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Why Spencer Gore decided it was time for Bedrock Materials to close up shop.
It wasn’t too long ago that the battery world was abuzz over sodium-ion batteries and their potential to be a cost-effective domestic competitor to the Chinese-dominated lithium-ion industry. The prevalence of sodium and the early-stage sodium-ion supply chain seemed to give the U.S. a shot at developing the next big battery for electric vehicles and energy storage systems.
But this past weekend, a promising sodium-ion startup called Bedrock Materials announced that it was shutting down and returning most of its $9 million seed funding to investors. The reason, according to CEO Spencer Gore? Its business model no longer made sense.
“We were responding to a very unique moment in the history of the battery industry,” Gore explained to me about his decision to start the company, which made cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries, in 2023. “Lithium prices had gone up about 10-fold, and so had other battery minerals by lesser degrees.” Experts predicted that the world was in for a long-term lithium shortage. Then the opposite happened: Lithium producers rapidly ramped up supply at the same time EV demand growth slowed, leading to oversupply and a 90% drop in price.
Before all of that happened, Bedrock saw the EV market as a good bet. Automakers were telling Gore that their first priority was lowering costs, and sodium-ion batteries seemed well positioned to help with that. The EV industry was also orders of magnitude larger than the battery storage market, and stood to benefit from the $7,500 consumer tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes the use of domestic minerals and battery components.
The election of Donald Trump threw the future of that tax credit into sudden doubt. The cratering raw minerals market, on the other hand, didn’t immediately translate into falling prices for lithium-iron-phosphate cathodes, the chemistry Gore saw as Bedrock’s main competitor, he told me. So long as this lasted, he thought, Bedrock’s business would be viable. But it didn’t.
“LFP prices have now crashed down to the point where it would almost be a viable business to extract the lithium from them and sell it on the open market,” Gore told me. “The active material producers are running single-digit margins. And so when that happened, it just became clear that the economic case for sodium had collapsed.”
Not everyone agrees that the domestic sodium-ion industry is doomed. Bay Area-based Peak Energy, for example, is still chugging away, and the company’s president and chief commercial officer, Cam Dales, told me he doesn’t expect to face the same headwinds as Bedrock. For one, Peak is targeting the sodium-ion energy storage market rather than the EV market, which means that energy density — sodium-ion’s weak point — is not as important a factor. Secondly, Peak is not in the business of producing battery materials, which Dales sees as an inherently risky and low-margin proposition. Rather, the company plans to produce battery cells domestically by 2028, while sourcing cathode and anode materials from other, ideally domestic, manufacturers.
So while the economic benefits of sodium-ion batteries have certainly diminished, Dales told me that the potential performance benefits — longer cycle life, greater efficiency, and ability to withstand high temperatures — are exceeding his initial expectations. Specifically, Peak is developing a cathode chemistry composed of sodium iron phosphate powder, which Dales claims will save customers money over the 20-year lifetime of a storage project, even if the upfront cost of sodium-ion battery cells is now higher than LFP. “System-level and project-level economics vastly outweigh smaller differences at the cell level,” Dales claimed.
The two industry leaders know each other well, as they used to work together at the lithium-ion battery manufacturer Enovix, where Dales was the chief commercial officer and Gore led the EV products team. Dales said he was bummed to learn of Bedrock’s closure, but not surprised. For domestic battery materials producers such as Bedrock to thrive, Dales told me, he thinks temporary policies that protect and nurture their growth will be necessary to ensure they’re not instantly outcompeted by Chinese incumbents.
“Absent that, it’s hard to see how you build a new materials company in the U.S. and compete against a fully scaled supply chain in China,” he told me.
Indeed, when I asked Gore if there was anything he wished he had done differently, he responded without hesitation, “I would have gone to China the very first day that I founded the company.” When he did visit months later, he said his main takeaway was that “most of the sodium-ion companies in China were producing material at scale, but losing money doing it,” even though they were “essentially producing sodium-ion materials on the exact same production lines that they had been using for lithium-ion materials.” The interchangeability of the two production processes made it crystal clear to Gore that Chinese battery giants such as CATL and BYD already had a tremendous advantage over the U.S., which doesn’t have scaled-up battery facilities.
This is why Gore now rejects the notion that the U.S. could win the race to scale up sodium-ion. “If you lost it for lithium-ion, you’ve already lost it for sodium. It’s the same thing, same equipment, same process.” Now he’s more interested in figuring out a way to facilitate a “once-in-a-generation” transfer of knowledge and technology between the U.S. and China. As it stands, he told me, “they’re 20 years ahead of the rest of the world, and we can’t even tie our own shoes.”
Ironically, bolstering domestic industry was the primary rationale behind Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which have since been put on pause for every nation except China, which will now be subject to 145% levies. And while Dales thinks tariffs would be a net-positive for his company, Gore told me he doesn’t expect them to help the domestic sodium-ion industry overall.
For one, tariffs will make the price of constructing domestic battery materials and cell facilities even more expensive than it already is relative to China. “So that’s one thing nudging us towards spreading out the factory costs over more energy dense cells,” Gore told me. Another incentive to optimize for energy density, tariffs or not, is the 45x tax credit, which gives cell manufacturers $35 per kilowatt-hour for domestically produced cells. “On a global basis, there’s a strong incentive for the most energy dense cells to be produced in the U.S.,” he argued.
While Peak will also have to contend with higher construction costs due to Trump’s tariffs as it builds out its sodium-ion cell production facility, the company’s customers are independent power producers and utilities that can pass cost increases onto ratepayers. This will mean higher electricity costs for Americans, which Dale acknowledged is not ideal, but he also told me, “I don’t think it actually affects our business that much.” While the company wouldn’t publicly disclose its partnerships, Dales said it’s “working with the majority of the large IPPs in the country,” as well as “a number of” utilities.
Gore thinks it’s possible that the sodium-ion performance advantages Peak is betting on will prove to be compelling for customers and investors in the energy storage space. It’s just not a bet he was willing to take. While Bedrock did explore pivoting into the energy storage market, Gore said he concluded that LFP batteries could likely be engineered to achieve the same cycle life, efficiency, and operating temperature benefits that Dales thinks makes sodium-ion stand out.
“Ultimately, we failed to find a niche where we thought that sodium was the best product,” Gore told me. Some investors were initially reluctant to accept that. They encouraged Bedrock to keep going, to pivot, to place a different bet. They had certainly never had a founder try and give back money before, Gore said. But to him, it just made good sense.
“It’s still possible that we would have succeeded,” he told me. “But I think that the likely size of the success and the likelihood of a success, given everything that we’ve now learned, is considerably smaller. The best expected value for us and for our investors was to simply return their money.”
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Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.