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The letter, sent Monday, came days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In it, staffers slammed President Donald Trump’s proposal to dramatically downsize FEMA, shifting more responsibility and cost for disaster response to the states. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office and our mission of helping people before, during and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the agency employees wrote.
Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the green light to restart a permanently shuttered nuclear plant for the first time in U.S. history, with plans to bring the Palisades atomic station in Michigan back online later this year. Now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has started the process to restart a second nuclear plant, the Duane Arnold station. The agency approved a waiver request on Monday that will allow utility NextEra Energy to restart the single-reactor nuclear plant in Iowa by the end of 2029.
NextEra closed down the plant in 2020 amid mounting financial challenges for the nuclear facility. But surging electricity demand and a newfound societal appreciation of the 24-hour, zero-carbon power atomic energy produces has put a new premium on keeping existing plants running, particularly given the high costs and long timelines associated with building new reactors. Last year, Microsoft agreed to spend $16 billion to reopen the idled reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote at the time of the deal, “The days of nuclear power plants shuttering not because of old age, safety concerns, or local opposition, but because of the economics of subsidized wind and solar and cheap natural gas, are likely over.” On Monday, the Palisades plant officially transitioned from decommissioning status back to operations status.
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Yet another startup is joining the race to develop power plants with nuclear fusion. Launched Wednesday morning, Inertia Enterprises aims to commercialize the technology that led to the breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022, when humanity successfully generated more energy from fusion than it took to ignite the reaction for the first time. While the vast majority of public funding into fusion energy research had gone into magnetic fusion, which depends on large doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, the breakthrough came through inertial fusion, using lasers.
The company — founded by fusion scientist Andrea Kritcher, fusion power plant designer Mike Dunne, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson — aims “to take the most direct, scientifically-proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy,” according to a press release. To do so, the company is developing “a new generation of mass-produced, low cost lasers and fuel targets that leverage the groundbreaking scientific result of fusion ignition,” and has licensed nearly 200 patents. “The goal of delivering limitless fusion energy has attracted tens of billions of dollars in government investment and decades of research, culminating in the achievement of ignition just a couple of years ago,” Lawson, who will serve as Inertia’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, we see a clear path from big science to commercial energy by scaling up the industrial base to the scale needed for laser inertial fusion.”.
Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower signed an agreement with the Utah government on Monday to develop a potential atomic energy station using the company’s fourth-generation sodium-cooled reactor. As part of the deal, TerraPower will work with the Utah Office of Energy Development as part of Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt” program to build out transmission capacity and invest in clean-firm electricity sources such as nuclear power and geothermal energy. “Today marks an important step forward for energy in Utah,” Cox said in a statement. “Operation Gigawatt is about adding capacity from diverse sources — nuclear, natural gas, geothermal and more — so families and businesses have power that is affordable, reliable and clean.”
The move comes months after rival nuclear developer Holtec International inked a deal with the Utah government to establish a manufacturing and worker-training hub for its buildout of small modular reactors across the Mountain West in the Beehive State.
Solar imports are surging, especially in South Africa. Ember
Over the past 12 months, Africa’s imports of Chinese solar panels soared 60%, to more than 15 gigawatts, according to a report released Tuesday by the clean energy research firm Ember. In that same time period, 20 countries on the continent set new records for solar imports. If installed, the panels could radically upend power generation in some countries. Sierra Leone could generate volumes of electricity equivalent to 61% of its total output in 2023 just from the panels imported in the past year.
A chart showing solar imports in 20 African countriesEmber
“The take-off of solar in Africa is a pivotal moment,” Dave Jones, the chief analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “This report is a call to action, urging stronger research, analysis and reporting on solar’s rise — to ensure the world’s cheapest electricity source, fulfills its vast potential to transform the African continent.”
A team of astronomers detected for the first time a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of multi-ringed dust and gas. “Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” Laird Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a press release. He called the discovery a “big deal” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many protoplanetary disks.
Earlier this month, the company put out a bid for $9.4 billion from the stock market to fund its work in the U.S. amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote of the sale, “While the market had been expecting Orsted to raise capital in some form, the scale of the raise is about twice what was anticipated,” causing its stock to plunge almost 30%. The White House has aggressively targeted policies that benefit wind energy in recent weeks. Following the Friday announcement, shares in Orsted tumbled 17% to a record low.
Trump’s clampdown on wind and solar has sent the industry spiraling in recent weeks as federal agencies limit access to clean energy tax credits and rework rules to disfavor the industry’s two largest sources of energy. Already, $18.6 billion worth of clean energy projects have been canceled this year, compared to just $827 million last year, according to data from Atlas Public Policy’s Clean Economy Tracker cited in the Financial Times.
Trump has blamed renewables for the rising price of electricity. But data Matthew covered last week showed that renewables are, if anything, correlated with lower prices. Instead, he wrote, at the “top of the list” of reasons electricity prices are surging “is the physical reality of the grid itself,” the poles and wires required to send energy into people’s homes and businesses. “Beyond that, extreme weather, natural gas prices, and data center-induced demand growth all play a part.”
The entrance to Florida's state-managed immigrant detention facility. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Together with the state of Florida, the Trump administration rushed to build what it calls “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility designed to hold several thousand migrants at a time in southern Florida. In its haste to complete the facility, however, the government failed to conduct the proper environmental reviews, according to a federal judge who ordered its closure late last week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Back in June, a pair of nonprofits filed a lawsuit alleging that the government had failed to conduct assessments of what impact the facility would have on endangered animals such as the Florida panther and the Florida bonneted bat. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida later joined the lawsuit.
The Trump administration argued that the law in question, the National Environmental Policy Act, only applies to federal projects, whereas this one was state-driven, an argument Judge Kathleen Williams rejected, according to the Journal. “Every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote. “This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
The eight countries that ring the Amazon rainforest pledged support over the weekend for a global pool of financing for conservation. In a joint declaration, the Amazonian nations — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela — expressed support for preserving the rainforest but stopped short of endorsing any curbs on fossil fuels. The statement comes as South America has emerged as the world’s hottest oil patch, with new discoveries moving forward off the coasts of Guyana and Brazil and Argentina advancing plans for a fracking boom.
“Abrupt changes” like the precipitous loss of sea ice are unfolding in Antarctica, highlighting the growing threat global warming poses to the frozen continent, according to a new paper in the journal Nature. These changes could push the Antarctic ecosystem past a point of no return, the authors wrote.
“We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren’t happening in isolation,” climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper, told Grist. “When we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we’re talking about changes that also have global consequences.”
Bad news for vegans who evangelize their diets on good health grounds: New research found no increased risk of death “associated with higher intake of animal protein. In fact, the data showed a modest but significant reduction in cancer-related mortality among those who ate more animal protein.” That, however, doesn’t change the huge difference in emissions between red meat and plant food products.
