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A nickel mine in Indonesia.Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
President Donald Trump has been on quite a shopping spree since taking an equity stake in MP Materials, the only active rare earths miner in the U.S., in a deal Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted made former Biden administration officials “jealous.” The latest stake the administration has taken for the American taxpayer is in USA Rare Earth, a would-be miner that has focused its attention establishing a domestic manufacturing base for the rare earth-based magnets China dominates. On Monday, the Department of Commerce announced a deal to inject $1.6 billion into the company in exchange for shares. “USA Rare Earth’s heavy critical minerals project is essential to restoring U.S. critical mineral independence,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a statement. “This investment ensures our supply chains are resilient and no longer reliant on foreign nations.” In a call with analysts Monday, USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton called the deal “a watershed moment in our work to secure and grow a resilient and independent rare earth value chain based in this country.”
After two years of searching for a site to build the United States’ first new aluminum smelter in half a century, Century Aluminum has abandoned its original plan and opted instead to go into business with a Dubai-based rival developing a plant in Oklahoma. Emirates Global Aluminum announced plans last year to construct a smelter near Tulsa. Under the new plan, Century Aluminum would take a 40% stake in the venture, with Emirates Global Aluminum holding the other 60%. At peak capacity, the smelter would produce 750,000 tons of aluminum per year, a volume The Wall Street Journal noted would make it the largest smelter in the U.S. Emirates Global Aluminum has not yet announced a long-term contract to power the facility. Century Aluminum’s original plan was to use 100% of its power from renewables or nuclear, Canary Media reported, and received $500 million from the Biden administration to support the project.
The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration has stopped publishing data tied to inspections of sites with repeated violations, E&E News reported. At a hearing before the House Education & the Workforce Subcommittee on Workforce Protections last week, Wayne Palmer, the assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, said the data would no longer be made public. “To the best of my knowledge, we do not publish those under the current administration,” Palmer said. He said the decision to not make public results of “targeted inspections” predated his time at the agency. The move comes as the Trump administration is pushing to ramp up mining in the U.S. to compete with China’s near monopoly over key metals such as rare earths, and lithium. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in September, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals.”
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South Korea’s center-left Democratic Party has historically been staunchly anti-nuclear. So when the country’s nuclear regulator licensed a new plant earlier this month — its first under a new Democratic president — I counted it as a win for the industry. Now President Lee Jae-myung’s administration is going all in all on atomic energy. On Monday, NucNet reported that the state-owned Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power plans to open bidding for sites for two new large reactors. The site selection is set to take up to six months. The country then plans to begin construction in the early 2030s and bring the reactors online in 2037 and 2038. Kim Sung-whan, the country’s climate minister, said the Lee administration would stick to the nuclear buildout plan authored in February 2025 under former President Yoon Suk Yeol, a right-wing leader who strongly supported the atomic power industry before being ousted from power after attempting to declare martial law.
Reflective, a nonprofit group that bills itself as “aiming to radically accelerate the pace of sunlight reflection research,” launched its Uncertainty Database on Monday, with the aim of providing scientists, funders, and policymakers with “an initial foundation to create a transparent, prioritized, stage-gated” roadmap of different technologies to spray aerosols in the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet. “SAI research is currently fragmented and underpowered, with no shared view of which uncertainties actually matter for real-world decisions,” Dakota Gruener, the chief executive of Reflective, said in a statement. “We need a shared, strategic view of what we know, what we don’t, and where research can make the biggest difference. The Uncertainty Database helps the field prioritize the uncertainties and research that matter most for informed decisions about SAI.” The database comes as the push to research geoengineering technologies goes mainstream. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported in October, Stardust Solutions, a U.S. firm run by former Israeli government physicists, has already raised $60 million in private capital to commercialize technology that many climate activists and scientists still see as taboo to even study.
Often we hear of the carbon-absorbing potential of towering forest trees or fast-growing algae. But nary a word on the humble shrub. New research out of China suggests the bush deserves another look. An experiment in planting shrubs along the edges of western China’s Taklamakan Desert over the past four decades has not only kept desertification at bay, it’s made a dent in carbon emissions from the area. “This is not a rainforest,” King-Fai Li, a physicist at the University of California at Riverside, said in a statement. “It’s a shrubland like Southern California’s chaparral. But the fact that it’s drawing down CO2 at all, and doing it consistently, is something positive we can measure and verify from space.” The study provides a rare, long-term case study of desert greening, since this effort has endured for decades whereas one launched in the Sahara Desert by the United Nations crumbled.
