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You know who also wants to see more investment in SMRs? Arizona senator and rumored Democratic presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who released an energy plan Wednesday calling on the Energy Department to ease the “regulatory, scaling, and supply chain challenges” new reactors still face.
Since he first emerged on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has made the proverbial forgotten coal miner a central theme of his anti-establishment campaigns, vowing to correct for urbanite elites’ neglect by putting workers’ concerns at the forefront. Yet his administration is now considering overhauling black lung protections that miners lobbied federal agencies to enact and enforce. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer will “reconsider and seek comments” on parts of the Biden-era silica rule that mining companies and trade groups are challenging in court, the agency told E&E News. It’s unclear how the Trump administration may seek to alter the regulation. But the rule, finalized last year, reduced exposure limits for miners to airborne silica crystals that lodge deep inside lung tissue to 50 micrograms from the previous 100 microgram limit. The rule also required companies to provide expanded medical tests to workers. Dozens of miners and medical advocates protested outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October to request that the rule, expected to prevent more than 1,000 deaths and 3,700 cases of black lung per year, be saved.
Rolling back some of the protections would be just the latest effort to gut Biden-era policy. On Wednesday, the White House invited automotive executives to attend what’s expected to be an announcement to shred fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, The New York Times reported late on Tuesday.
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A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA
The average American spent a combined 11 hours without electricity last year as a result of extreme weather, worse outages than during any previous year going back a decade. That’s according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Blackouts attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2025, compared to an average of roughly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023. Major hurricanes accounted for 80% of the hours without electricity in 2024.
The latest federal grants may be good news for third-generation SMRs, but one of the leading fourth-generation projects — the Bill Gates-owned TerraPower’s bid to build a molten salt-cooled reactor at a former coal plant in Wyoming — just cleared the final safety hurdle for its construction permit. Calling the approval a “momentous occasion for TerraPower,” CEO Chris Levesque said the “favorable safety evaluation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”
TerraPower’s project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is meant to demonstrate the company’s reactors, which are designed to store power when it’s needed — making them uniquely complementary to grids with large amounts of wind and solar — to avoid the possibility of a meltdown. Still, at a private lunch I attended in October, Gates warned that the U.S. is falling behind China on nuclear power. China is charging ahead on all energy fronts. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese had started up a domestically-produced gas turbine for the first time as the country seeks to compete with the U.S. on even the fossil fuels American producers dominate.
It’s been a rough year for green hydrogen projects as the high cost of producing the zero-carbon fuel from renewable electricity and water makes finding customers difficult for projects. Blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment, isn’t doing much better. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. abandoned plans to build what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production plants in Baytown, Texas. This week, BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen project in England. At issue are strict new standards in the European Union for how much carbon blue hydrogen plants would need to capture to qualify as clean.
You’re not the only one accidentally ingesting loads of microplastics. New research suggests crickets can’t tell the difference between tiny bits of plastics and natural food sources. Evidence shows that crickets can break down microplastics into smaller nanoplastics — which may be even worse in the environment since they’re more easily eaten or absorbed by other lifeforms.
Data centers’ projected electricity demand has grown so much in the last seven months that BloombergNEF increased its forecast by nearly 40%. In a new analysis published Monday, the consultancy estimated that power demand from U.S. data centers will surge to 106 gigawatts by 2035. That’s 36% higher than BloombergNEF’s outlook published in April, “illustrating just how quickly the sector is expanding,” the consultancy wrote.
The finding illustrates the key challenge facing the grid as data centers complete construction far faster than new gas turbines, nuclear reactors, or even solar panels can be built and patched onto the grid. That reality has put new value on the ability of data centers to power down when the grid is overtaxed, a process Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin described as “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.” It also shows why data centers are becoming so politically contentious that the “backlash,” as our colleague Jael Holzman put it, “is swallowing American politics.”
Back in August, I told you about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended staffers who signed onto a letter criticizing President Donald Trump’s plans to gut the agency. Now the Trump administration has reinstated 14 employees placed on administrative leave after their signatures on a letter addressed to Congress were considered “misconduct.” In notices sent to the workers last week, which The New York Times reviewed, FEMA said the “misconduct investigation has been closed, and as a result you are being removed from administrative leave.” The notices did not disclose the probe’s findings, and FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t respond to the newspaper’s questions.
The move comes as Illinois Governor JB Pritzker accuses Trump of politicizing disaster relief. The billionaire Democrat, who is widely discussed as a potential presidential candidate in 2028, said the White House rejected two separate requests for $130 million to help households affected by storms in late July and mid-August. E&E News called the denial “unusual” since “the damage documented by the administration was at such a high level that it would routinely lead to a presidential approval for disaster aid.”
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is dead. Long live the National Laboratory of the Rockies. The lab’s focus on clean energy wasn’t unique. Nuclear power, for example, benefits from receiving the primary focus at sites such as the Idaho, Argonne, and Oak Ridge national laboratories. But the Department of Energy said Monday that the rebranding was part of an effort to broaden NREL’s scope. “The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson, a key deputy of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright (whose unique professional history with Wright I wrote about last week), said in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”
In its press release, the Energy Department said NREL was formed amid the 1973 oil crisis and that the new name “reflects the Trump Administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado.”
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Soldiers march in Mozambique. Ivan Bruno/Getty Images
In March, the Trump administration approved a $5 billion loan aimed to help restart the French oil giant TotalEnergies’ controversial liquified natural gas project in Mozambique. Though the project initially had international support, the southeast African nation has faced ongoing challenges from extreme weather and an Islamist insurgency, which mounted a deadly terrorist attack that caused work on the project to shut down in 2021. Troops from Rwanda have since come in to secure the area.
On Monday, however, the British government decided to pull its $1.15 billion loan, the Financial Times reported. Initially approved in 2020, the public financing faced fierce pushback from environmental and human rights groups. The Netherlands also announced Monday that it would stop backing the project.
Direct air capture is going big in Japan. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. carbon removal startup Heirloom announced investments from the Development Bank of Japan and Chiyoda Corporation, building on $150 million in Series B funding the company closed last year. That financing round also included investments from Japan Airlines, the industrial giant Mitsubishi Corporation, and the trading behemoth Mitsui & Co. The move comes as Japan’s greenhouse gas-trading system is poised to shift from voluntary participation to mandatory compliance next year, becoming Asia’s second-largest carbon market.
Heirloom had planned to build a giant DAC facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last year. But as our colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in October, the Trump administration looks poised to slash federal funding to support construction of DAC plants, making the fate of the Shreveport project unclear.
In the race to develop next-generation technology to harvest water straight out of the air, AirJoule Technologies has a promising lead. The GE Vernova-backed startup is already publicly traded and has deals with major industrial giants such as appliance maker Carrier. Now the company has inked a deal with a hyperscaler to sell water to cool data centers and use waste heat from the servers to power production of that same water. In a press release, the data center company, Nexus Data Centers, said AirJoule’s “waste-heat-to-water approach provides a superior solution by utilizing thermal energy we are already generating to produce high purity water for electricity production and cooling systems.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the relationship of the new investments in Heirloom to its previous funding round.
