The End is Nigh: Playing Russian Roulette with the Tech Bros

Google, Amazon and Meta have made a pledge. Not a pledge to address environmental collapse, war, water scarcity, waste, pollution, corruption. No. A ‘pledge’ to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 to feed the Musk-ian mouth of AI. Making Nuclear Clean Again.

Let’s hear it from the mouth of Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.

“Nuclear,” he said, “is a safe source of carbon-free energy that can help power our operations and meet the growing demands of our customers, while helping us progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040.”

How many lies can you pack into one sentence, Matt?

Safe? They haven’t even cleared up the nuclear waste from the 1940s Manhattan Project that built the nuclear bombs that were dropped on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In St Louis, USA, they poured the nuclear waste from the bomb-making into the creeks and rivers, where future generations of children would play and swim in what was called a “fairytale American childhood” that would quickly turn into a nightmare cancer deathtrap that was still killing people as the 2020s progressed.

Safe? Not a single state in the United States of America — not even Texas — wants to accept nuclear waste. The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, a research and development laboratory of the US Department of Energy, located approximately 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, concluded that to deal with uranium mining waste, you’d need to forbid human habitation in the area.

Anwa Weelanchee Huaute, a Willow Woman Brave, told me about the awful impact of uranium mining on Navajo and Hopi Indigenous communities in the Grand Canyon area. The pollution and damage that started in the 1940s was ongoing in the 2020s, she said. Diné Navajo writer, musician and environmentalist, Klee Benally, who died in 2024 at the age of 48, wrote about its impacts in his searing memoir, No Spiritual Surrender.

“We’d face the occasional scares when my dad’s brothers would stop by in the evening asking to stay or for some food. My Mom would scream at them to stay away due to the white dust on their clothes. I later learned this was uranium dust from their work at the nearby Canyon (now Pinyon Plain) mine.”

This was a common occurrence.

“Workers often lived near mines and mills and would bring yellowcake home on their clothes, exposing their families to harmful radioactive dust,” Alicia Inez Guzmán wrote for High County News.
Judy Pasternak wrote about the impact of the thousands of abandoned nuclear waste mines for the Los Angeles Times.

“Particularly toxic were the ‘hot’ houses built with radioactive debris. In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls. Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks.”

RESTARTING THREE MILE ISLAND

In 2025, driven by AI fever, they re-started the Pinyon Plain mine where Klee Benally’s uncles worked, and uranium-laden trucks again rolled across Indigenous lands. All over Indigenous land, nuclear waste lies like an open wound, blowing in the wind, seeping into the groundwater.

“They still want the minerals under the reservation, and they are still fighting to get these people off that land so they can mine,” Anwa Weelanchee Huaute told me.

To that end, young Indigenous people were lured off the reservation with promises of housing in the city.

“These houses offered were not even completed,” Huaute explained. “No water, no electricity. It literally destroyed the lives of many that could not cope in the city and turned to alcohol.

“Native culture on the reservation is built in family units, so when younger generations are lured away, then that family structure is broken. Many of the elders were left without that support group, which of course leads to more trauma. Many of these elders have never stepped a foot off of tribal land ever. Effectively poisoning the only place they have, while stealing away their familial infrastructure.”

Safe? Children and animals playing in the middle of nuclear waste: this is what the tech bros call ‘safe’? And it all gets done to the poor and the Indigenous people, in faraway wild places among the animals, the birds and the bees. Relentlessly disturbing the balance. Edith Hood, a Diné Navajo from Red Water Pond Road Community described it.

“There is a Navajo concept called hózhó. Hózhó is how we live our lives. It means balance, beauty and harmony between us, the Five-Finger people, and nature. When this balance is disturbed, our way of life, our health and our well-being all suffer. The uranium contamination and mining wastes at my home continue to disrupt hózhó. There was no respect for people living there, and certainly, no respect for Mother Earth.”

