lawmakers who talk about "energy
independence" want Arizona to depend on Vladimir Putin as a backup for
nuclear fuel. That is not independence. That is a foreign dictator
holding our leash.

We do have uranium mines in northern Arizona. But ask the Navajo
Nation and other local communities about the legacy of uranium mining.
Decades later, they are still dealing with contaminated water and
health problems. Opening more mines is not a simple solution. Why send
people to mine poison when the sun is already there?

Who Are We Building This For?

Here is the question no one in Phoenix is asking: Who are we building
this power for?
The push for SMRs is being driven by big tech companies that want to
build massive data centers in Arizona. These data centers are for
Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Once they are built, they create very
few local jobs. They use enormous amounts of electricity. And they
drink millions of gallons of water for cooling.

In the meantime, the companies building these data centers have bought
up almost all of the world's most advanced computer chips. That drives
up the cost of our own electronics. They will happily rent us back
some computing power—for a monthly subscription, of course.

So we are being asked to give up our water, our land, and our energy
future for facilities that will send their profits out of state. And
here is the kicker: even if we fast-track SMRs, they will not be
online for ten years. So how will these data centers be powered in the
meantime? Coal. Natural gas. The very fossil fuels SMRs are supposed
to replace.

A Better Way

We have a better choice. Arizona has more sunshine than almost
anywhere in the world. Solar power with battery storage is ready to
install today. It is the cheapest way to generate electricity at
scale. And unlike nuclear, solar does not use water at anything close
to the rate of a nuclear reactor.

Solar can be owned by the people who use it. Instead of betting
everything on massive, corporate-owned reactors, we can build
community solar arrays, cooperative facilities, and rooftop panels.
That keeps the money in our communities instead of sending it to Wall
Street.

What is more, through existing models of community-focused investment,
our state and local governments can help create cooperative public
benefit corporations. Using grants, bonds, and individual investment
through a statewide retirement fund to capitalize them, there's no
reason community oriented private cooperatives owned by regular
Arizonans couldn't build and own not just the power infrastructure,
but also the data centers themselves—using next-generation processors
that are low-heat and low-energy use, that are already being developed
and are nearing commercial production right here in Arizona.

Our money spends just as well as that from Wall Street investment
firms and Silicon Valley Tech Bros. Why shouldn't we be using existing
ways of pooling our funds to build and keep wealth in Arizona owned by
not the state government but the actual people of Arizona? These
technologies are already being developed and will be ready for
commercial production before the first U.S. HALEU fuel plant is even
online, and well before the first SMR powers up the by-then
already-obsolete Silicon Valley corporate AI data centers.

If we're going to be preparing for a future in which Arizona is on the
cutting edge of an emerging technology, we're going to have to make
some speculations as to what has the best chance of doing the most
good for everyday working Arizonans. We should bet on what is most
likely to build real wealth for our people and provide the most
independence and local economic control to our communities. This is
how we lower crime rates, help families to stay together, bolster
small business, protect our water resources, and improve access to
vital goods and services: by creating onramps to meaningful ownership
of productive wealth for the people of our state.

Letting corporate SMRs, run corporate desalination plants, to run
corporate AI data centers to fill our entire world with AI slop,
destroy professional jobs, and place the last vestiges of the digital
frontier behind a corporate paywall is a recipe for corporate
codependence, widening rural poverty, and water-starved ghost towns
replacing our historical communities.

No matter which way the future goes, we will have the sun, and by
taking the first step to energy independence through investing in
solar will serve us well regardless of how the geopolitics of fossil
and nuclear fuels shake out and with no respect to the potential
rupture of the AI bubble which is being seen as an extremely possible
scenario.

Expanding the time-tested paradigm of cooperative community
investment, we could fund a Digital New Deal for Arizonans. This would
provide local control, dignified wages, and a position as a world
leader in solar and computer technology—all while protecting our rural
areas and sensitive environments from being chewed up by the
industrial machine to feed Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Even if next-generation processors are not immediately available,
local energy sovereignty for Arizonans would be a massive economic
strength. It would support economic expansion beyond
agrivoltaics—things like more energy-efficient special-purpose AI
tools, more efficient programming methodologies, and cutting-edge
heat-reflective materials science to help cool our warming world.

What This Means for Rural Arizona

For those of us in Cochise, Graham, and Greenlee counties, this is
personal. We know how precious water is. We watch every drop in the
San Pedro Valley, the Sulphur Springs Valley, and across our ranch
lands.

Agrivoltaics—placing solar panels over crops—is already proving that
we can farm and generate power on the same land. The panels shade
crops, reduce evaporation, and often increase yields. Our farmers
could gain stable energy costs and a new source of income while using
less water. A nuclear plant, by contrast, sits behind a fence, using
millions of gallons of water and producing nothing else for our
communities.

There is something else. The bills being pushed in Phoenix would strip
counties of their authority to regulate SMRs. That means local
communities like ours would have no say over a nuclear reactor being
built in our backyard. Rural Arizonans believe in local control.
Taking that away to fast-track an unproven technology for out-of-state
corporations is exactly the wrong way to treat us.

The Choice Is Ours

I understand the appeal of nuclear SMRs. It sounds powerful and
futuristic. But Arizona has always been defined by its relationship
with the sun. We have an opportunity to lead—not by waiting a decade
for an unproven reactor, but by investing today in technology that is
clean, cheap, accessible for working people, and built for our desert
home.

The sun does not send us a bill. It does not require fuel from Russia.
It does not need a cooling tower. It rises every morning over Arizona,
offering us a choice.
We would be wise to take it.
____
Ryan Slawson holds a bachelor's degree in applied
technology (Informatics) from the University of Arizona.