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The data center backlash, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote in the fall, is “swallowing American politics.” Polling from Heatmap Pro has shown that public resentment toward server farms they perceive as driving up electricity bills, sucking up too much water, or supporting software that threatens human jobs is rapidly growing. Data centers, as Jael wrote last week, are now more controversial than wind farms.
Nuclear startups taking part in the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program are approaching the agency’s July 4 deadline to split their first atoms, and companies are making deals left and right for new projects. But just four firms have so far secured commercial offtakers, announced project-specific financing, and locked down contracts with suppliers and construction partners. That’s according to new data from a report by the policy advocate Third Way, shared exclusively with me for this newsletter. TerraPower’s nuclear project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, which broke ground this month, is in the lead, with the most advanced application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Amazon-backed X-energy has two projects that have achieved all three preliminary milestones. Holtec International’s small modular reactor project in Michigan and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s debut unit at the Tennessee Valley Authority — each of which recently received $400 million in federal funding, as I previously reported — are close behind.
Among the report’s other takeaways: Federal policy is “too often rewarding hype instead of commercialization readiness,” and the U.S. needs to winnow down the technologies on offer.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has officially entered what CBS News called “a financial danger zone” that threatens to limit spending to only the most urgent life-saving needs. The status, called Imminent Needs Funding, is triggered when FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund drops below $3 billion. The depletion is a symptom of the partial government shutdown of FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding has become hotly political over the hardline actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the timing couldn’t be worse: Hurricane season is about a month away. “Disasters are unpredictable. They’re very costly. We don’t know what could happen between now and June 1,” FEMA Associate Administrator Victoria Barton told the network.
This was all predictable. Back in February, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned that the DHS shutdown would “starve local disaster response.”
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The U.S. is racing to get new nuclear projects off the ground. But it’s not yet clear where all the new reactor fuel is going to come from, especially once federal law fully bans all imports of Russian uranium in 2028. A new uranium mining project has started up operations this week in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin. The reactivated mine was previously considered the birthplace of in-situ recovery mining, a more eco-friendly method of extraction that involves injecting a solution into rock that dissolves minerals, then pumping that fluid to the surface for collection. The developer, Ur-Energy, said it’s returning to operations to power at least the next nine years of uranium demand in the U.S.
The milestone at the uranium mine comes as global mining deals reached a new high in the first three months of this year. Global law firm White & Case LLP recorded 121 mergers and acquisitions in the sector in the first quarter, up from 117 a year earlier and 102 in 2024, according to Mining.com. It’s the strongest first quarter since 2023. “The math is unforgiving,” the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang and Peter Cook wrote in an Ideas essay for Heatmap this week. “We need more minerals, and we need them soon.”
The containment dome hoisted over Unit 1 in 2022. VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Another week, another new full-scale nuclear reactor has come online in China. On Wednesday, World Nuclear News reported that Unit 1 of the San’ao nuclear station in eastern Zhejiang province has entered commercial operation. The reactor is the first of six Hualong One reactors planned for the site. The Hualong One is China’s leading indigenous reactor design, borrowing heavily from the Chinese version of the Westinghouse AP1000, America’s leading reactor.
South Africa, meanwhile, is making a bid to lure engineers working abroad to come home to help the country build up its own nuclear sector once again. The plan, detailed by Semafor, “aims to attract skilled migrants and South African expatriates, especially those working in the United Arab Emirates,” which hired large numbers of local engineers during the buildout of the Gulf nation’s debut Barakah nuclear plant over the past decade.
Even before China made a big gamble in recent months on green hydrogen to ease the effects of the Iran War’s hydrocarbon shock, the country’s electrolyzer manufacturers were already starting to dominate the industry. Now the first Chinese electrolyzer manufactured in Europe is due to be assembled in the coming weeks. RCT GH Hydrogen, a joint venture between the Jiangsu-based electrolyzer maker Guofu and the German technology company RCT Group, is on track to roll out its first unit in June, Hydrogen Insight reported Wednesday.
