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The eastern and northern United States are suffering under a hazy, poisonous cloud of wildfire smoke, produced by out-of-control forest fires in Quebec and Nova Scotia. The most toxic soot and ash are sitting virtually on top of North America’s most densely populated corridor, clouding the air in New York City; Toronto; Ottawa; Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.; and Norfolk, Virginia.
Air pollution alerts are in effect across the United States and Canada, affecting roughly 150 million people.
This is Heatmap’s set of commonly asked questions about the crisis. We’ll keep it updated throughout the event.
Hundreds of wildfires have raged across northern Quebec for the past few weeks, driven by unusually warm and dry conditions.
Then on Monday, a low-pressure system surrounded by counterclockwise winds moved just off New England’s coast. Its strong, dry gusts fanned the flames in Canada, then pushed the resulting smoke and ash into the eastern United States.
Intense Canadian fires are unusual this early in the season, but the fires this year were fed by a warm spring and drought-like condition, Kent Moore, an atmospheric-physics professor at the University of Toronto, told me. Because the fires took hold before the vegetation could “green up” for the spring, the conflagrations grew more rapidly than they normally would, he said.
The dry conditions also helped the fires ignite the soil itself. “Because the soil was so dry — because of the dry winter and the dry spring — the fire got into the ground,” he said. “The vegetation below ground started to burn, and those are much harder to put out.”
This is likely one of America’s worst days for air pollution in several decades, in terms of the number of people affected and the severity of the exposure, Marshall Burke, an economist and sustainability professor at Stanford, told me.
“It’s pretty off the chart,” Burke said. Wildfire smoke is affecting New York City much more acutely — and much earlier in the year — than it has at any time since 2006, when contemporary air-pollution data began to be kept.
It is difficult to attribute a single unprecedented event to climate change, and the climatology of wildfires in eastern North America is particularly challenging. (Climate change has more clearly worsened wildfires out West.) “This is probably an unlucky year for Canada, as far as wildfires go,” Moore, the atmospheric physicist, said.
But wildfires will become more likely across Canada as the climate changes, he said. And while climate change should broadly increase rainfall across Canada, it will also increase the likelihood of heat waves and more extreme spring and summer temperatures, which can make wildfires more likely.
“Nova Scotia has always had wildfires. It’s just they’ve had more wildfires this year than they have on average for the whole year,” he said. “There’s always going to be wildfires, but there’s going to be more of them.” As Canadian cities sprawl into previously uninhabited woodland areas, he added, the human impacts of wildfires will increase — even if the number and intensity of wildfires does not.
First, consult the air quality index at AirNow.gov. The AQI is a unit-less index of air quality running from zero to 500; any reading above 100 would rank as unusually polluted in the United States. On Wednesday afternoon, some air sensors in New York and New Jersey indicated that the AQI exceeded 400.
If it’s higher than 100, then the most vulnerable groups of people — including children, the elderly, anyone with a cardiopulmonary condition, and pregnant women — should limit strenuous activity outdoors. If higher than 150, then people should generally try to limit their outdoor activity; at levels above 200, the air is considered unhealthy and everyone should try to go outside as little as possible.
If you think you might be especially vulnerable, err on the side of caution. Recently, a body of new and large-scale studies have shown that air pollution is generally worse for the body and brain than previously thought.
Then, if you’re in an area with hazardous air pollution, consider how to limit your exposure to the air as much as possible. Keep your doors and windows closed. An air filter outfitted with a HEPA filter can improve the air in a home or apartment. It should generally be closer to the most sensitive people.
“Any pregnant moms — if my wife or anyone I knew was pregnant right now — I would be texting them to stay inside and sit by an air filter,” Burke told me. Exposure to severe air pollution during pregnancy has been shown to increase the risk of preterm birth, and it can reduce a child’s lifelong earnings, cognitive performance, and other indicators, he said.
A KN95 or N95 mask — the type of high-filtration mask used to prevent COVID infection — can also significantly limit your exposure to soot and ash. If you are in a sensitive group or are worried about air pollution’s health effects, you could consider wearing a mask inside if you have no other way to filter the air.
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The company is well-positioned to take advantage of Trump’s nuclear policies, include his goal of installing a microreactor on a military base within the next few years.
At one point during his 12-year stint at SpaceX, Doug Bernauer turned his attention to powering a Martian colony with nuclear microreactors. Naturally, these would also fuel the rocket ships that could shuttle Mars-dwellers to and from Earth as needed. Then he had an epiphany.“I quickly realized that yes, nuclear power could help humanity become multiplanetary in the long term, but it could also transform life on Earth right now,” Bernauer wrote in 2023.