On Saturday, right before Winter Storm Fern began, the Department of Energy issued its first emergency order of the year to deploy backup generation in Texas in hopes of avoiding a repeat of Uri. As of Sunday evening, data from Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, showed natural gas providing nearly 60% of the electricity on the wires, with coal and wind neck-and-neck for second place and solar in a close fourth. It’s a relief that the grid is holding. But the overreliance on fossil fuels isn’t a good long-term strategy. While “climate change deniers love to use major winter storms as ‘proof’ that global warming isn’t real,” my colleague Jeva Lange wrote last week, “in the case of this weekend’s polar vortex, there is evidence that Arctic warming is responsible for the record cold temperature projections across the United States.”
A look at The Metals Company's proposed mining operation.The Metals Company
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finalized a rule last week clearing the way for companies to apply for the right to mine the deep ocean floor. Under the new rules, applications for commercial and exploratory licenses are streamlined into a single process, cutting the number of required environmental assessments and public comment hearings in half. The day after the final rule came out, The Metals Company, the leading startup racing to collect mineral-rich nodules from largely unexplored depths of international waters, submitted an application to mine an area roughly twice the size of its original plans. “Nearly 50 years after this industry took shape, it’s ready to move forward,” the company told The New York Times. But opposition to deep-sea mining is mounting as environmentalists highlight the risk the industry poses to a scarcely understood and still remarkably untouched ecosystem. A corporate campaign to oppose deep sea mining just added the solar giant Sunrun to its petition, as I told you last week.
Tesla has officially discontinued Autopilot, its basic self-driving software, in the U.S. and Canada. All new car purchases now come with standard Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Sawyer Merritt, a self-described Tesla investor with a prolific social media presence, wrote in a post on X. The move, according to TechCrunch, is designed to boost adoption of Tesla’s more advanced Full Self-Driving setting. But it’s also in response to a courtroom loss in the company’s biggest market. Last month, a judge in California ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing by overstaying the capabilities of both Autopilot and FSD for years. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally brought the case, gave Tesla two months to comply with the ruling by dropping the Autopilot name.
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul is going all in on nuclear power. She started off last year at the helm of a new multi-state alliance working on building more reactors. Over the summer, she directed the state-owned power authority to oversee construction of New York’s first new reactor since the 1980s. More recently, she inked a deal with Ontario to work together on building new plants and expanded her target fivefold to 5 gigawatts of new atomic energy in the state. Now she’s backed something a little more traditional but no less important. Last week, the state’s utility regulators extended subsidies for existing nuclear plants by another two decades in hopes of keeping aging reactors open until at least 2049.
In Denmark, meanwhile, the government has officially started considering building small modular reactors and lifting the nuclear ban the parliament put into effect 40 years ago. “Green energy from solar and wind is now and will continue to be the backbone of the Danish energy supply, but we can also see that it cannot stand alone,” Lars Aagaard, Denmark’s climate, energy and utilities minister, said in a statement. “We must be open to examining whether other technologies can provide us with green energy in the future. Small modular nuclear reactors may be an option.”
Standard Nuclear, a startup producing TRISO atomic fuel required by several of the nation’s leading small modular reactor designs, has raised $140 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Decisive Point, with first-time backing from Chevron Technology Ventures, StepStone Group, and XTX Ventures. Several existing investors, including Fundomo, Andreessen Horowitz, and Crucible Capital, increased their stakes. The financing will support Standard Nuclear’s plans to expand TRISO production to over 2 metric tons per year at multiple sites across the country. The timeline, the company said, is “rapid” and will take place by mid-2026. “With this funding, we are positioned to accelerate our roadmap, scale operations, and deliver on the promise to fuel the next generation of reactors powering industry, defense, and space,” Kurt Terrani, Standard Nuclear’s chief executive, said in a statement.
While TRISO was invented decades ago, the fuel — which has extra layers of ceramic coating that are meant to make a meltdown virtually impossible — is making a comeback as the go-to material for next-generation reactors designed to reach higher temperatures by using coolants other than water. Standard Nuclear has also inked a deal with the nuclear recycling company SHINE Technologies to work on reprocessing radioactive waste into fresh fuel.
Years ago, at a lecture about the spread of Lyme disease in the New York area, I learned that opossums eat thousands of ticks every season. That information totally changed my perception of a rodent that previously creeped me out. Well, it turns out kestrels — colorful, predatory birds — serve a similar function on fruit farms. New research in the Journal of Applied Ecology suggests kestrels keep harmful pathogens off fruit by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those diseases. Orchards that housed the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without, translating to what Inside Climate News described as a 81% reduction in crop damage.
