NUCLEAR GUINEA PIGS: How a Small Kansas Town Became the Site of a Nuclear Experiment to Power AI
Artificial intelligence needs more power than America will give it, so the industry went looking for ground where nobody gets a vote. In Parsons, Kansas, where one in five residents lives in poverty, that means the first nuclear reactor in history designed to operate underground, drilled through the aquifer, on land where the Army still detonates waste explosives under federal permit.
About The Kansas City Defender
🔥 The World’s Most Innovative Black Digital News Startup
We are a nonprofit Black media powerhouse producing hard-hitting news, mutual aid and digital tools to keep our people informed and organized.
Latest Stories
While Cutting Buses for the Poor, KCATA Signed a Secret Deal to Harvest Their Faces for a Private Company’s AI
A secret contract. No policy protecting riders’ data. The Defender obtained the deal KCATA signed to harvest bus riders’ faces for AI.
The People Said Let Us Vote. The Council Gave a Billionaire $600 Million Instead
Two days after city officials violently arrested a community leader, I sat in a chamber swarmed with police and watched eleven council members give a billionaire one of the biggest public deals this city has ever seen, without letting a single resident speak.
“I Can’t Breathe!” Black Community Leader Violently Attacked & Arrested For Resisting KC Billioniare Stadium
A Royals stadium worker was violently attacked and pinned to the ground at City Hall as Kansas City advanced the billionaire ballpark with no public vote.
‘All They Got to Do is Stop Talking Honky’: How Argentina’s Racist Display at the World Cup Mirrors the MAGA Backlash in the US
A month after the World Cup ended, the spectacle is gone. The racial and political tensions it exposed are not, as Argentina’s President Javier Milei, much like Trump, stokes racial tensions to cover for a sick economy and its savage inequalities.
Missouri Begins the Medical Torture of Trans People in Its Prisons. The People It Caged Are Fighting Back
Da’Shae Breeze learned to write at Maya Angelou’s desk. Now she writes to The Defender from a solitary confinement cell as Missouri strips away her medical care. She spoke to us from inside state prison, alongside Jessica Hicklin, who spent 26 years in maximum security and won the federal ruling the state just defied.
Kansas City Killed the Data Center. The Tax Scheme It Was Feeding Is Still Alive
A Miami fund bought a 126-year-old downtown building, quietly signed away the right to demolish it, then asked Kansas City for permission to demolish it anyway and build a 20-story data center. A leading legal scholar reviewed the paperwork The Defender obtained and called it by its name. This week, Kansas City said no.
If We Must Die: A Black August Tribute from the Heart of the Country
Born behind prison walls, carried across the diaspora, Black August is the month we count our martyrs and sharpen ourselves. McKay gave us the vow. Missouri and Kansas gave us the battleground.
