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The startup team observes the test reactor at the Idaho National Lab. Clean Core Thorium Energy
Back in April, I told you about Clean Core Thorium Energy. The Chicago-based startup is dusting off a decades-old dream of harnessing abundant thorium as a fuel for nuclear reactors to replace uranium, which is rarer and produces more long-lived radioactive waste. In the spring, the firm inked a handful of deals to begin manufacturing its first fuel assemblies using thorium. Now, I can report exclusively, Clean Core has surpassed a technical milestone for its fuel with the publication of a comprehensive peer-reviewed engineering assessment in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design. The paper comes after the company completed a multi-year campaign of irradiating the fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor. The results showed that the fuel can be used in an existing pressurized heavy water reactor, like those that make up the bulk of the Canadian and Indian fleets, and achieve a high “burnup” of the material. “Milestones in this industry are earned in reactors, not in renderings,” Mehul Shah, Clean Core’s chief executive and founder, told me in a statement. “The analyses underpinning the fuel’s design have now withstood the scrutiny of peer review in one of the field's leading journals.”
Google has agreed to buy the entire initial output of a sweeping solar project in Arkansas in a bid to offset its fossil fuel emissions. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the tech giant would purchase the full 1.6 gigawatts of solar power and 2 gigawatt-hours of battery storage from the first phase of construction on the Steel River Energy Center, set to be complete in 2029. The second phase will up the output to 2.5 gigawatts of solar and 2.9 gigawatt-hours of storage. The panels will all come from First Solar, the U.S. manufacturer that boasts a 100% domestic supply chain. None of Google’s data centers will use the electricity, but the power will serve as an offset to gas-fueled operations elsewhere.
It’s hardly the only bullish sign for solar. In June, Europe generated a quarter of its power from photovoltaics for the first time, according to an analysis by the renewables-focused think tank Ember. “Solar’s rise has been truly stratospheric, beating prediction after prediction,” Chris Rosslowe, a senior energy analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “In just a few years solar has gone from a small player to an essential part of Europe’s power system, as governments and citizens look for low-cost, quick-to-install domestic power sources.”
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You can’t make it here, but you can — at least, for now — make it anywhere else. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday enacting the nation’s first state-level moratorium on building large-scale data centers. The one-year pause “will ensure New Yorkers are not paying for transmission and infrastructure build outs” and will give Albany time to create a statewide investment framework to direct more benefits from projects to local communities, the governor’s office said in a press release. “New York will lead the way in creating the strongest standards in the nation for data center development, ensuring that when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too,” Hochul said in a statement. She also vowed to press the legislature to pass a bill to repeal sales tax exemptions from large data center projects.
It’s no surprise. At least seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers built near their homes, Heatmap Pro polling showed last month. That’s at least partly driven by the perception that data centers are driving up electricity costs. Utilities requested $18.6 billion in electric and gas increases in the first six months of this year, according to a new report from the grid-focused nonprofit PowerLines. More than $9 billion of those requests were filed in the second quarter of this year alone, surpassing the total for the same period in 2025 — which was itself a record — by 26%. “Summer is when Americans pay attention to what electricity costs because their utility bills are often higher,” Charles Hua, PowerLines’ founder and executive director, said in a statement. “The amount of utility rate increase requests in these filings shows the pressure on household energy bills isn’t easing.”
Realta Fusion, a magnetic mirror fusion startup, announced plans Wednesday to convert an iconic former Oscar Mayer plant in Wisconsin into its corporate headquarters and research hub. As part of the deal, the state and its capital city of Madison will contribute $55 million to support the conversion. The facility will employ more than 600 people in technical and non-technical roles. “We spent the better part of the past two years searching across the country to find the most favorable business environment and the most attractive site to build our R&D facility, and we found it in our own backyard,” Realta CEO Kieran Furlong said in a statement. “The state of Wisconsin and the city of Madison have made it clear they understand the promise of fusion energy and share our vision for the future, and now they’ve thrown their lot in together to make that vision a reality.” It’s yet another sign, as my colleague Katie Brigham put it in 2024, that fusion is “finally, possibly, almost” here.