Nuclear is ‘carbon-free’ according to that Amazon.com grifter. Not so, when you calculate the true and total costs. Stephanie Palazzo, a socio-cultural anthropologist, delivered an accurate reckoning.
“Mining, milling, and production of nuclear fuel, as well as the construction and decommissioning of nuclear plants, emit greenhouse gases at levels ranging from 10 to 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of power — lower than fossil fuels but higher than wind and hydroelectricity (and roughly on par with solar).”

Amazon.com is one of the most environmentally destructive companies on earth. A cheap, planned obsolescence discounter. A cruel employer who slave-drives its workers calling them, with perverse and twisted cynicism, “industrial athletes.” A trash producer who sells so much garbage it could smother the earth every year with its plastic packaging.

Microsoft, meanwhile, are aiming to restart Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant in Pensylvania where, in 1979, a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor occurred, releasing radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment. They aim to have it in operation by 2028, to power their data centres.

“Three Mile Island,” Stephanie Palazzo reflects, “has become a symbol of the U.S. nuclear industry’s overconfidence in its early expertise and of its ultimate failure to deliver on its promises. The irony of it being used to power AI — a technology already notorious for surprising and outpacing its experts — is unavoidable. But there is something even more dangerously ironic about powering the future with the stubborn optimism of the past. Rather than how to meet AI’s voracious energy demands, Three Mile Island might provide a historical vantage to consider whether to power this future at all.”

VICTIMS ARE FORCED TO PROVE HARM

Have you heard of Church Rock Chapter in the Navajo Nation? Didn’t think so.

Also in 1979, its nuclear waste tailings dump collapsed — as, by the way, is inevitable — sending contaminated water into the Rio Puerco, a tributary to the Rio Grande, located in New Mexico.

“Today, it constitutes the largest release of nuclear materials in the U.S., worse even than the meltdown at Three Mile Island,” Alicia Inez Guzmán wrote for High County News in 2025. You haven’t heard about it because it’s on Invisible land — Indigenous land. This is what it comes down to: invisible mining on invisible land.

No one in authority cares. And Big Tech cares even less.

As you listen to the legitimate fears of those forced to live beside nuclear reactors, remember this truly startling truth: for every ton of uranium mined, there are 999 tons of toxic waste left behind on those invisible lands.

Alicia Inez Guzmán wrote about one such uranium mine.

“The leftover slurry,” she explained, “was piped into two unlined earthen pits, the largest the size of 50 football fields and filled with over 21 million tons of uranium mill tailings. Over time, the uranium tailings decayed into radon gas; meanwhile, radioactive contaminants seeped into four of the region’s aquifers. Residents compiled a list of neighbours who died of cancer — they called it the Death Map.”

When the mining companies have stuffed their pockets and abandoned their responsibilities, the US government has a 10,000-year problem on its hands that it will abandon on Indigenous land like it has abandoned thousands of mines before. And then the toxic slurry will break free and flood into the water-table deep underground and the poisons will be spread far and wide.

As for the devastated environment, and the families with sick children with rare cancers, the academics and scientists from industry and government will tell them that their experiences are not abnormal or statistically valid.

Often you will hear the phrase “no definitive link.” It is a classic playbook of the mining oligarchs and their bought-off government officials and academics, that is rolled out again and again all over the world, as the victims are forced to prove harm rather than the industry prove that it is safe.

As these Tech Bros present the nuclear option as some dream ‘clean’ and ‘green’ machine, it’s worth keeping in mind the words of Klee Benally, in No Spiritual Surrender.

“The devastation of nuclear colonialism, which permanently destroys Indigenous communities throughout the world is outright ignored by some of the most devout climate justice advocates,” Klee said. “They claim nuclear energy production is also a green solution to the climate crisis. More than 15,000 abandoned uranium mines are located in the so-called US, mostly in and around Indigenous communities, permanently poisoning sacred lands and waters, with little or no action being taken to clean up their deadly toxic legacy.”