As nuclear power reemerges as a prominent player in the U.S. energy conversation, its potential to help drive a decarbonized future has crystallized into a rare bipartisan point of consensus. Radiant Nuclear, the Earth-based microreactor company that Bernauer founded after leaving SpaceX in 2019, is well positioned to take advantage of that, as its value proposition might as well be tailor-made for the Trump administration’s priorities
The startup’s aim is to make highly portable 1-megawatt reactors that can replace off-grid power sources such as diesel generators, which are ubiquitous in remote areas such as military bases. It’s fresh off a $165 million Series C funding round, with plans to begin commercial deployment in 2028. That aligns neatly with Trump’s recently announced goal of deploying a reactor on a military base by the same year. It’s an opportunity that Radiant Chief Operating Officer Tori Shivanandan told me the company is uniquely well-suited to take advantage of.
“A diesel generator that operates at 1 megawatt you have to refill with diesel about every three to five days,” Shivanandan explained. That means having regular access to both fuel and the generator itself, “and that’s just not reliable in many locations.” The company says its reactors only need refueling only every five years.
Radiant’s goal is to be cost competitive with generators in far flung locales — not just military bases, but also distant mines, rural towns, oil and gas drilling operations, and smaller, more dispersed data centers. “A customer who’s on the North Slope of Alaska, they might pay $11 or $12 a gallon for diesel,” Shivanandan told me. That’s a price she said Radiant could definitely compete with.
“The military’s interest in microreactors has been coming for quite a long time,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at the venture firm DCVC told me. The firm led Radiant’s Series C round. Some of Radiant’s appeal is “right place, right time,” she said. “Some of it is putting in a lot of work over a long time to make it the right place, right time.”
Trump’s recent nuclear-related executive orders also have Shivanandan and her team over the moon. As the administration looks to streamline nuclear licensing and buildouts, one order explicitly calls for establishing a process for the “high-volume licensing of microreactors and modular reactors,” which includes “standardized applications and approvals.” These orders, Shivanandan told me, will keep Radiant on track to start selling by 2028, and set the stage for the company’s rapid scale up.
Alongside DCVC, the company's latest round included funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s “American Dynamism” team, Union Square Ventures, and Founders Fund. This raise, Shivanandan told me, will cover Radiant’s expenses as it builds out its prototype reactor, which it plans to test at Idaho National Lab next year. It will be the first fueled operation of a brand new reactor design in 50 years, she said.
“My perspective is the bigger reactors are important and interesting, and there are a lot of great companies, but they’re not a very good fit for venture investing, Slaybaugh told me. “We like microreactors, because they just need so much less capital and so much less time.”
That potential buildout speed also means that even as the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits look poised for a major haircut, Radiant may still be able to benefit from them. In the latest version of the budget bill, nuclear projects are only eligible for credits if they begin construction by 2029 — a tall order for the many startups that likely won’t start building in earnest until the 2030s. But if all goes according to plan, that’s a timeline Radiant could work with — at least for its initial reactors, which would be the most expensive and thus most in need of credits anyway.
The company aims to reach economies of scale relatively quickly, with a goal of building 50 reactors per year at a yet-to-be-constructed factory by the mid 2030s. The modular design means Radiant can deploy multiple 1-megawatt reactors to facilities with greater power needs. But if a customer wants more than 10 or so megawatts, Radiant recommends they look to microreactors’ larger cousins, the so-called small modular reactors. Companies developing these include Last Energy, which makes 20-megawatt reactors, as well as NuScale, Kairos, and X-energy, which aim to build plants ranging from 150 megawatts to 960 megawatts in size.
While it could take one of these SMR companies years to fully install its reactors, Radiant’s shipping container-sized products are not designed to be permanent pieces of infrastructure. After being trucked onsite, the company says its reactors can be switched on the following day. Then, after about 20 years of continuous operation, they’ll be carried away and the site easily returned to greenfield, since there was no foundation dug or concrete poured to begin with.
This April, the Department of Defense selected Radiant as one of eight eligible companies for the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations Program. The winner(s) will design and build microreactors on select military installations to “provide mission readiness through energy resilience” and produce “enough electrical power to meet 100 percent of all critical loads,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit’s website.
Also on this list was the nuclear company Oklo, which counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman among its primary backers and went public last year. This Wednesday, the Air Force announced its intent to enter into a power purchase agreement with the company to build a pilot reactor on a base in Alaska. The reactor will reportedly produce up to 5 megawatts of power, though Oklo’s full-scale reactors are set to be 75 megawatts. Whether the military will opt to contract with other nuclear companies is still an open question.
