America’s Rare Earths Champions Against China Are Fighting Each Other

Current conditions: The summerlike heat in the Northeast is set to drop by double digits as cold Canadian air blows southward, sending temperatures in Boston as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit by Saturday • Temperatures are nearing 100 degrees in Cordoba, Spain, as Western Europe’s record-breaking heatwave continues • Juba is also nearly 100 degrees as heavy thunderstorms roll into the capital of conflict-riven South Sudan.

THE TOP FIVE

1. America’s two rare earths champions are fighting each other

Last year, in a move so bold it made Biden administration officials jealous, President Donald Trump took an equity stake in MP Materials, making the federal government the largest shareholder in the United States’ only active domestic rare earths producer. The deal became a trend, with the U.S. government taking minority ownership stakes in at least a dozen more companies that produce or process critical minerals, of which China controls the global supply. In January, USA Rare Earth, a manufacturer of rare earth magnets that aims to eventually mine and process fresh ore in Texas, became the second large rare earths-focused company in the Trump administration’s portfolio. Now America’s two champions in the war against China’s metal monopolies are instead battling each other. On Wednesday afternoon, the Financial Times reported that MP Materials had filed a lawsuit against USA Rare Earth, accusing its rival of “stealing” its technology for making the permanent magnets that go into everything from phones and electronics to electric vehicles to fighter jets. “USA Rare Earth has repeatedly failed to meet its commercial and performance targets and is now resorting to stealing technology to dig itself out,” MP Materials alleged in a complaint filed last week in Texas court. In response, USA Rare Earth said: “MP Materials’ complaint has misrepresented our company, our culture, and our people, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

2. Exclusive: Microreactor developer Last Energy’s pilot project hits a key permitting milestone

Yet another U.S. reactor startup hoping to build a prototype plant under the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program has won the agency’s approval for its safety blueprint. On Thursday, Last Energy plans to announce the regulator’s official endorsement of the microreactor developer’s preliminary documented safety analysis — a key procedural step known as PDSA — for its 5-megawatt demonstration reactor at Texas A&M University. The reactor, set to be a quarter the size of Last Energy’s commercial-scale model, is designed to show regulators the technology can safely split atoms and generate heat for electricity production. The approval is only from the Energy Department and limited to the pilot project. To produce commercial electricity, Last Energy still needs to go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license. But the data from this pilot project is likely to count for Last Energy’s eventual application to the NRC for its first commercial plant. “Last Energy’s PWR-5 uses the same physical reactor geometry as the company’s commercial PWR-20, with reduced fuel enrichment scaled for 5 megawatts of electrical output,” the company told me. “The PWR-5 pilot project is a direct bridge to Last Energy’s commercial PWR-20 deployment.”

The approval makes Last Energy at least the fourth company so far to pass the PDSA phase after rival microreactor developers Antares, Radiant, and Deployable Energy. But it isn’t the only one. On Wednesday afternoon, an official at the Idaho National Laboratory posted on LinkedIn that he had approved the PDAS for two reactors in the Energy Department’s pilot program. It wasn't immediately clear which company was the second after Last Energy. “I couldn’t be prouder of the exemptional nuclear safety review team,” wrote Bob Boston, the Energy Department’s Idaho operations manager. “The public can rest assured that any and all approvals for new reactors under DOE will be safe.”

3. Pennsylvania and New Jersey unveil new data center rules

Two of the most populous states in the nation’s largest electric grid just released new rules for data centers looking to set up shop. In Pennsylvania, the largest state in PJM Interconnection, Governor Josh Shapiro issued a new set of standards for companies seeking to fast-track development, including requiring developers to generate their own electricity, give out millions of dollars in local support, and follow stricter sustainability rules on water. The Democrat, per the public radio station WVIA, “also wants to change a tax exemption program for data center owners and operators” to require companies to meet the new standards to qualify for tax breaks. The idea mirrors a proposal from Searchlight Institute senior fellow Jane Flegal, who argued last month for conditioning tax incentives on meeting best-practice industry standards for data centers. In New Jersey, the sixth-largest of PJM’s 13 states, Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill released her own set of guidelines for data center companies that includes requiring public reporting of water and electricity usage and plans to develop “strong statewide standards” that provide “state resources to ensure municipalities can negotiate from positions of strength, ensuring data centers address impacts like light, noise, and pollution while making meaningful local investments” and “delivering good-paying jobs.”

