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Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has become something of a one-woman band lately, traveling the country promoting nuclear energy. In Las Vegas at the American Nuclear Society annual conference last week, she told the audience, “We’re looking at a chance to build new nuclear at a scale not seen since the ’70s and ’80s.” A few weeks earlier she paid a visit to the Vogtle nuclear plant outside of Augusta, Georgia, site of the first new nuclear project to start construction this century “It’s time to cash in on our investments by building more, more of these facilities,” she told an audience there.
Unlike the past few decades, when nuclear power plants were more likely to shut down than be built amidst sluggish growth in electricity demand, any new nuclear power — whether from a new plant, one that’s producing new power on top of its regular output, or one that’s re-opening — is likely to be bought up eagerly these days by utilities and big energy buyers with decarbonization mandates. States and the federal government are more than happy to pony up the dollars to keep existing nuclear plants running. Technology companies will even pay a premium for clean power. Amazon, for instance, bought a data center adjacent to a nuclear plant despite despite having no nuclear strategy to speak of.
What brought about this abrupt about-face of enthusiasm? In spite of the rapid expansion of wind and solar and the recent boom in batteries, with electricity demand rising, it’s hard to turn down any green electrons. And with all that solar and wind comes a need for “clean firm” power, sources of electricity that can operate when other sources aren’t. The Department of Energy estimates that a decarbonized economy will require 700 to 900 gigawatts of clean firm power by 2050, about four times what is currently on the grid.
While a number of power sources fit this bill — long-duration batteries, geothermal, hydrogen — there is already a massive preexisting nuclear fleet, and the technology for nuclear power is well-proven, even if growing costs and decades of environmental opposition arrested the industry’s growth in the United States for decades.
“Demand has changed significantly,” Kenneth Petersen, the outgoing president of the American Nuclear Society, told me. With tech companies willing to pay additional for clean, reliable power, “demand is going up, and you’re getting a premium for that.”
While nuclear power has faced stiff opposition from environmental groups for decades,the crashing price of natural gas in the 2010s combined with the growth and falling cost of renewables made it difficult for some existing plants to stay in business, especially in regions of the country with “restructured” energy markets, where the plants were competing with whatever the cheapest source of power was on the grid. Despite the fact that these plants were producing large and steady amounts of carbon-free power, electricity markets at the time didn’t particularly value either of these attributes.
States with aggressive decarbonization goals simply could not reasonably meet them considering that nuclear plants shutting down tends to result in more burning of natural gas and more greenhouse gas emissions. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided another pot of funding for existing nuclear, and so in markets like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, and California, nuclear plants receive some combination of state and federal dollars to stay online.
Constellation Energy, which has a 21 reactor nuclear fleet, saw its stock price shoot up earlier this year when it upped its forecast for revenue growth citing the strong demand and government support for its clean electrons. Its shares have risen almost 90 percent on the year.
“When you hear utilities talk about restarting a reactor, yep, it’s a huge effort. And they’re confident that they can sell the offtake of that,” Petersen told me. In the case of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, which shut down in 2022 and is now in the process of re-opening, there is already a power purchase agreement with a group of rural utilities on the table.
Nuclear is the third biggest electricity source in the U.S. currently, and the largest non-carbon emitting one. As Secretary Granholm likes to remind the public — and the industry — nuclear power hasn’t had more explicit support than it has now in decades. That has come in the form of tax credits for energy output, an overhauled regulatory process for advanced reactors, and explicit funding for early-stage projects.
But Granholm isn’t the only public official talking to anyone who will listen about America’s nuclear industry.
Tim Echols, the vice chairman of Georgia Public Service Commission, the regulator that oversaw Southern Company’s Vogtle project, has been warning other state regulators about embarking on a new nuclear project without explicit cost protection from the federal government. The third and fourth Vogtle reactors started construction in 2013, about a decade after the planning process began; the final reactor was completed and started putting power on the grid in April, some $35 billion later (the project was originally expected to cost $14 billion).
And that was a successful project. A similar project in South Carolina was never completed and took down the utility, SCANA, that planned it, even resulting in a two-year federal prison sentence for its chief executive, who was convicted of having “intentionally defrauded ratepayers while overseeing and managing SCANA’s operations — including the construction of two reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station.” Westinghouse, which designed the reactor in operation at Vogtle, known as the AP1000, itself went bankrupt in 2016.
