The TVA’s Big Nuclear Project Gets the Green Light

Current conditions: Last weekend’s nor’easter caused up to $13 billion in damages across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States • Hurricane Nolo shut down a major highway on Hawaii’s Big Island • A heat dome forming over eastern Africa is driving temperatures in Juba, the impoverished capital of South Sudan, past 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The Senate reaches a permitting deal

At last, right after hopes dimmed, we have a deal. Senate negotiators reached a bipartisan agreement on a package of federal permitting reforms, locking in what Politico described as “the contours of long-sought legislation to speed up approvals for new energy projects in the U.S.” Democratic negotiators Senators Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told the news outlet they were withholding endorsements of a final deal as “the last five yards” of the agreement are hammered out. Whitehouse cautioned that he needed “more clarity from the Trump administration” on what their easing of the blockade on wind and solar approvals would mean. Neither Democrats nor Republicans released text of the bill, which both parties said should come out this week.

2. Nuclear regulators are poised to greenlight construction on the TVA’s big SMR project

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is set to issue only its second construction permit for a novel type of nuclear reactor in decades. At 11 a.m. EDT, the agency is scheduled to give the Tennessee Valley Authority the go ahead to begin building what could be the nation’s first commercial small modular reactor, a 300-megawatt unit at the federally-owned utility’s Clinch River site. The project is one of two the Department of Energy is financing to support deployment of third-generation SMRs, a technology based on existing large-scale reactors but shrunken down to force developers to buy more and help the industry bring down the cost of atomic power through repeatedly building the same design. (The second one is Holtec’s expansion of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan.) The permit comes six months after the NRC gave TerraPower, the Bill Gates-backed fourth-generation nuclear developer, the green light to start constructing its liquid sodium-cooled reactor at the site of an old coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The unit planned at Clinch River is a BWRX-300, a boiling water reactor from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy that borrows from the technology behind roughly a third of the American nuclear fleet. Boiling water reactors, pioneered by General Electric in the mid-20th century, traditionally represented a competitor to the more dominant pressurized water reactor invented by Westinghouse. By the time Clinch River comes online, North America may already have its first BWRX-300 in operation in Canada, where Ontario Power Generation is building the first reactor at its Darlington plant. TVA has said it plans to bring its debut BWRX-300 online by the end of 2033 at the latest. Yet, despite the forthcoming permit, no start date for construction has been announced.

The NRC, meanwhile, has sought to advance plans to restart the functional reactor at Constellation Energy’s Christopher Crane Clean Energy Center, the facility formerly known as Three Mile Island. Last week, the agency issued an environmental assessment finding no significant impact from plans to begin generating electricity at the plant again. While America’s attempt at restarting a permanently shuttered reactor for the first time are largely going according to plan, regulators are investigating what the Detroit Free-Press described as a “mishap” in the handling of fuel for Holtec’s Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, which could come online in a matter of weeks. The company said nuclear fuel rods “tipped” during installation, halting the refueling process and forcing plant operators to return to the NRC for approval to retrieve the assembly from within the reactor vessel.

3. A solar developer pivots to gas and data centers

Arevia Power marketed itself as a renewable energy powerhouse led by solar industry veterans. Now, my colleague Jael Holzman reported yesterday, the company is making data centers and gas turbines central to its business. “Arevia is an energy company that delivers reliable and affordable electricity to the communities and utilities we serve,” Ricardo Graf, the company’s chief development officer, told her via email, acknowledging that “in some cases, that energy may be solar; in others, it may be gas.” He added that “yes, we also develop data center projects, but ones with accompanying power solutions to ensure ratepayers are not impacted by the data center’s energy needs.”

The shift in focus comes right as American solar offers a major new business opportunity. Solar panels are aging, and newer technologies are as much as 70% more efficient than those designed and built two decades ago. “All across the United States, solar panels are withering on the vine. Equipment installed 10 to 15 years ago is still capturing sunlight and pumping out electricity, but significantly less of it than when the cells were new,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday about a new report examining the potential to swap out the country’s existing panels for new ones. “This is not a story about decline, however, but about growth. America’s aging solar farms represent an opportunity to expand clean energy capacity without using more land — and potentially without having to wait years for new projects to get through the grid’s interconnection queue.”

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4. New York’s own version of the TVA will own a big solar farm

The TVA isn’t the only government-owned utility making progress on clean power plants. The New York Power Authority — the state electrical company that then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt established in the 1930s and later used as a model for New Deal investments such as the TVA — said Monday that it will take a 51% stake in a 240-megawatt solar plant in the state’s rural northern reaches, according to the Watertown Daily Times. The Rich Road solar farm in Canton, near the Canadian border, will follow a model promoted by progressive legislators with a bill meant to encourage the state to finance and own renewable projects to speed up decarbonization of the grid. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has used that authority to support her plans to build at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear power through NYPA. (That effort, as I told you yesterday, has drawn some blowback from left-wing Democrats who oppose nuclear energy.) EDF Power Solutions North America, a subsidiary of the French electrical giant, will own the other 49% share of the project, which is set to begin construction next year. Once completed, the facility is expected to provide credits to low-income New Yorkers to lower bills.

5. The Rhine falls to record lows, sending diesel shipping costs to record highs

The Rhine in decline. Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images

When I used to think about the Rhine River, the first thing that came to mind was a song off my favorite album from high school. Written and performed by Beirut, the stage name of an American guy who galavanted around Europe making folksy songs that sounded straight out of an American teenager’s romantic notion of an Old World beer hall, the song was called “Rhineland.” Over mournful horns and a plunky mandolin, the song repeats a refrain: “Life, life was all right on the Rhine,” bringing to mind some kind of bucolic interwar existence in an ill-fated era of European history. Two decades later, I can’t tell which has changed more, me or the place I was imagining. The correct answer is probably “both,” but the clearest answer today is the latter. Levels at a key gauge of the mostly German waterway dropped to 1.2 inches below the threshold ship operators use to determine how much cargo their vessel can safely carry down the river without risking damage or running aground, Bloomberg reported. Despite a slight recovery on Monday, the cost of shipping diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe hit a record €260 per ton (equal to just under $296), after more than doubling this month amid the aftershocks of the summer’s record heat waves and droughts.

The latest trouble comes as the Trump administration weighs the merits of a ban on diesel exports. At Heatmap’s Climate Week event last Wednesday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ruled out such a step. But Trump said he was “very seriously” considering the step, despite warnings from Goldman Sachs that doing so would raise prices in Europe.

THE KICKER

TotalEnergies may be taking up President Donald Trump on his legally sketchy offer of nearly $1 billion to abandon its offshore wind ambitions in the U.S. But the French energy giant — the second-largest European oil company after Shell — sees the energy shock brought on by the U.S. war against Iran as a boon to that very business. CEO Patrick Pouyanne said “high oil prices” are “accelerating electrification,” according to a snippet shared on X by Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas. “We have seen a huge surge in EV sales,” he added, noting that sales are booming well beyond China, in India, Latin America, and Europe. Increased profits from higher crude prices spurred the company to start buying back roughly $5 billion in shares over the next two quarters.