Meanwhile in Alaska, where the Trump administration is clearing the way for all kinds of new infrastructure, the Anchorage-based startup Stak Energy is proposing one of the largest data centers in the nation on the Arctic North Slope. The $500 million project would take up an entire square mile with multiple buildings off the Dalton Highway, where proponents say cold temperatures and an abundant supply of land and natural gas for power can bolster the facility. The project could, according to the Northern Journal, produce up to 3 gigawatts of power for its own use, “making it competitive with some of the largest data centers under development in the Lower 48.” In a Tuesday segment on Alaska Public Radio, Northern Journal reporter Nathaniel Herz said the below-freezing average temperature on the North Slope meant the project would “be using what they expect to be 90% less water than a facility in the Lower 48.” Perhaps the biggest benefit though is the sparse population in the Arctic. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained of the latest Heatmap Pro data, the number of data center projects being canceled due to public backlash is soaring.

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4. California’s first carbon capture and storage project comes online

Deep under California’s traffic-clogged streets, rolling farmland, and sprawling deserts are vast caverns — many the legacy of wells drained of oil during the heyday of Chevron’s Great Depression-era homestate drilling bonanza — capable of storing carbon dioxide captured before it enters the atmosphere. Until now, the state could only theoretically return carbon to the Earth’s crust. But on Tuesday, the oil and carbon management developer California Resources Corporation injected its maiden load of carbon dioxide into a depleted oil reservoir, marking the first time a carbon capture and storage project has come online in the state’s history. The project, called Carbon TerraVault I, is located in Kern County, the vast inland stretch northeast of Santa Barbara that’s home to California’s largest active oil fields. The site will draw out the dregs of oil left in the depleted wells in the Elk Hills Field by permanently returning up to 30 million tons of carbon dioxide to the formation roughly a mile deep underground. It’s part of a vertically integrated operation. California Resources Corporation, which calls itself CRC, operates a nearby cryogenic gas plant. The company captures the carbon dioxide from the facility and ships it to the so-called Class IV well in the oil and gas field. The first injection “demonstrates that California can lead on climate solutions that are practical, scalable, and cost-effective,” CRC CEO Francisco Leon said in a statement. Investors remain skeptical. Shares of CRC fell nearly 3% yesterday.

With gas turbines selling faster than manufacturers can keep up, technology that could capture carbon from gas-fired plants and thus preserve their value even in a scenario where the government prices emissions commands a new premium. It wasn’t long ago that activists uniformly dismissed the technology as a “false solution,” and experts cautioned that carbon capture and storage would be limited to hard-to-abate industrial sectors. But last October, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Google backed a project to build a gas plant with CCS, launching what may be one of the most promising efforts yet to commercialize the technology.

5. RFK Jr. targets microplastics with the biggest federal research investment yet

Fresh off wrangling a biting pair of eastern racer snakes he grabbed off the patio of Dr. Oz’s vacation home, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is trying to find ways to round up and get rid of the microscopic plastic particles circulating in Americans’ bodies. A new $144 million program, launched last month but featured in E&E News on Wednesday, aims to measure, understand, and remove micro- and nanoplastics, and marks the biggest federal investment to date in a field of study that coalesced just five years ago.

While the move was “welcomed by researchers, industry, environmental, and Make American Healthy Again advocates as well as online wellness gurus promoting nascent ‘detoxification’ methods,” the newswire quoted Kennedy’s own experts, who said the controversial health government chief was “focused on the wrong questions.” Marcus Eriksen, a marine plastics scientist who heads up the nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute and has advised Kennedy for years, said: “Getting it out of our bodies? That seems extremely tough to me.” So, why put resources there? Well, Eriksen said, it’s politically easier to sell than cracking down on the fossil fuel companies with growing businesses producing the ingredients for plastics. “I get that’s kind of the narrative that’s going to fly with this administration — focus on the downstream stuff, less on the prevention side,” he said.

THE KICKER

The world's first floating nuclear plant and SMR: the Akademik Lomonosov. Rosatom

For all the hype around small modular reactors, only two of the 440 some-odd commercial nuclear reactors in operating in the world today would qualify. One of them is a high-temperature gas-cooled plant in China, which generates 210 megawatts of electricity. (The cutoff for what qualifies as an SMR is widely agreed to be under 300 megawatts but over 20 megawatts, the threshold for microreactors.) The other was the world’s first SMR: Russia’s floating nuclear plant on a barge in the Siberian Arctic, capable of generating 70 megawatts of power. Nearly seven years after the vessel Akademik Lomonosov started producing electricity, Russia’s state-owned nuclear firm is preparing for another floating nuclear station. On Wednesday, World Nuclear News reported that Rosatom had finished manufacturing a 58-megawatt reactor for a serialized floating power station set to power a copper mining complex in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, in the country’s northeasternmost corner. “Rosatom continues to expand its range of floating power units, and the completion of the first reactor for the lead floating nuclear power unit is a significant milestone,” Alexey Likhachev, the director general of Rosatom, said in a statement. “Today, Russia is the only country with an operating floating nuclear power plant, and we intend to maintain our leadership in the development of small-scale technologies.”