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The Nuclear Company is betting on the old school approach.
More than any other form of zero-carbon energy, nuclear energy seems to be stuck between its past and its future. There are currently 94 working reactors in the United States, fewer than there were in 1990. With the country’s growing energy needs in mind, the federal government has made generous incentives and tax credits available for constructing new nuclear power, operating existing plants, and for re-opening shuttered plants. It has also literally rewritten the rulebook for nuclear power to encourage the development of smaller advanced reactors that are supposed to be, eventually, cheaper to build at scale.
But in the meantime, there’s the confused present.
Despite more reactors closing than opening in the past decade, nuclear remains the largest source of carbon-free energy on the U.S. grid. Right now, there are only a handful of reactor designs certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but no actual plans to build any more of them. The two most recently built reactors in the U.S., Vogtle 3 and 4, are both AP1000s, the latest version of the workhouse United States nuclear design — massive light water reactors, the most common reactor type, which use regular water as a coolant. (The other approved designs include the ESBWR, a GE-Hitachi reactor, and the APR-1400 — both versions of large, light-water reactors, both more likely to be built overseas than at home.) The NRC has approved just one small modular reactor design, but a recent attempt to actually build it for a coalition of utilities fell through.
The two reactors that have been built recently, Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4, were each delivered years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. “So there was a feeling in the industry that we weren’t going to build anymore AP1000s,” Jessica Lovering, co-founder and executive director of the Good Energy Collective, told me. “And that was a shame because we just got all this experience from doing this big project.”
Lately, however, utilities have been asking a provocative question. What if, instead of waiting for one of the many nascent advanced reactor technologies to take off, we just ... keep building AP1000s, instead?
Anyone who wants to build or buy new nuclear power might have a new partner in The Nuclear Company, which wants to build a 6 gigawatt fleet of reactors — to start — using “proven, licensed technology,” according to the company’s public statements. Juliann Edwards, The Nuclear Company’s chief development officer, wouldn’t specify which technology in particular the company is planning on deploying, but she did tell me it plans on doing so one after the other, in sequence, hoping to drive down the massive price of building a new reactor. “We’re definitely focused on fleet scale deployment,” Edwards said.
“Six has been this magic number that comes back again and again and again,” Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute told me. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, for instance, called for 6,000 megawatts — a.k.a. 6 gigawatts — of new nuclear built with a new production tax credit as an incentive, exactly what Edwards and crew are planning to deliver.
The Nuclear Company won’t be designing or operating the reactors. Instead, Edwards told me, “picture us as the front end as well as throughput to operations. That’s ensuring that a project gets developed, licensed, all the necessary environmental permits, interconnect filings,” working with utilities that have licensed and permitted development sites already lined up. The company is focusing particularly on the big new sources of electricity demand — data centers and manufacturing — which likely means it will concentrate its activities in the East and Southeast. As far as areas where nuclear development has already been approved, Utility Dive identified sites in Florida and South Carolina that are licensed for AP1000, while others in Michigan and Virginia are authorized to use GE-Hitachi reactors.
The reason having this fleet approach matters, Lovering told me, is that building out a supply chain and getting the requisite investment is much easier when everyone involved knows there’s going to be six reactors’ worth in the pipeline, and costs could fall as the reactors are constructed. “If it was just a one-off project, I’d be much more skeptical,” she said. “It’s always easier to get financing for a proven project that's already up and running.”
John Kotek, the head of public policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute, concurred. He told me in an emailed statement that The Nuclear Company’s business model “demonstrates the innovation needed to meet the demand for clean, reliable nuclear energy.”
But there’s a reason much of the nuclear advocacy and policy community has seen advanced reactors as the solution to building out the scale of nuclear power needed to help power a growing grid without carbon emissions. Nordhaus’ Breakthrough Institute is one of the biggest boosters of nuclear, with a focus on reforming the regulatory system in order to make advanced nuclear more economical.
“The market for a 1 gigawatt reactor is a very large public works project,” Nordhaus said. “No one in the world has ever built one of these things on spec. Instead, they’re typically built by national energy companies, or, in the United States, by utilities who are able to essentially charge their customers for the massive costs of construction.”
