Are politicians going to just allow numerous nuclear catastrophes?
Donald Trump’s nuclear rules slash security requirements, eliminate groundwater protections, and allow for higher exposure to radiation, to push untested experimental nuclear reactors not proven safe.
This is so obviously a recipe for numerous nuclear accidents:
The Trump administration has secretly rewritten nuclear safety rules Updated January 28, 20262:03 PM ET Heard on Morning Edition Geoff Brumfiel, photographed for NPR, 17 January 2019, in Washington DC. The orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.
My letter to reps:
It’s reported that Donald Trump has pushed through nuclear rules that are set up for both national security and community safety to be completely compromised.
This is, it is said, to benefit the experimental nuclear reactor companies so they can rush through production of nuclear reactors. One wonders if there’s foreign influence here as well, as it will allow for widespread national security points of failure. Donald Trump’s new nuclear rules slash security, eliminate groundwater protections, and allow for higher worker exposure to radiation.
The type of business people we are supposed to trust to set up nuclear reactors with loose security and safety rules are apparently people like Kip Mock who is reported to have burned an employee sending him to the hospital by putting diesel fuel into a wood burning stove and now he’s an exec at a company that made a marketing claim that spent fuel was as safe to hold as having a medical CT scan, when in fact it would deliver a fatal dose of radiation probably within milliseconds.
There have been plans made known in the press already, that these untested and unregulated nuclear reactors, with little to no safety and loosened environmental protections, have been planned already around Scranton and Pittsburgh.
The company Oklo is planning untested technology nuclear reactors where the meltdown ingestion zone includes downtown Pittsburgh as well as Butler PA and Youngstown Ohio. The purpose being to power Meta AI which Mark Zuckerberg says the use case for it is to replace human friends with chatbots and replace human created reels on Instagram with AI slop.
This is complete madness, and must be stopped by any means necessary.
What are you doing to stop multiple preventable nuclear catastrophes in Pennsylvania?
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
The type of business people we are supposed to trust to set up nuclear reactors with loose security and safety rules are apparently people like Kip Mock who is reported to have burned an employee sending him to the hospital by putting diesel fuel into a wood burning stove and now is head of operations for Valar Atomics that’s made ridiculous and obviously false safety claims.
Watch out because “innovation” is always a red flag, remember Stockton Rush infamously complained people were stopping him from doing innovation. These people also are so often said to lash out at so-called “haters”.
One man, Elijah Froh, was sent to the hospital with serious burns on his torso. His employer, Kip Mock, also received a less severe burn on his arm. Mock said he took “sole responsibility” and explained that he put “old diesel” into a wood-burning stove. “When the old diesel went onto the fire, not exactly sure how it happened but the wood stove… it blew back,” Mock said. They said the fire was all over Froh, even his beard was aflame, and they quickly ripped his shirt off and got him and everyone else out of the building. “We’re grateful everybody’s alive,” Mock said. The officer left to confer with another patrol officer, telling him he spoke with Mock, the leaseholder of the property. “He’s the one putting diesel on the fire?” the officer asked, before replying. “Stupid f—ing idiot.” The officers noted that “his buddy could have got killed” before discussing next steps for keeping the scene secure. As the officers talked, boisterous laughs came from Mock and the other young men who had fled the fire and were huddled together 50 feet away.
(...)
Valar Atomics has been criticized by nuclear experts for making exaggerated safety claims for its products, even claiming a person could safely hold spent nuclear fuel from their reactors in their hands while receiving only a mild dose of radiation. This at the same time they announced they were joining a lawsuit with other companies and the states of Texas, Arizona, Florida and Utah in suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, claiming the agency is holding back innovation. It’s a maneuver that critics say misinterprets the law to claim a safety exemption the company has simply not proven that they deserve. Valar Atomics also made news for securing $21 million in venture capital funding to build its first advanced test reactor.
(...)
When Touran then looked at the new data, he saw that holding Valar’s spent fuel would result in a fatal dose in 90 seconds. Another nuclear engineer used a more advanced calculation method to argue the fatal dose would actually be as fast as 85 milliseconds. Taylor posted a reply stating: “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun…” Taylor also told Wired.com he was working on a response, but more than two months later no reply has been provided. Touran said Taylor often lashes out at his “haters.”