That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from finding new ways to terminate other offshore wind projects. As I wrote yesterday, the Department of the Interior announced that two more projects — Bluepoint Wind off the coast of New Jersey and Golden State Wind off California — had taken the administration up on its offer to pay back the leasing costs up to a combined nearly $900 million in exchange for the developers abandoning the bids and agreeing not to pursue other offshore wind deals in the U.S. “We did not take this decision lightly,” Michael Brown, the CEO of Ocean Winds North America, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo in an emailed statement. “But when the underlying conditions in a market change, we must adapt. In this case, receiving a refund for the lease payments we had invested and exiting on agreed terms was the right outcome for our shareholders and partners.”
The United Arab Emirates said Tuesday it would withdraw from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, shrinking the world’s biggest oil-producing cartel to just 11 nations. The decision takes effect on May 1. The announcement came ahead of Wednesday’s latest OPEC meeting in Vienna. Abu Dhabi said it will also quit the broader OPEC+ supergroup that includes non-members led by Russia. In a post on X, Sultan Al Jaber — who serves as the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and the chairman the country’s leading clean energy firm Masdar — said his nation had “taken a sovereign decision in line with its long-term energy strategy, its true production capability, and its national interest.” The National, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned English-language newspaper, wrote that “independence from OPEC will give the UAE, which accounts for roughly 4% of global oil production, more flexibility and responsiveness in managing the oil market.”
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The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a new categorical exclusion for geothermal, freeing developers from the requirement to carry out environmental reviews at yet another key step in the drilling process. The regulatory change marks the third new categorical exclusion for geothermal issued in the past two years. That comes after what Joel Edwards, the co-founder of the geothermal startup Zanskar, said in a post on X was a period of about 20 years “without any new” exclusions. In April 2024, pre-leasing and surveying got a categorical exclusion. In January 2025, a new categorical exclusion covered postleasing, drilling, and flow-testing on areas of up to 20 acres. Now this latest step will allow for an exemption on pre-leasing activities such as drilling up to 10 acres. “Very nice to see the agency continuing to streamline permitting,” Edwards wrote. “Still more bottlenecks to work out, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, introduced legislation to boost federal funding for next-generation geothermal research, development, and commercialization. “The U.S. is at the forefront of geothermal energy innovation, and this bill has the potential to strengthen global leadership, boost competitiveness, and accelerate the next generation of clean firm technologies,” Terra Rogers, director for superhot rock energy at Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement. “This nation has vast, underutilized next-generation geothermal and superhot rock potential.”
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CATL, the world’s largest battery market, has signed the world’s largest-ever order for sodium-ion batteries, the technology widely discussed as a potentially cheaper and more abundant alternative to the lithium power packs that propel electric vehicles and increasingly back up the grid. The Chinese giant inked a deal for 60 gigawatt-hours of batteries with the energy storage integrator HyperStrong. The deal marks what CATL calls proof that it has “overcome the challenges of the entire sodium-ion battery mass production chains,” prompting some experts to describe the agreement to Electrek as a potential “DeepSeek moment,” a reference to the Chinese artificial intelligence model that shook up the global industry with its affordability and nimbleness.
Sodium-ion batteries have seemed like the “next big thing” for years now, but as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, the industry has faced something of a curse when it comes to manufacturing, though new startups are attempting to overcome that problem.
The debut nuclear station in 2023. Abdul GONI / AFP via Getty Images
Fuel loading has begun at Bangladesh’s first nuclear power station. The uranium rods could be in place in the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, made up of two VVER-1200 reactors designed and built by Russia’s state-owned Rosatom, in as little as 45 days. The plant will vault Bangladesh into the group of 31 nations that harness the power of splitting atoms for electricity production. “Today, Bangladesh joined the club of countries using peaceful nuclear energy as a reliable source of sustainable development,” Rosatom Director General Alexei Likhachev said in a statement to World Nuclear News. “The Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant will undoubtedly become a vital element of the country's energy system. For Rosatom, this project is another important step in the development of global nuclear energy and in strengthening friendly relations with our international partners.” When the plant generates its first power for the grid later this year, it will complete a project first planned when the country was known as East Pakistan.
When my high school girlfriend made my first Facebook account, I never imagined that, about 20 years later, the social network’s parent company would be trying to harvest electricity for its servers from outer space. But this week, Meta announced a deal with the startup Overview Energy, which aims to beam light from thousands of satellites to solar farms that power data centers at night, effectively making solar a 24-hour power source. Overview CEO Marc Berte said the goal is to launch the satellites by 2030, with what TechCrunch called “a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth.”
