Israel’s CIVILIAN Nuclear Dilemma

Israel’s high-tech industry is among the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence. The country is also the only one among all OECD nations to have a birth rate well above replacement so that its population will continue to increase in the foreseeable future.

What’s the connection between these two seemingly unrelated phenomena? The answer: Israel’s energy needs will grow tremendously in the coming decades. Artificial Intelligence is a huge energy guzzler (e.g., an AI prompt uses ten times more energy than a simple Google search request) – and I haven’t mentioned Israel’s plan to be a world leader in quantum computing that devours even more energy! Added to all this, higher population numbers clearly also mean more energy use.

Given Israel’s sunny weather, one might think that producing more solar power would be enough, but it turns out that the “sun” isn’t even close to offering enough energy. That’s because AI data centers are huge energy guzzlers. There isn’t sufficient wind offshore in the Mediterranean for that to help much either. Nor is there much thermal energy coming out of the ground. Oil and coal – too polluting. What about the country’s huge gas finds? They have already been “sold” to neighboring countries for hard currency. The only viable solution? Nuclear energy.

That sounds reasonable; after all, Israel already has had an operating nuclear research site (in Dimona) for decades. But that’s precisely the problem. For reasons that have never been officially made clear, Israel refuses to be a signer of the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that mandates each signing country to leave open its nuclear site(s) to international inspection.

What to do? There are four alternatives on the table:

The best option would be to do what India did: get permission from the NPT administration to set up a civilian-oriented nuclear site without international supervision. The problem: Turkey would have to agree (the permission needs to be unanimous among all signers), and that’s not going to be forthcoming.

Another possibility is for Israel to go it alone in building a nuclear power plant – but that would be prohibitively expensive given that it would have to manufacture all the parts by itself, not to mention that it couldn’t make use of the nuclear power expertise other countries’ scientists have accumulated over the decades. In addition, during war it would become a prime target for missile attack – hard to defend hermetically.

A third route would be to build such a nuclear plant jointly in a nearby country (e.g., Cyprus; but there, Israel could have no more than a 49% stake) and deliver the power to Israel through an underwater cable. But that leaves Israel at the mercy of anything happening to the host country, including possible future enmity versus Israel.

The fourth and final option is the weirdest but probably the most doable: the “American Model.” Here Israel would officially cede a little of its own territory to the United States which would build a nuclear power plant on that site (presumably with Israeli financing and some technical help) under NPT supervision. However, for Israel the wider NPT problem gets bypassed because the plant would be situated on “American territory” so that the NPT would have no right to supervise anything else in Israel proper! Of course, some Israeli ultra-nationalists and religious extremists might be upset about ceding even a little “Biblical Holy Land” territory, but the majority of Israelis would most probably go along with such a Rube Goldberg solution, especially when it would mean lower electric costs, or at least significant moderation of increased energy outlays.

What about environmental opposition? Or the fear of a nuclear disaster that would be especially deadly in as small a country as Israel? Or the problem mentioned above: military attack on the nuclear plant? There’s an answer for each of these concerns.

Environmentalists have come to understand that nuclear power is the least polluting of all energy sources other than solar and wind. The world has come a long way in nuclear power research, especially how to safely get rid of nuclear waste. While some environmentalists still see the energy solution as being a matter of “consuming less,” most understand that this isn’t realistic.

As for nuclear disaster, that can never be discounted, but the number of world deaths due to nuclear disasters (mainly Chernobyl and Fukushima) are orders of magnitude less than the number of humans who have died due to air and other types of pollution from coal, oil and gas – still the world’s main energy sources. This is similar to deaths by plane versus car crashes. When the former happens, the whole world hears about it and trembles – but deaths in car accidents are far, far higher everywhere, all the time. Moreover, today’s nuclear plants are far safer than in the past – in large part by learning from what went wrong in the few nuclear disasters that did occur. (For the first time in a decade, American authorities recently approved a new type of nuclear plant based on new technologies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/climate/nuclear-power-terrapower-construction-permit.html).

Finally, what about a potential military attack on the plant? First, such a nuclear plant could be built underground. But in any case, such an attack is not very likely given that this would now be U.S. territory and would automatically elicit an immediate American counterattack against the culprit country. (One assumes that Israel would be able to prevent any terrorist attempt to destroy the plant from its own land.)

No option is perfect, but public policymaking usually comes down to choosing a “satisficing” alternative (sufficiently satisfying one’s needs). Israel’s has great energy needs that sooner or later will have to be somehow satisficed.