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On offshore mining, New Jersey’s offshore wind, and China’s oil breakthrough
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are pummeling the Mississippi Valley, particularly in Arkansas • Heavy rain has deluged much of the Somali capital of Mogadishu • Temperatures in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Have Bart write this on the chalkboard: I Will Not Spread Nuclear Misinformation.The Simpsons
Let’s, for a moment, recast The Simpsons’ role in nuclear energy discourse. Rather than fearmongering with a pseudoscientific depiction of fission energy, imagine if that sign in the scene from the opening credits that reads “days without an accident” instead tracked how long it’s been since the United States started work on building newer, sleeker, and more efficient reactors. Until last week, the sign would have clocked 4,539 days — 13 years since construction began on the AP1000 reactor known as Plant Vogtle’s Unit 4. But last Friday, the next-generation reactor startup Kairos Power broke ground on its demonstration plant in Tennessee. Then this week, the Bill Gates-founded reactor company TerraPower started construction on its debut power plant in Wyoming. “This isn’t a test reactor,” Chris Levesque, president and chief executive of TerraPower, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a grid-scale nuclear reactor that will be built in 42 months.” While there’s plenty of ambition to build more reactors in the U.S., the country has a very, very long way to go to even catch up with China’s actual construction output.
California won’t be the site of any new plants anytime soon, at least until the state lifts its legislative ban on building new reactors. But keeping the state’s last operating nuclear station, Diablo Canyon, running from 2030 to 2045 could offer net savings of capital and operating costs totaling more than $7.6 billion, or more than $500 million per year of continued operations, according to a new analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. The savings “more than double when calculated relative to the current portfolio of alternatives mandated” in a state bill that lays out the renewable energy options for meeting Sacramento’s 2045 climate goals. “In that case,” the report states, “the total present value of savings for extending the life of” the plant “exceeds $20 billion, or more than $1.3 billion per year.”
If the Trump administration achieves its goal of siring a nuclear renaissance, we’re going to need a lot more reactor fuel than we currently have available. Much of that supply has come in recent years from Russia, but a U.S. law will fully ban imports in 2028. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have lavished funding on fuel enrichers. But on Thursday, the Department of Energy tapped a new tool: the Defense Production Act, the once-obscure Korean War-era statute that gives the federal government more powers to direct manufacturing. Under a newly launched Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consortium, the agency assembled representatives of more than 90 companies in the nuclear industrial base to “address all facets of the nuclear fuel supply chain including milling, conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fabrication, recycling, and reprocessing.” The Energy Department also kicked off a campaign it’s calling “Nuclear Dominance — 3 by 33.” The program aims by 2033 to “catalyze a secure and cost competitive domestic fuel supply chain,” speed up deployment of advanced reactors and reprocessing facilities, and find ways to use the DPA to speed up the buildout.
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The Department of the Interior is creating a new office called the Marine Minerals Administration to manage oil drilling and seabed mining in America’s territorial waters. The new office, formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, threatens to weaken the environmental oversight of both the traditional oil and gas industry and the emerging mining sector. The move is “worrisome because it has the potential of bringing things back where they were, where there was this inherent conflict of interest between promotion of offshore oil and gas, and oversight safety,” Donald Boesch, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told The New York Times. On Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said “these unification efforts will streamline bureaucracy.”
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The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has canceled the agreement it reached with PJM Interconnection in 2021 to develop wires and substations needed to send electricity from offshore wind turbines across the state. The board terminated the deal, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote, “because much of New Jersey’s expected offshore wind capacity has either been canceled by developers or indefinitely stalled by President Donald Trump.” Despite soaring electricity prices, “New Jersey is now facing a situation in which there will be no identified, large-scale in-state generation projects under active development that can make use of [the agreement] on the timeline the state and PJM initially envisioned,” the board wrote in a letter to PJM requesting termination of the agreement. Newly-inaugurated Governor Mikie Sherrill has vowed to build new nuclear capacity in the state. As I wrote earlier this month, New Jersey became the latest state to lift its ban on new atomic energy plants.
Heatmap House kicked off San Francisco Climate Week with a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors. Two talks in particular are worth highlighting.
China is going all in on hydrogen as Beijing seeks ways to free itself from imported fossil fuels. Now the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics has announced a facility in Xinjiang to use 1.5 gigawatts of wind power to produce green hydrogen mixed with an engineered material in a slurry bed reactor to transform solid asphalt into synthetic crude oil. If successful, the new process would allow China to import heavy oil and asphalt very cheaply from Central Asia and convert it into crude oil, the technology blogger TP Huang wrote on X, adding: “China is continuing work to turn crap into useful energy source by applying green electricity derivatives in its bid for energy independence.”
This year’s ocean-heating phenomenon could make climate change seem less bad than it really is — at least in the U.S.
You may have heard that we could be in for a “super” or even a “super duper” El Niño this year. The difference is non-technical, a matter of how warm the sea surface temperature in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation region of the central-eastern Pacific Ocean gets. An El Niño forms when the region is at least half a degree Celsius warmer than average, which causes more heat to be released into the atmosphere and affects global weather patterns. A super El Niño describes an anomaly of 2 degrees or higher. Some models predict an anomaly of over 3 degrees higher than average for this year.
