By James J. Devine
A famous saying, often attributed to Albert Einstein, observes: “There are only two things that are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not so sure about the universe.”
That comes to mind because there is some nuclear nuttiness at large on the Great Plains, where a new gold rush is underway in the American heartland. The prospectors are not seeking precious metals. They are drilling for something far more valuable: water. And they are doing it with the full faith and credit of political connections that have already made them billionaires on paper.
In the Texas Panhandle, a company called Fermi America, founded by a former Energy Secretary, his son, and the son of a former Republican congressman, intends to build the largest nuclear power complex in the nation.
Their plan, ambitious to the point of alchemy, requires a resource more finite than uranium: billions of gallons of water in a desert where every drop is a memory of the last ice age.
The target is the Ogallala Aquifer, a subterranean ocean that stretches beneath eight states.
This is not some common pond that refills with a season’s rain. It is a fossil treasure, a legacy of a wetter epoch, and it is the sole reason the High Plains are not a dust bowl.
It waters the wheat in Kansas and the corn in Nebraska. It fills the irrigation pivots that paint green circles across the brown landscape. And it is being mined, not merely used.
The Ogallala Aquifer supports nearly a third of all U.S. irrigated agriculture, but it is being bled dry.
Since the 1950s, we have drawn down its volume by an estimated nine percent. The mathematics of the Ogallala are a sobering sermon: once it is gone, it would take over six thousand years of rainfall to replenish.
This is like burning the Library of Alexandria to boil a pot of tea.
Into this precarious balance, the nuclear evangelists arrive with their blueprints and their stock offerings.
Their reactors, which demand a constant, colossal flow of cooling water, would become the single most thirsty entity for hundreds of miles.
To grant them this water is to make an irrevocable choice.
It is to choose the cooling of a reactor over the irrigation of a farm. It is to choose the power for a server farm over the drinking water for a town. It is to mortgage our agricultural security for the promise of digital profits.
The consequences of draining the Ogallala would not be contained by state lines.
This is not a local problem; it is a national unraveling.
The depletion of this aquifer would hollow out the American breadbasket, turning productive land back into shortgrass prairie.
The cost of food—from the beef on your grill to the bread on your table—would skyrocket, not as a market fluctuation, but as a permanent new reality.
The great inland agricultural empire, which has helped feed the nation and the world, would begin to wither from the roots down.
That such a gamble is being taken by men who have never built a reactor, but who expertly navigated the corridors of power, adds a layer of farce to the looming tragedy.
They have been enriched by a belief in their political access, a belief so potent it conjures billions from investors before a single foundation is poured.
They are like men selling tickets to a ship that has not been built, promising a voyage across a sea they insist they can create by draining a lake.
A Turkish husband-and-wife team with experience building nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates and China, Mesut Uzman and Sezin Uzman, was hired by Fermi America to lead nuclear plans for a massive Amarillo energy-AI campus.
The real fission reaction we are witnessing is not nuclear, but financial and political, and the fallout will be measured in dust and thirst.
The ultimate, bitter irony would be if the quest for the energy to power our artificial intelligence results in the very real, very permanent stupidity of sacrificing a continent’s freshwater heritage for a desert mirage.
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