FEMA Suspends Staffers Who Criticized Trump’s Plans to Gut Agency

Current conditions: A large dust storm blew over the Phoenix area, causing damage and airport delays • Typhoon Kajiki made landfall in central Vietnam, leaving at least four dead in flooding as heavy rains deluged Laos and parts of Thailand • Florida faces increased risk of flooding as tropical thunderstorms gather over the Gulf of Mexico.

THE TOP FIVE

1. FEMA suspends dozens of staffers who signed letter criticizing Trump

The Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended nearly 40 employees on Tuesday who signed a letter to Congress warning that the Trump administration’s cuts had damaged the nation’s ability to respond to extreme weather disasters. Of the 182 FEMA staffers who signed the letter, 36 attached their names. Those that did received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately, and continuing until further notice,” according to The New York Times.

The letter, sent Monday, came days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In it, staffers slammed President Donald Trump’s proposal to dramatically downsize FEMA, shifting more responsibility and cost for disaster response to the states. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office and our mission of helping people before, during and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the agency employees wrote.

2. FERC approves plans to restart a second idled U.S. nuclear plant

Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the green light to restart a permanently shuttered nuclear plant for the first time in U.S. history, with plans to bring the Palisades atomic station in Michigan back online later this year. Now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has started the process to restart a second nuclear plant, the Duane Arnold station. The agency approved a waiver request on Monday that will allow utility NextEra Energy to restart the single-reactor nuclear plant in Iowa by the end of 2029.

NextEra closed down the plant in 2020 amid mounting financial challenges for the nuclear facility. But surging electricity demand and a newfound societal appreciation of the 24-hour, zero-carbon power atomic energy produces has put a new premium on keeping existing plants running, particularly given the high costs and long timelines associated with building new reactors. Last year, Microsoft agreed to spend $16 billion to reopen the idled reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote at the time of the deal, “The days of nuclear power plants shuttering not because of old age, safety concerns, or local opposition, but because of the economics of subsidized wind and solar and cheap natural gas, are likely over.” On Monday, the Palisades plant officially transitioned from decommissioning status back to operations status.

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

3. New nuclear fusion startup launches

Yet another startup is joining the race to develop power plants with nuclear fusion. Launched Wednesday morning, Inertia Enterprises aims to commercialize the technology that led to the breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022, when humanity successfully generated more energy from fusion than it took to ignite the reaction for the first time. While the vast majority of public funding into fusion energy research had gone into magnetic fusion, which depends on large doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, the breakthrough came through inertial fusion, using lasers.

The company — founded by fusion scientist Andrea Kritcher, fusion power plant designer Mike Dunne, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson — aims “to take the most direct, scientifically-proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy,” according to a press release. To do so, the company is developing “a new generation of mass-produced, low cost lasers and fuel targets that leverage the groundbreaking scientific result of fusion ignition,” and has licensed nearly 200 patents. “The goal of delivering limitless fusion energy has attracted tens of billions of dollars in government investment and decades of research, culminating in the achievement of ignition just a couple of years ago,” Lawson, who will serve as Inertia’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, we see a clear path from big science to commercial energy by scaling up the industrial base to the scale needed for laser inertial fusion.”.

4. Bill Gates’ nuclear startup inks a deal to deploy in Utah

Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower signed an agreement with the Utah government on Monday to develop a potential atomic energy station using the company’s fourth-generation sodium-cooled reactor. As part of the deal, TerraPower will work with the Utah Office of Energy Development as part of Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt” program to build out transmission capacity and invest in clean-firm electricity sources such as nuclear power and geothermal energy. “Today marks an important step forward for energy in Utah,” Cox said in a statement. “Operation Gigawatt is about adding capacity from diverse sources — nuclear, natural gas, geothermal and more — so families and businesses have power that is affordable, reliable and clean.”

The move comes months after rival nuclear developer Holtec International inked a deal with the Utah government to establish a manufacturing and worker-training hub for its buildout of small modular reactors across the Mountain West in the Beehive State.

5. Solar is booming in Africa

Solar imports are surging, especially in South Africa. Ember

Over the past 12 months, Africa’s imports of Chinese solar panels soared 60%, to more than 15 gigawatts, according to a report released Tuesday by the clean energy research firm Ember. In that same time period, 20 countries on the continent set new records for solar imports. If installed, the panels could radically upend power generation in some countries. Sierra Leone could generate volumes of electricity equivalent to 61% of its total output in 2023 just from the panels imported in the past year.

A chart showing solar imports in 20 African countriesEmber

“The take-off of solar in Africa is a pivotal moment,” Dave Jones, the chief analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “This report is a call to action, urging stronger research, analysis and reporting on solar’s rise — to ensure the world’s cheapest electricity source, fulfills its vast potential to transform the African continent.”

THE KICKER

A team of astronomers detected for the first time a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of multi-ringed dust and gas. “Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” Laird Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a press release. He called the discovery a “big deal” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many protoplanetary disks.