Energy Department Pumps $800 Million Into Two Nuclear Projects

Current conditions: The Northeastern U.S. is bracing for 6 inches of snow, including potential showers in New York City today • A broad swath of the Mountain West, from Montana through Colorado down to New Mexico, is expecting up to six inches of snow • After routinely breaking temperature records for the past three years, Guyana shattered its December high with thermometers crossing 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Energy Department shells out $800 million to two nuclear projects

The Department of Energy gave a combined $800 million to two projects to build what could be the United States’ first commercial small modular reactors. The first $400 million went to the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority to finance construction of the country’s first BWRX-300. The project, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the TVA’s “big swing at small nuclear,” is meant to follow on the debut deployment of GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt SMR at the Darlington nuclear plant in Ontario. The second $400 million grant backed Holtec International’s plan to expand the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan where it’s currently working to restart with the company’s own 300-megawatt reactor. The funding came from a pot of money earmarked for third-generation reactors, the type that hew closely to the large light water reactors that make up nearly all the U.S. fleet of 94 commercial nuclear reactors. While their similarities with existing plants offer some benefits, the Trump administration has also heavily invested in incentives to spur construction of fourth-generation reactors that use coolants other than water. “Advanced light-water SMRs will give our nation the reliable, round-the-clock power we need to fuel the President’s manufacturing boom, support data centers and AI growth, and reinforce a stronger, more secure electric grid,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “These awards ensure we can deploy these reactors as soon as possible.”

You know who also wants to see more investment in SMRs? Arizona senator and rumored Democratic presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who released an energy plan Wednesday calling on the Energy Department to ease the “regulatory, scaling, and supply chain challenges” new reactors still face.

2. Trump considers changing black lung protections for coal miners

Since he first emerged on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has made the proverbial forgotten coal miner a central theme of his anti-establishment campaigns, vowing to correct for urbanite elites’ neglect by putting workers’ concerns at the forefront. Yet his administration is now considering overhauling black lung protections that miners lobbied federal agencies to enact and enforce. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer will “reconsider and seek comments” on parts of the Biden-era silica rule that mining companies and trade groups are challenging in court, the agency told E&E News. It’s unclear how the Trump administration may seek to alter the regulation. But the rule, finalized last year, reduced exposure limits for miners to airborne silica crystals that lodge deep inside lung tissue to 50 micrograms from the previous 100 microgram limit. The rule also required companies to provide expanded medical tests to workers. Dozens of miners and medical advocates protested outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October to request that the rule, expected to prevent more than 1,000 deaths and 3,700 cases of black lung per year, be saved.

Rolling back some of the protections would be just the latest effort to gut Biden-era policy. On Wednesday, the White House invited automotive executives to attend what’s expected to be an announcement to shred fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, The New York Times reported late on Tuesday.

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3. Americans faced worse blackouts last year than any year in the past decade

A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA

The average American spent a combined 11 hours without electricity last year as a result of extreme weather, worse outages than during any previous year going back a decade. That’s according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Blackouts attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2025, compared to an average of roughly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023. Major hurricanes accounted for 80% of the hours without electricity in 2024.

4. Bill Gates’ TerraPower clears final safety hurdle

The latest federal grants may be good news for third-generation SMRs, but one of the leading fourth-generation projects — the Bill Gates-owned TerraPower’s bid to build a molten salt-cooled reactor at a former coal plant in Wyoming — just cleared the final safety hurdle for its construction permit. Calling the approval a “momentous occasion for TerraPower,” CEO Chris Levesque said the “favorable safety evaluation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

TerraPower’s project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is meant to demonstrate the company’s reactors, which are designed to store power when it’s needed — making them uniquely complementary to grids with large amounts of wind and solar — to avoid the possibility of a meltdown. Still, at a private lunch I attended in October, Gates warned that the U.S. is falling behind China on nuclear power. China is charging ahead on all energy fronts. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese had started up a domestically-produced gas turbine for the first time as the country seeks to compete with the U.S. on even the fossil fuels American producers dominate.

5. BP abandons a key blue hydrogen project

It’s been a rough year for green hydrogen projects as the high cost of producing the zero-carbon fuel from renewable electricity and water makes finding customers difficult for projects. Blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment, isn’t doing much better. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. abandoned plans to build what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production plants in Baytown, Texas. This week, BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen project in England. At issue are strict new standards in the European Union for how much carbon blue hydrogen plants would need to capture to qualify as clean.

THE KICKER

You’re not the only one accidentally ingesting loads of microplastics. New research suggests crickets can’t tell the difference between tiny bits of plastics and natural food sources. Evidence shows that crickets can break down microplastics into smaller nanoplastics — which may be even worse in the environment since they’re more easily eaten or absorbed by other lifeforms.