Perhaps more meaningful, though, is the show of support Radiant recently gained from the Department of Energy, which selected it as one of five companies to receive a conditional commitment for a type of highly enriched uranium known as HALEU that’s critical for small, next-generation reactors. Much of this fuel came from Russia before Biden banned Russian uranium imports last year, in a belated response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine and an attempt to shore up the domestic nuclear supply chain.
America’s supply of HALEU is still scarce, though, and as such, Shivanandan considers the DOE’s fuel commitment to be the biggest vote of confidence Radiant has received from the government so far. The other companies selected to receive fuel are TRISO-X (a subsidiary of X-energy), Kairos Power, TerraPower, and Westinghouse, all of which have been around longer — the majority a decade or more longer — than Radiant.
Though the company is currently focused on Earth, Radiant hasn’t completely abandoned its interplanetary dreams. “We do believe that, should you want to colonize Mars and also create the environment in which you could refuel your rocket and send it back, then you would need 1-megawatt nuclear reactors,” Shivanandan told me. Anything larger might be too heavy to put in a rocket.
Good to know.
The Senate’s Democratic minority leader talks to Heatmap about the origins of the law and working with Republicans to preserve it.
The Inflation Reduction Act was never supposed to get here.
The clean energy law was one of President Joe Biden and the then-Democratic congressional majority’s proudest accomplishments. But the law — which as initially written would put America much closer to its climate goals — is now in the process of being dismantled. Last month, House Republicans overhauled the law in their reconciliation megabill, all but undoing most of the incentives meant to support the American solar, battery, and electric vehicle industries.
The onus to save the IRA now lies with Senator Chuck Schumer, the New Yorker who leads the Senate’s now-Democratic minority. The IRA, which was first born of his wrangling with former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, could possibly perish under his watch. On Thursday, I caught up with Senator Schumer for a conversation about where the clean energy law came from, the costs of repealing it, and how Democrats plan to save it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Manchin and I sat down and first he wasn’t going to do it. We needed his vote — we only had 50. And finally — you know the story — sitting in this little room, we negotiated the bill no one else could know about. And to the surprise of everyone, we came out with a good, strong bill that Manchin would support, and it passed, and the support was just overwhelming.
We wrote into the bill that wind and solar would get $369 billion in tax credits. We said that, but it ended up being closer to $1 trillion. Manchin got mad at me. I said, Well, Joe, while we were sitting in that room together. I was always afraid that you would want a cap. You could’ve asked for a cap, and you could have gotten it. Anyway, the program’s been overwhelmingly successful in every corner of America.
When the Republicans came in, when Trump won and the Republicans won the House and Senate, I knew we were in trouble, because this has divided the parties. Unfortunately, the Republican Party in the Senate and in the House was too much in the throes of the fossil fuel industry, and we knew that the hard right — it’s not every Republican, but there’s a hard right group that, almost as a religion, hates clean energy.
We have 16 Senate Republicans who are sympathetic, either because of the geography of their districts, or they just understand that this is a new future, and we are working them intensely. I have a good team of eight Democrats who are reaching out to the 16 — they have friendships with them — and we are meeting several times a week.
You see, there’s two groups in the Republicans. None of them are going to be a big advocate right now for wind and solar, with maybe a few exceptions. But the hard right, which wants to kill it, went too far.
We have $10 million of ads going out in different Republican states, and other groups are doing more ads. We’ve mobilized the environmental movement. I spoke to the [League of Conservation Voters] four or five times, and I’m doing a tele-town hall meeting with thousands and thousands of members of the environmental groups to get them to call their senators and call their friends. We’re going all-out.
No one believes it because they know, first, the cheapest, quickest way to produce new energy is through solar. It takes five, six years to get more natural gas [on the grid]. Solar can take two years, and it’s cheaper.
We’ve made the argument to the Republicans — if we need a lot more energy quickly, you can do whatever you want with oil and gas, but you can’t cut off clean energy. And the tech companies support that, and a lot of the financial companies that want more energy. The AI industry is on our side.
We’re asking the AI companies to quietly talk to both. There are some friends in the Trump administration, but we’re asking them to talk to the senators. It makes no sense for the Trump administration to say we need to double our output of energy and then cut off the quickest, cleanest, cheapest source.
The power of the hard-right Freedom Caucus to dictate much of what goes in the Republican bills. Their margin’s so narrow, and they say they’re not going to vote for the bill. We need the people on the other side to be just as strong. So far, that’s what we’re trying to build.