If a super El Niño forms — and that is still a big if, about a one-in-four chance — it would be the fourth such event in just over 40 years. But the impacts could be even more severe, simply because the world is hotter today than it was in the previous super El Niño years of 1983, 1998, and 2016.
“2016 would be an unusually cold year if it occurred today,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for payment processing giant Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, told me. “1998 would be exceptionally cold.”
And yet in a strange twist, a 2026-2027 El Niño event might actually make Americans care less about climate change. Though many parts of the world are likely to get clobbered by El Niño’s characteristic combination of hotter, drier weather, the phenomenon has the potential to alleviate some of the extreme weather we’ve seen recently in the United States.
For example, warmer, wetter conditions in the southern U.S., milder winters in the north, and increased wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane basin are all classic El Niño signatures in North America.
“It may actually mean a better snow season for the Western U.S. and the mountains, hopefully recovering our snowpack if it’s not too warm,” Hausfather said. “We might benefit from higher rainfall” next winter, which could help lift widespread drought conditions in the southwest. High wind shear usually results in reduced hurricane activity in the Atlantic by depriving the storm systems of their heat engines and causing them to be too lopsided to organize into a full-blown cyclone.
Though the body of evidence for climate change remains incontrovertible, the temporary reprieve in some of its more visible effects will almost certainly make some Americans less concerned. Blame it on evolutionary biology. Brett Pelham, a social psychologist at Montgomery College who researches egocentrism and biases, told me that humans are hardwired to pay attention to the conditions happening directly around them. “That’s great if you’re living 20,000 or 80,000 years ago,” he said. “But today, we’re pumping tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it’s a recipe for disaster because people only care deeply about that problem if they feel the heat on a pretty chronic basis where they live.”
People are generally less likely to believe the planet is warming on a snowy day in March than they are in the summer, and a lower average state temperature is about as reliable a predictor of climate change skepticism as being a Republican, even when controlling for income, party affiliation, education, and age. Given that it is, in theory, easier to convince someone living in scorching hot Phoenix that greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere than someone living by a lake in Minnesota, if an El Niño mellows out some extreme weather trends in the U.S. this year and next, it could also mellow some of the sense of urgency to act.
“It’s a definite implication of my work that day-to-day variation, monthly variation, and geographical variation matter,” Pelham said.
“If my data are true,” he added, “it’s going to be true on average that in places that have an unseasonably cool summer or winter, there’s going to be a temporary shift in the average attitude.”
Such shifts affect the average by just a few points either way — “they’re not night and day, like ‘I believed in climate change and now I don’t,’” Pelham stressed. But it’s undoubtedly ironic — and concerning — that heading into what could be one of the hottest years on the planet in recent history, Americans may be predisposed to feeling relatively safe.
Other parts of the world won’t have such luxury. Even a normal-strength El Niño, which looks all but certain to form this year, could cause major damage, from wildfires in parched Indonesia to catastrophic floods in East Africa to water rationing in South America. In Peru and Ecuador, El Niño is already a “current event,” Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, told me. Warm coastal conditions off the continent — a known, albeit not guaranteed, global El Niño precursor — are causing deluges, landslides, and heat waves in the upper northwest corner of South America. “You can see how the impacts start extending towards other parts of the world until it reaches us,” he said.
It is possible to combat local biases. Pelham told me other researchers have found that images can break through our egocentrism. So “if we see more pictures of melting glaciers or waters rising in our own backyards, we would start to say, ‘Oh my goodness, we really have to do something about this global problem,” he said.
But to that end, coverage of climate change that might have this effect is becoming rarer. Stories about global warming have dropped about 38% since 2021; even people working in climate-related industries have “a kind of exhaustion with ‘climate’ as the right frame through which to understand the fractious mixture of electrification, pollution reduction, clean energy development, and other goals that people who care about climate change actually pursue,” my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote based on the results of latest Heatmap Insiders Survey.
Of course, there is no promise that the U.S. will skirt disaster because of El Niño. Increased rainfall means more floods and landslides; if the El Niño pushes temperatures up too high, snowpack will once again be an issue next winter. All it takes is one big hurricane forming and making landfall for it to be considered a bad storm year, which is as much a roll of the dice as anything else. And because El Niño releases ocean heat into the atmosphere, the periods immediately following it are often about two-tenths of a degree Celsius warmer, increasing the severity of heat waves and droughts. Compounded by climate change, that puts 2027 on track to be potentially the hottest year the planet has seen in human history.
“We might be at 1.45 degrees Celsius [above preindustrial levels] next year from human activity, and we might end up at 1.65 degrees because there’s a very strong El Niño,” Hausfather said. But for context, “we are seeing that much warmth added to the climate system from human activity roughly every decade,” he told me. That is, “— we’re adding a permanent super El Niño-worth of heat to the climate system” via the continued burning of fossil fuels.
There couldn’t be a worse time to let up on our collective sense of climate urgency, to put it mildly. But if El Niño makes conditions in the U.S. appear any better, then even if there’s disaster elsewhere, “you’re going to give a sigh of relief,” Pelham predicted. “You’re going to feel like [climate change is] not as bad as people have hyped it up to be.”
