Trump Backs Three Mile Island Revival

Current conditions: The West Coast’s parade of storms continues with downpours along the California shoreline, threatening mudslides • Up to 10 inches of rain is headed for the Ozarks • Temperatures climbed beyond 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland this week before beginning a downward slide.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump grants his first LPO loan

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office just announced a $1 billion loan to finance Microsoft’s restart of the functional Unit 1 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The funding will go to Constellation, the station’s owner, and cover the majority of the estimated $1.6 billion restart cost. If successful, it’ll likely be the nation’s second-ever reactor restart, assuming Holtec International’s revival of the Palisades nuclear plant goes as planned in the next few months. While the Trump administration has rebranded several loans brokered under its predecessor, this marks the first completely new deal sanctioned by the Trump-era LPO, a sign of Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s recent pledge to focus funding on nuclear projects. It’s also the first-ever LPO loan to reach conditional commitment and financial close on the same day.

“Constellation’s restart of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy to Americans across the Mid-Atlantic region,” Wright said in a statement. “It will also help ensure America has the energy it needs to grow its domestic manufacturing base and win the AI race.” Constellation’s stock soared in after-hours trading in response to the news. Holtec’s historic first restart in Michigan got the green light from regulators to come back online in July, as I reported in this newsletter at the time. But already another company is lining up to turn its defunct reactor back on: As I reported here in August, utility giant NextEra wants to revive its Duane Arnold nuclear station in Iowa. The push to restart older reactors reflects a growing need for electricity long before new reactors can come online. Meanwhile, next-generation reactors are plowing ahead. The nuclear startup Valar Atomics claimed this week to achieve criticality long before the July 4 deadline set in an Energy Department competition.

2. Data centers’ electricity demand is forecast to soar

Over the next five years, American demand for electricity is set to grow by the equivalent of 15 times the peak demand of the entirety of New York City. That’s according to the latest annual forecast from the consultancy Grid Strategies. The growth — roughly sixfold what was forecast in 2022 — comes overwhelmingly from data centers, as shown by which regions expect the largest growth:

A chart from the report shows rising demand in different grid systems. Grid Strategies

“The fact that these facilities are city-sized is a huge deal,” John Wilson, Grid Strategies’ vice president and the report’s lead author, told Canary Media. “That has huge implications if these facilities get canceled, or they get built and don’t have long service lives.” Mounting political opposition to data centers could make deals less certain. A Heatmap Pro survey in September found just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center opening nearby. And last week I wrote about how progressives in Congress are rallying around a crackdown on data centers.

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3. While Trump hosts Saudi prince, Al Gore blasts the kingdom at COP30

The contrast couldn’t be starker. In Washington, President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, offering an opulent welcome to the White House and lashing out at reporters who asked about September 11 or the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In Belém, Brazil, meanwhile, former Vice President Al Gore tore into the team of delegates Saudi Arabia sent to the United Nations climate summit for “flexing its muscles” in negotiations about how to shift away from oil and gas. “Saudi Arabia appears to be determined to veto the effort to solve the climate crisis, only to protect their lavish income from selling the fossil fuels that are the principal cause of the climate crisis,” Gore told the Financial Times. “I hope that the rest of the world will stand up to this obscene greed and recklessness on the part of the kingdom.”

But the Trump meeting could yield some progress on clean energy. Among the top issues the White House listed in its read-out of the summit was the push to export American atomic energy technology to Saudi Arabia as the country looks to follow the United Arab Emirates in embracing nuclear power.

4. EU plans to curb exports of aluminum scrap

Facing growing needs for domestic sources of metal for the energy transition, the European Union is seeing its trash as treasure. On Tuesday, the European Commission proposed restricting exports of aluminum scrap amid what The Wall Street Journal called “concerns that rising outflows of the resource could leave Europe short of a critical input for its decarbonization efforts.” Speaking at the European Aluminum Summit, EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic referred to the exports as “leakage.” The proposal wouldn’t fully block sales of aluminum scrap overseas, but would adopt a “balanced” measure that ensures sufficient supplies and competitive prices in the single market. “Scrap is a strategic commodity given its important contribution to circularity and decarbonization, as production from secondary materials releases less emissions and is less energy intensive, as well as to our strategic autonomy,” Sefcovic said. The measure is set to be adopted by spring 2026.

In the U.S., the Biden administration made what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin last year called a “big bet” on aluminum. The Trump administration slapped steep new tariffs on imported aluminum, though as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote, “aluminum producers rely on imports of these same materials to build their own plants. Tariffs on these vital construction materials — plus exorbitant levies on all goods from China — will make building new production facilities significantly costlier.”

5. U.S. drilling rig count remains low

A chart showing the drop in active drilling rigs in the U.S.EIA

The average number of active rigs per month that are drilling for oil and natural gas in the continental United States fell steadily over the past year. As of last month, the U.S. had 517 rigs in operation, down from a peak of 750 in the end of 2022. The number of oil-pumping rigs dropped 33% to 397 rigs, while gas-pumping rigs slid 23% to 120 rigs over the same period from December 2022 to October 2025. While the Energy Information Administration said the declining rig count “reflects operators’ responses to declining crude oil and natural gas prices,” the federal research agency said it’s also “improvement in drilling efficiencies,” meaning companies are getting more fuel out of existing wells.

THE KICKER

It’s been a pattern in recent research on sustainability. Scientists look at methods that Indigenous groups have maintained as traditions only to find that approaches that have sustained throughout centuries or millennia are finding new value now. A study by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology found that Native Hawaiian aquaculture systems — essentially fish ponds known as loko iʻa — effectively shielded fish populations from the negative impacts of climate change, demonstrating resilience and bolstering local food security. “Our study is one of the first in academic literature to compare the temperatures between loko iʻa and the surrounding bay and how these temperature differences may be reflected in potential fish productivity,” lead author Annie Innes-Gold, a recent PhD graduate from the university, said in a press release. “We found that although rising water temperature may lead to declines in fish populations, loko iʻa fish populations were more resilient.”