Our goal is to get a critical mass of Republican senators. We have four ways to win. We first have the parliamentary procedures — you know, the Byrd bath. We’re not going to be able to knock out a bunch with that, maybe a little bit.
Our second and our best chance is to get a group of critical mass of Republican senators to go to [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and [Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike] Crapo and say, You’ve got to change this. We can’t vote for it the way it is.
Our third option is we will prepare a long list of amendments, which will be very difficult for some of them to vote for. They may end up voting for them, but the fact that they know they’re coming will help us. And the fourth is we’re going to get another chance back in the House, because once the Senate changes the bill, it has to go back to the House. We’re continuing to work House members. I’ve been in all six Republican House districts in New York, talking about how bad this stuff is. And so we have a real chance.
On the reconciliation bill, power plant regulations, and Climate.gov
Current conditions: Eight to 12 inches of rain could fall in Texas and the southern Plains • Air quality alerts are in place today for the New York metro region due to wildfire smoke from Canada • Parts of Europe will see temperatures up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal on Thursday and Friday, with highs approaching 100 degrees in Florence, Italy.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released its take on the Republican reconciliation bill on Wednesday afternoon, with boasts of “repealing billions in unspent Green New Deal handouts.” Its proposals include:
The draft also includes the details of Republican Senator Mike Lee’s latest proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands to finance President Trump’s tax cuts. Specifically, the proposal would require the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to make the “prudent sale” of 0.5% to 0.75% of their lands in 11 western states for “housing, increased timber sales, geothermal leasing, and compensation of states and localities for the cost of wind and solar projects on federal land.” The states named for the selloffs include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, with Montana — home of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who opposed a similar proposal in the House — notably absent from the list.
You can read a section-by-section breakdown of the rest of the ENR’s proposals here.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to retract Biden-era regulations on fossil fuel-fired power plant emissions on the grounds that the plants don’t cause or contribute “significantly” to air pollution. EPA’s proposed rule specifically suggests that power plant pollution makes up merely a “small and decreasing part of global emissions,” and therefore does not require regulation under the Clean Air Act.
But as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year, and accounted for 5% of the total climate pollution worldwide over the past 30 years — making U.S. power plants the world’s sixth biggest CO2 emitter if they were their own country. The administration’s claim that power plants make up only a small portion of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is akin to “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Emily. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
Late last month, the Trump administration fired the entire staff of Climate.gov, the main website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, The Guardian reports. The website had a staff of “about 10,” but it also received editorial content from NOAA scientists in other departments. Climate.gov described its mission as “climate communication, education, and engagement,” but it also took pains to be “politically neutral, and faithful to the current state of the sciences,” The Guardian writes. “It’s targeted, I think it’s clear,” said Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA spokesperson who was fired earlier this year. “They only fired a handful of people, and it just so happened to be the entire content team for Climate.gov. I mean, that’s a clear signal.”
The World Bank announced Wednesday that it will end its longtime ban on financing nuclear energy projects. “We will support efforts to extend the life of existing reactors in countries that already have them, and help support grid upgrades and related infrastructure,” World Bank President Ajay Banga wrote in an email to staff, per the Financial Times. Though the development bank’s ban has only been formally in place since 2013, it hasn’t funded a nuclear project since 1959. “In the decades since, a few of the bank’s major funders, particularly Germany, have opposed its involvement in nuclear energy,” The New York Times notes, although both Germany and the Trump administration have recently pivoted toward more pro-nuclear positions. In his memo, Banga added that the bank’s ban on funding oil and gas projects, which has been in place since 2017, will also be reconsidered.
Amazon on Wednesday announced a deal to buy enough power from Pennsylvania nuclear plant operator Talen Energy “to sustain a midsize city for years,” Barron’s reports. The agreement will see Talen supplying Amazon with electricity “for operations that support AI and other cloud technologies at Amazon’s data center campus,” while maintaining its “ability to deliver to other sites throughout Pennsylvania,” Talen said in its own announcement, with the companies also agreeing to explore building a new small modular reactor in the state.
The news comes against the backdrop of Congress’ efforts to eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, even as tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continue to pursue ambitious net-zero energy goals. “There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy,” my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in her recent analysis. “Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.” Amazon’s deal with Talen for nearly 2 gigawatts of nuclear power through 2042 follows Meta signing a nuclear agreement with Constellation Energy last week and Microsoft partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island last year.
Tesla
“Tentatively, June 22.” —Elon Musk, responding on Twitter to a question about the public launch date of the self-driving Tesla Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, although he added, “We’re being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the level of rescissions from LPO’s budget.