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It’s the number the industry wants. It’s the number a report to Congress found is appropriate to compete with China’s soaring spending. Now American fusion could get its $10 billion. On Thursday, Californians Zoe Lofgren, the ranking member of the House Science Committee, and her Republican colleague Jay Obernolte, chair of the body’s Subcommittee on Research and Technology, introduced the American Leadership in Fusion Act, which would pump some $10 billion into the industry to commercialize the frontier nuclear energy technology, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported yesterday. “Fusion is the future, and this bipartisan bill is a major step in capitalizing on the promise of its emission-free power,” Lofgren said in a statement. “This bill will unleash a new era of fusion energy development in the United States.”
Los Azules copper mine in Calingasta, Argentina. Luis ROBAYO / AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration is cementing its, uh, rock solid relationship with Argentinian President Javier Milei. On Wednesday, the Export-Import Bank of the United States agreed to finance up to $7 billion in critical mineral projects in South America’s second-largest economy. The deal, announced during the United Nations General Assembly, lays the groundwork for what the U.S. State Department dubbed the Andes-Atlantic Corridor. The funding will also include investments in Argentina’s liquified natural gas sector, its power grid, and its rail and water transport networks to help get resources to port. “EXIM is moving boldly into the industries of the future,” EXIM Chairman John Jovanovic said in a statement. “To do this, we must secure our supply chains, support American jobs, and ensure American workers, products, and expertise reach all parts of the Western Hemisphere.”
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At the start of this week, the Financial Times reported that biodiesel prices fell to an all-time low, becoming cheaper than most conventional marine fuels in the world’s largest production hotspot, the Netherlands’ port of Rotterdam. It’s a potential sign of things to come. A new study by the British think tank Chatham House and the Forest Stewardship Council found that global biofuels production is set to surge nearly 70% by 2030 as major producing countries increase fuel-blending mandates in response to the energy crisis brought on by the Iran War. In its write-up of the study, OilPrice.com noted that the U.S., the European Union, Brazil, India, and Indonesia have either adopted or proposed higher biofuel blending rules since the war began in February. That could bring knock-on effects. Ecofin Agency, a publication focused on Francophone African issues, highlighted that the new biofuels mandates could divert 36 million hectares of cropland to producing corn or sugarcane for fuels such as ethanol.
If, as Denmark’s intelligence services warned yesterday morning, Russia is indeed going to attack a NATO country sometime in the coming months, those numbers may yet go up.
The Department of Energy announced a $5.3 billion spending package Thursday to fund 31 grid upgrades across 26 states. Roughly $3.4 billion will come in the form of cost-share funding, with another $1.9 billion in direct federal spending, for projects that include reconductoring or rebuilding more than 1,500 miles of transmission lines and grid-enhancing technologies across another nearly 21,000 miles. Together, the agency expects the upgrades to increase capacity on the nation’s power lines by 23 gigawatts. “These investments will get more out of the infrastructure we already have, move more electricity across the grid, and help deliver affordable, reliable, and secure power that will fuel American prosperity for decades to come,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.
Reconductoring — restringing power lines with more advanced wires — is, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in 2024, “a stupidly easy way to expand the grid.”
Let me set the mood for the last item today: Imagine the 1958 classic “Nel blu, dipinto di blu” by Italian crooner Domenico Modugno, with its famous line repeating the word volare — to fly — and replace it with dividere, the verb for “to split.” After parting ways with atomic energy in 1990, becoming the first country to completely exit nuclear power after the Chernobyl accident, Italy is getting ready to split atoms yet again. This week, NucNet reported, the Italian Senate gave final approval for a bill to legalize nuclear energy in the country again.
Former Vice President Al Gore, meanwhile, injected some optimism into the discussion about decarbonization. Reflecting on how climate discourse had evolved since the release of his famous film An Inconvenient Truth 20 years ago, he said booming electric vehicle sales and a global shift to renewables and nuclear power spurred by the energy shock from the war in Iran showed that “these are signs that this thing is really moving into high gear.” He added: “The fossil fuel industry is losing. They know they’re losing, and they’re trying to slow down how quickly they lose.” Yet perhaps one of the best hopes for speeding up deployment of more clean energy dimmed last night when Punchbowl News reported that increasingly bullish talks on permitting reform may be tanking. “The administration and congressional Republicans agreed to a strong bipartisan offer. The Democrats have since refused to take yes for an answer. If they think that the administration is going to freeze these concessions until the lame duck, they are severely mistaken,” a White House official told the outlet.