(emphasis added)
How about NOPE.
Oklo is a SMR nuclear reactor company. Small Modular Reactors sound like some sort of pre-fab nuclear power plants that Wikipedia describes this way: “SMRs require new designs with new technology, the safety of which has yet to be proven.”18 I believe this is the type of nuclear reactor that was planned in secret to be installed at the planned data center outside Scranton Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains.19 The developer used the threat of gas turbines and nuclear reactors as leverage to get what they wanted in moving forward with their monster plant.20 Oklo is definitely reported as the company involved with the Meta connected data center plans around Pittsburgh. One of the largest investors of Oklo Inc. is Sam Altman of OpenAI, a company that is reported by many as financially dubious and sketchy with their seemingly nonsensical business model21 because it sounds like the OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar22 is hoping to turn ChatGPT into some kind of Multi-Level Marketing scheme. Business Insider described a January 2026 episode of The OpenAI Podcast where: “Sarah Friar floated the idea of “licensing models,” in which the company could take a share of downstream sales if a customer’s product takes off.”23 And one financial expert writing in The New York Times has in the same month predicted OpenAI will go bust by mid 2027.24
Oklo Inc. is named after a region in Gabon Africa25 where it’s said, according to sources in Wikipedia, that 1.7 billion years ago “self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions are thought to have taken place” when life on Earth “consisted largely of sea-bound algae and the first eukaryotes, living under a 2% oxygen atmosphere”.26 For contrast, the oxygen in the atmosphere today is around 21%, so that was a very different world that far back. And the presumed “self-sustaining” and “natural” nuclear fission used for a name feels like a PR choice to natural-wash27 commercially produced industrial nuclear reactors, as if they’re invoking almost a pie in the sky idea of a perpetual motion machine,28 when of course nuclear reactors are not without waste pollution, not without risks, and nuclear reactor plants absolutely need fuel to keep the reaction going, and transportation of that fuel is part of the risk that needs to be considered. But it won’t be considered because the Trump administration is, NPR reports: “sidestepping the regulatory system” to “fast-track construction of new and untested reactor designs built by private firms”.29
Oklo and their nuclear reactor projects, and indirectly Sam Altman of OpenAI, appear to be leaning really heavily on a payoff from Meta AI,30 which frankly sounds iffy on its own. Meta’s hype for an AI use case sounds a lot like what they said about that Metaverse idea which was an utter failure, and indeed some think the AI talk is even more grandiose. Mark Zuckerberg stated he intends for this Meta AI to replace human relationships.31 This is what they need these huge data centers for. To replace people friends with artificial interactions. In an interview Mark Zuckerberg described a world where instead of watching an Instagram Reel from your friends and even from your influencer faves, you’ll be interacting instead with fake AI content.32 So this is all what’s behind the motivation to create these big Meta AI data centers in Louisiana and around Pittsburgh PA and Ohio. This is what the monster palaces are for, that’s what Donald Trump referred to them as, monstrous palaces,33 and I quite like that actually, it’s descriptive.
But of course people already don’t like data centers and all the problems that come to communities with them. The noise pollution, the air pollution, the light pollution, the stress on the grid, home values plummeting because quality of life is in the toilet, and the utility bill increases for electricity and water. And people don’t want nuclear reactors pushed out at breakneck speed with little to no regulations or little mind to safety. Unregulated nuclear is a risk assessment nightmare, and the private insurance industry already won’t insure nuclear plants,34 and actually the insurance industry has been asking to be able to exclude AI related claims as well.35
There’s literally no reason for any of this, no it’s not “worth it”.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is one of the largest investors connected to this Meta Vistra nuclear plant project in Beaver County Pennsylvania… except that OpenAI is not profitable, and not making money, in fact by the sounds of it, the company is pissing away money. Are Pennsylvania taxpayers going to be on the hook to bail out all these AI slop companies, the tycoons, and this nuclear plant operation, when all that “profit by inference” (speculation) doesn’t work out because it’s all built on a house of cards and circular reasoning?