Meanwhile, some fission news: Remember when I told you last month about why I try to cover all the major milestones in China’s nuclear construction projects? Well, I have another update: China General Nuclear, one of the country’s two main state-owned nuclear companies, just installed the reactor pressure vessel for unit 1 of the Lufeng nuclear plant in Guangdong province. In a statement to World Nuclear News, CGN, as the company is known, said the latest item off the construction checklist marks “the beginning of the peak period for the installation of main system equipment in the nuclear island of unit 1 and lays a solid foundation for the orderly progress of subsequent key processes such as the installation of main pipelines.”
There are thousands of ways to pull a climate or energy angle out of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Here’s one: Tajikistan isn’t receiving as much Russian oil and gas as before, given Ukraine’s campaign of drone attacks on key pipeline and refinery infrastructure, so it’s looking to ramp up its own drilling operations again. On Monday, the Times of Central Asia reported that Tajik Energy Minister Daler Juma said the country had only enough fuel to last about two months.
Meanwhile, the war appears to be back on. After resuming mutual attacks last week, President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. would reinstate its blockade of Iran’s ports. “The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network.
With the world’s largest fleet of nuclear reactors, the U.S. has the capacity to pump out about 97 gigawatts of atomic energy. If every project now waiting in the pipeline goes forward, the country could nearly double that total capacity. A new analysis by the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank, found that the U.S. has 74 gigawatts of projects in various stages of development. “While it is unlikely that all of that capacity will ultimately be built, if even a fraction of it is deployed it would mark a historic turnaround for the U.S. nuclear industry,” Joy Jiang, an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute who authored the paper, wrote in a blog post. And more appears to be coming: New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill signed a bill Monday that creates a new procurement process for building a new nuclear plant in the state.
In Belgium, meanwhile, the government just approved nearly $12.5 million in funding for eight nuclear energy research projects as Prime Minister Bart De Wever seeks to reverse his country’s previous phaseout policy. On Monday, NucNet reported that the government wanted to restore nuclear power to its “rightful place” in the Belgian energy mix.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW, added a record 30,000 new members so far this year, up from 24,000 a year ago. The milestone, announced Monday in a post on X, highlights a looming challenge for Democrats who are embracing the populist wing of the party’s calls for a moratorium on data center construction, no doubt a large part of what’s led to the recent hiring boom. “The building trades unions that the left’s major decarbonization agenda revolves around putting to work are further alienated by data center rejection (instead of regulation),” Fred Stafford, the pseudonymous socialist energy researcher and Heatmap contributor, wrote in a post on X. Still, the political dynamics are hard to pass up for left-wing candidates and advocacy groups. As Semafor reporter David Weigel wrote on X, moderates worry that coming out against a data center will activate opposition spending from the AI industry’s political action committees. “No such worries on the left, which wasn’t getting that money,” he wrote.
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A long-exposure photo of turbines in Hatay, Turkey.Ali Kemal Zerenli/Anadolu via Getty Images
Turkey is building its first nuclear plant and billions of dollars of new hydroelectric dams. But that doesn’t mean wind and solar don’t have a part. On Monday, Renewables Now reported that, over the weekend, the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources published announcements for nearly two dozen renewable energy tenders scheduled for this year, with a target of deploying 2.4 gigawatts of new projects.
Shortly after the 2024 presidential election, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham declared “the death of ‘climate tech.’” By that, she meant that the incoming Trump administration would kibosh use of that two-word phrase to describe next-generation technologies that could generate power without emissions or reduce the impacts of global warming in other ways. But the sector is mounting quite a comeback. In the first half of this year, the global climate tech sector notched its busiest six months on record. A Bloomberg write-up of a new analysis by the market research firm Currence identified 153 transactions in the first half of 2026. That’s an eye-popping 70% hike from the same period last year.
It’s been 36 years since the signing of the Americans with Disability Act, yet the country remains tragically inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs, walkers, and canes. (For a disturbing account of just how bad things are in the nation’s largest city, listen to this old “This American Life” episode about lawyer and advocate Britney Wilson’s struggle to use Access-a-Ride, New York City’s para-transit provider.) It’s a problem Tesla aims to change. The auto giant is building a wheelchair-accessible self-driving taxi. But Electrek cautioned that Tesla “gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the ‘active product’ is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.” Nevertheless, I’d welcome its entry to the roads.