The first nuclear plant being built in Turkey — by Russia. Photo: Akkuyu Nucleer PP/Anadolu via Getty Images
Later in the afternoon yesterday, I scurried off to the New York Nuclear Symposium, the annual conference organized by the advocacy group Nuclear New York. In the august halls of the New York Bar Association on 44th Street, policy experts and executives debated exactly what was needed to shift the excitement over atomic energy into actual projects with shovels in the ground. While some doubts persisted over how quickly anyone would commit to new fission plants in the U.S., at least beyond the various first-of-a-kind projects currently under development, the American government charged forward with export deals. Earlier this week, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency announced a partnership with Turkey to build as much as 5 gigawatts of small modular reactor power in the country. On Thursday, NucNet reported that Poland’s national nuclear company had reached a deal with the U.S. developers Bechtel and Westinghouse on the commercial terms for the European nation’s first atomic power station, a trio of Westinghouse AP1000s on the Baltic sea.
Meanwhile, the South Korean project manager and builder Samsung C&T unveiled new deals with two SMR companies in the U.S. The company pledged $100 million toward building the next-generation reactors designed by Google-backed Kairos Power. A day later, the company signed onto projects involving GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt reactor, based on a traditional water-cooled design.
Enhanced geothermal leader Fervo Energy announced Thursday morning that it had shipped the first megawatts to the grid from its flagship Cape Station project, nearly three years to the day after breaking ground at the site. The facility in Beaver County, Utah marks a significant scale-up from the company’s earlier Project Red, located in the Blue Mountain geothermal field of Nevada, which began supplying 3.5 megawatts of electricity to the grid in 2023. Cape Station, by contrast, is the company’s first greenfield project. Phase I of the facility consists of three 33-megawatt units, the first of which has begun ramping up, while the remaining two are expected to reach commercial operations by 2027. “I could not be more proud of the years of hard work from Fervo’s employees, investors, suppliers, customers, and partners, which brought us to this moment,” Fervo CEO Tim Latimer said in a statement. “We are just getting started.”
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Last month, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I reported on the Department of Commerce’s latest import levies on polysilicon, the main ingredient in most solar panels. The restrictions were designed to keep out cheap, subsidized competition from Chinese companies. But the nearly four-month delay in the policy’s implementation opened the door to companies stockpiling foreign-made reactors. To avoid that, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has issued a temporary rule explaining how it will monitor imports, Solar Power World reported. Starting December 4, polysilicon components in a panel such as wafers, cells, and the finished rigs themselves will have a 15% tariff.
“Flooding the U.S. market with large volumes of imported products is a strategy that companies abroad have long used to undermine American manufacturers,” Andy Park, the global chief executive officer of Hanwha Qcells, said in a statement. “We have repeatedly seen import volumes surge ahead of the implementation of significant U.S. trade or industrial policies, as companies seek to exploit loopholes and gain an unfair advantage before new measures take effect.”
“When it comes to fuels, we have plenty of options, but nothing has hit the jackpot.” That’s what Ernest Moniz, former President Barack Obama’as energy secretary, told me yesterday morning on stage at a Climate Week breakfast hosted by his nonprofit, the EFI Foundation. Just 21% of the world’s end-use energy comes from electricity, meaning 79% comes from molecules — mostly natural gas and oil. The point Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained physicist, was making was that we need to take green fuels such as hydrogen and biodiesel more seriously. “My bet for scalability is some or multiple colors of hydrogen,” referring to the rainbow of names that denote how hydrogen fuel is produced. Hours later, Hydrogen Insight reported that the German energy giant Uniper had signed “one of the largest” offtake deals ever for aviation fuel made with green hydrogen. As part of the deal, the Düsseldorf-based firm will buy 40,000 metric tons of green fuels for at least the next decade.
The New York State Research and Development Authority announced awards for eight energy storage facilities and 13 large-scale renewable projects on Wednesday, totaling $3.7 billion in private investment. Combined, the projects are expected to pump out 1.7 gigawatts of power. “These newly-contracted large-scale energy projects not only further the growth of clean energy and more than double the utility-scale energy storage that exists currently statewide — but they contribute to New York’s comprehensive, all of the above energy strategy,” Doreen Harris, NYSERDA’s chief executive, said in a statement. “This will help reduce costs for New York ratepayers while continuing to improve the reliability of our state’s grid.”