Echols is proud of Vogtle now. “Finishing those AP1000s at Vogtle changed everything,” Echols told me in an email. “People are looking past the overruns and celebrating this as a great accomplishment.”
But he’s pretty sure no one else should do it like Georgia did, with a utility using ratepayer funds for a nuclear project of uncertain cost and duration. “So many of my colleague regulators in other states don’t feel there are enough financial protections in place yet — and that is holding them back,” Echols told me. “The very real possibility of bankruptcy exists on any of these nuclear projects, and I am not comfortable moving forward with some catastrophic protection — and only the federal government can provide that.”
Granholm and other DOE officials includingJigar Shah, head of the Loan Programs Office, have expressed puzzlement at this view. At the ANS conference, Granholm pointed to “billions and billions and billions” that the federal government is offering in terms of loan guarantees (from which Vogtle benefitted under presidents Obama and Trump)and investment tax credits that, according to the Breakthrough Institute’s Adam Stein, could amount to “around 60% cost overrun protection” when combined with DOE loans.
It’s unlikely that Republicans would be more interested in this level of cost protection than Democrats. Shelly Moore Capito, the West Virginia Republican who helped shepherd a recent nuclear regulatory reform bill through Congress,told Politico, “I don’t think the government should be in the business of giving backstop.”
Echols conceded that Shah “is right in saying the deal is better than it was when we started our AP1000s,” but still said the possibility of bankruptcy was too daunting for state utility regulators.
While technology companies that want to buy clean electrons have demurred about actually financing construction of next generation “advanced” nuclear plants, Echols predicted that “companies like Dow, Microsoft, or Google build a [small modular reactor] before any utility in America can finish another AP1000,” referring to the reactor model at Vogtle, which is about one gigawatt per reactor, compared to the few hundred megawatts contemplated by designs for small modular reactors.
Dow is currently working on a gas-cooled reactor project with X-energy that would provide both power and industrial steam. The reactor would operate at a higher temperature than the light water reactors that dominate the U.S. nuclear fleet. TerraPower, the Bill Gates backed startup that has received billions of dollars in federal support, started construction on the non-nuclear portion of its Natrium plant in Wyoming earlier this year, while a number of other advanced reactor projects are at various stages of design and preparation. There’s only one design that’s received certification from the NRC, however, and the company behind it, NuScale, saw its one active project to build a plant collapse due to rising costs.
As Breakthrough’s Stein told me, “It’s not really going to be a question of large LWR vs. SMR or water-based SMR vs advanced. We’re going to need a mix of technology to get to net zero, just like we need a mix of nuclear and non-nuclear. “The nuclear space is not nearly as homogenous as photovoltaic space — it’s not all one technology with different advantages that can fit different niches.”
Much of the Department of Energy’s work in past years has been in funding and supporting the development of these “advanced” reactors, which are supposed to be more efficient and safer than existing light-water reactor designs and can serve more discrete purposes, including industrial processes like steam. Last week, Granholm announced almost $1 billion of money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the construction of small modular reactors. The ADVANCE Act, which passed the Senate last week, was designed to help make reviews of these reactor designs faster, cheaper and more focused.
“I think the Vogtle experience and what that means for ratepayers makes it very, very unlikely that another utility is going to step up and ratebase a big first-of-its-kind, firm, flexible generation technology,” Jeff Navin, a former Department of Energy official and partner at the public affairs firm representing TerraPower, told me. “The challenges facing financing nuclear are the same challenges that you're going to face with carbon capture, with large-scale hydrogen production, with enhanced geothermal, with all of these others technologies that we all know we need to have to solve climate change. But we don't really know how to finance these things.”
Many analysts think that if we get advanced reactors, it will likely be sometime in the early 2030s. “Optimistically, maybe 2032 we should have a couple of these things up and running,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineering professor at MIT, told me. “All the industry needs is one winner, and the floodgates might open.”
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New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.
That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the Southeast, small-government conservatives demanded fast and effective government service, in the form of relief operations organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet even as the agency was scrambling to meet the need, it found itself targeted by far-right militias, who prevented it from doing its job because they had been led by cynical politicians to believe it wasn't doing its job.
