Trump’s Media Company Strikes ‘Flabbergasting’ Fusion Deal

Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump’s social media company is getting into fusion energy

In a Mad Libs of a merger story, President Donald Trump’s social media company inked a $6 billion deal Thursday to combine with fusion energy company TAE Technologies in a bid to start construction on “the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant” next year. It’s a lofty claim, to put it minimally. Once the darling of private fusion investors, TAE has since fallen behind rivals pursuing technological approaches that are considered easier and better studied, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems. A key difference between the two technologies is the fuel. While TAE's deuterium-fueled reactor has to get as hot as 1 billion degrees Celsius, Commonwealth Fusion’s tritium-deuterium fuel needs to reach only — I almost want to put “only” in quotes since we’re talking about a temperature nearly seven times hotter than the center of the sun — 100 million degrees. The more than two dozen private fusion companies racing to build the first power plant aren’t just competing against each other. China, as I have written in this newsletter recently, is outspending the rest of the world combined on fusion investments.

But the all-stock deal between TAE and Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, could capture more money from retail investors eager to get in on the fusion game. After all, the next-generation nuclear fission industry has a growing stable of startups whose stocks generate billions of dollars but whose businesses have no revenue. The merger shows “both the Trump administration’s commitment and investor appetite for clean, scalable fusion energy,” Greg Piefer, the chief executive of the rival fusion company SHINE Technologies, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Still, he said his startup, which Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote recently is already generating revenue selling medical isotopes, will be able “to scale faster than any other fusion company.” That’s a diplomatic way of analyzing a deal involving the president. When I called up Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF yesterday morning, he told me, “I’m just flabbergasted.”

2. House passes permitting reform bill with anti-wind measures

The House voted 221-196 Thursday to pass the SPEED Act, a bipartisan permitting reform bill to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act. Eleven Democrats supported the bill, and just one Republican voted no. But GOP lawmakers made last-minute changes to appease right-wing critics of offshore wind, causing some Democrats who planned to vote yes to defect, Politico reported. That provision will almost certainly make passage in the Senate a challenge. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported last week, top Senate Democrats vowed to oppose the legislation unless the bill barred executive branch agencies from yanking already-granted permits, a move designed to halt the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind. As our colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, passing the House was one thing, “but now comes the hard part.”

Easing federal environmental assessments isn’t the only approach to speeding up energy deployment. As our other colleague Matthew Zeitlin explained yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing to make it easier to plug data centers directly into power plants.

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3. Energy Department faces probe over blue state cuts

The Department of Energy’s independent watchdog is opening an investigation into the agency’s decision to cancel $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects in California and other Democratic-leaning states. The bulk of the projects, including a $1.2 billion regional hydrogen hub, were located in California, the Los Angeles Times noted. The audit by the Energy Department’s Office of the Inspector General came in response to a plea from nearly 30 California lawmakers raising concern that the states were illegally targeted “for their perceived lack of support for President Trump.”

At the same time, a coalition of cities, consumer advocates, and green groups sued the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday over new Treasury Department rules “that unfairly and illegally discriminate against wind and solar projects.”

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4. Oklo backs a Swedish nuclear startup

A rendering of a future Blykalla power plant in a quintessential Nordic landscape.Blykalla

The Swedish nuclear startup Blykalla raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding to hasten its work on building small modular reactors. The most interesting name among the investors? The American nuclear startup Oklo. In a statement to NucNet, the companies said that by aligning two of the fastest-moving reactor developers in the world, the companies could shorten “critical paths to development, reducing schedule risks and unlocking supply chain efficiencies.” While Oklo’s as-yet-unbuilt microreactors would use liquid metal as a coolant, Blykalla’s design uses lead. But both models qualify as fourth-generation reactors.

5. GM considers former Tesla Autopilot chief as its next CEO

General Motors CEO Mary Barra may have identified her heir apparent, but first she plans to put him through a “tough test” in his new role as chief product officer. Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot division, first joined the Detroit giant in May, in what the electric vehicle site Electrek called “a surprising move that put a tech executive in charge of the legacy automaker’s entire vehicle development program.” Now a new report from Bloomberg stated that Barra sees Anderson as a frontrunner to replace her when she eventually steps down.

THE KICKER

Flying drones over whales to collect samples of exhaled breath from blowholes is considered a breakthrough in non-invasive health monitoring for marine giants in Arctic regions. Now, however, a study of wild humpback, sperm and fin whales in northern Norway has revealed for the first time a potentially deadly virus known as cetacean morbillivirus circulating above the Arctic Circle. The upside is that the new use of drones could support conservation by detecting the virus, which is connected to mass strandings, early before major death events. “Drone blow sampling is a game-changer,” Terry Dawson, a co-author of the study and a professor at King’s College London, said in a statement. “It allows us to monitor pathogens in live whales without stress or harm, providing critical insights into diseases in rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems.”