It’s almost a law of nature, or at least of politics, that when government does its job, few people notice — only when it screws up does everyone pay attention. While this is nothing new in itself, it has increasingly profound implications for the future of government-driven climate action. While that action comes in many forms and can be sold to the public in many ways, it depends on people having faith that when government steps in — whether to create new regulations, invest in new technologies, or provide benefits for climate-friendly choices — it knows what it’s doing and can accomplish its goals.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever. Unfortunately, simply doing the right things — like responding competently to disasters — won’t be enough to convince people that the next climate initiative will do what it’s supposed to.
The number of people expressing faith in government today is nearly as low as it has been in the half-century pollsters have been asking the question. That trust has bounced up and down a bit — it rose after September 11, then fell again during the disastrous Iraq War — but for the last decade and half, only around 20% of Americans say they trust the government most of the time.
It’s partisan, of course: People express more trust when their party controls the White House. And the decline of trust reaches beyond the government. Faith in most of the key institutions of American life — business, education, religion, news media — has fallen in recent decades, sometimes for good reason. The net result is a public skeptical that those in authority have the ability to solve complex problems.
Changing that perspective is extraordinarily difficult, often because of the nature of good and bad news: The former usually happens slowly and invisibly, while the latter often happens dramatically and all at once.
Take the program created in the Energy Department under George W. Bush to provide loans to innovative energy technologies. If most Americans had heard of it, it was because of one company: Solyndra, a manufacturer of innovative but overly expensive solar panels. Undercut by a decline in prices of traditional panels, the company went under, and its $535 million loan was never repaid. Republicans made Solyndra’s failure into a major controversy, claiming that the program showed that government investment in green technology was corrupt, ineffective, and wasteful.
What few people heard about was that the loan program overall not only turned a profit at the time (and for what it’s worth, it still does), it also provided help to many successful companies, even if a few failed — as any venture capital investor could tell you is inevitable. The successes included Tesla, which used its federal loan to ramp up production of the sedans that would turn it from a niche manufacturer of electric roadsters into what it is today. Needless to say, Elon Musk does not advertise the fact that his success was built on government help.
More recently, the hurricane response has shown how partisan polarization can be used to undermine trust in government — especially when Donald Trump is involved. Trump took the opportunity of the hurricanes to accuse the federal government of being both political and partisan, delivering help only to those areas that vote for Democrats. Soon after, he promised to do precisely what he falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, saying that if he is president again, he will withhold disaster aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom changes the state’s water policies to be more to Trump’s liking. “And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. And in fact, in his first term Trump did try to withhold disaster aid from blue states.
What sounds like hypocrisy is actually something much more pernicious. As he often does, Trump is arguing not that he is clean and his opponents are dirty, but that everyone is dirty, and it’s just a question of whether government is in the hands of our team or their team. When he says he’ll “drain the swamp,” he’s telling people both that government is corrupt, and the answer is merely to change who gets the spoils. If you believe him, you’ll have no trust in government whatsoever, even if you might think he’ll use it in a way you’ll approve of.
We’ve seen again and again that people want government to perform well and get angry when it doesn’t, but they don’t reward competence when it happens. Which is why making sure systems operate properly and problems are solved is necessary but not sufficient to win back trust. Government’s advocates — especially those who are counting on it to undertake ambitious climate action both now and in the future — need not only to deliver, they have to get better at, for lack of a better word, propaganda. Policy success is not its own advertisement. And despite his ample policy achievements, Joe Biden has not been a charismatic and effective messenger — on the role of government, or much else.
Ronald Reagan used to say that the most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; the oft-repeated quip was at the center of his incredibly successful effort to delegitimize government in the eyes of voters. To reverse the decline of trust so people will believe that government has the knowledge and ability to tackle climate change, the public needs to be reminded — often and repeatedly — of what government does well.
Touting past and present successes on climate — and disaster relief, and so many other ways the government solves problems every day — is essential to building support for future climate initiatives. Those successes are all around, it’s just that most people never hear about them or take them for granted. But promoting government as an engine of positive change should be as high a priority for climate advocates, including those who hold public office, as discrediting government was for Reagan and is for Trump.