While the nuclear industry has, with lots of intellectual and public support from groups like Nordhaus’s Breakthrough, oriented its energies toward advanced reactors, The Nuclear Company likely has fans in the Department of Energy, which would really like to see more large reactors getting built soon. “There’s a lot of energy right now, being driven in part by [Secretary of Energy Jennifer] Granholm and [the Loan Programs Office’s] Jigar [Shah], who are like, We need to get nuclear steel in the ground and get more AP1000s built,” Nordhaus said.
Granholm has called for a buildout of new nuclear “at a scale not seen since the ’70s and ’80s.” The Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, meanwhile, has been supporting nuclear since its founding following the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and Shah has scolded utilities and state regulators for demanding the government essentially provide cost overrun insurance before they even think about building a new AP1000, pointing to the incentives and loans available from the feds.
Nordhaus, who called himself “skeptical” about The Nuclear Company’s plans, told me that his goal was “to get technology to market that would be feasible to build outside a vertically integrated market. I don’t see how nuclear has a future in this country if you don’t do that.”
That’s Edwards’s goal, too. She’s confident that The Nuclear Company could build even in restructured electricity markets where utilities can’t tap their ratepayers to build expensive new plants, she told me. “We need to be able to get in a cycle where maybe we're breaking ground and by the late 2020s. And then we're going into putting neutrons on the grid by the mid 2030s.”
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Republicans have blamed Democrats for unleashing Russ Vought on federal spending. But it doesn’t take much to see a bigger plan at work.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been waiting for this moment his whole adult life — or that’s what President Trump and the Republican Congressional leadership would like you to believe. As they put it, Vought is a fanatical budget cutter who, once unleashed, cannot be controlled. Who knows what he’ll cut if the Democrats continue to keep the government shut down?
Substantial staffing cuts that go beyond the typical shutdown furloughs are “the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico on Thursday. “We don’t control what he’s going to do.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Thursday morning that Democrats “have now, effectively, turned off the legislative branch,” and have “turned it over to the executive.”
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
In short, any cuts — even ones some Republicans might find distasteful — are the Democrats’ fault, according to Republican leadership.
This is not the first time we’ve seen an eager budget cutter ascend to power in this administration. Let’s take a moment to flash back to the very first days and months of Trump’s second presidency, when young staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were marching into government offices, demanding data and deleting programs.
Though he operated at the time with the full support of the president and spurred on by the enthusiasm of his supporters, Musk quickly ran into conflict with the people actually running the departments he had essentially appointed himself to oversee.
Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into “a heated shouting match in earshot of President Trump and other officials in the White House,” according to Axios, over leadership of the IRS. Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio got into an argument in front of Trump, The New York Times reported, when Musk accused Rubio of not firing enough people. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has gone public with his own account of a dispute with Musk over who had the authority to make staffing decisions in the Transportation Department, during which Duffy insisted that “we are not going to fire air traffic controllers,” he told the New York Post in August.
Musk also stirred up conflict with Vought himself. The Times reported that the OMB director “could barely contain his frustration” when Musk’s team exceeded his own plans for federal staffing cuts.
Bessent, Rubio, Duffy, and Vought are all still around. Musk is not. The cabinet secretaries and congressional leadership wrested back their prerogatives over federal spending and staffing, and some staffers that were let go have been hired back.
But the shutdown threatens to introduce a volatile new dynamic, in which another aggressive budget cutter in the highest echelons of the government — in this case, Vought — gets the upper hand without the intra-party blowback.
That’s because unlike Musk, the space entrepreneur and car manufacturer who had only recently become a Republican, Vought is a career conservative, whose command of the levers of power has been honed over years of experience in government. This may be Vought’s moment to make permanent changes in the size and structure of the federal government — or at least credibly threaten to do so — with particular attention to programs he views as a “cartel” between Congress and the federal bureaucracy, as well as spending programs that tend to advance progressive ends, including mitigating or preventing climate change.
Vought has been teeing up dramatic budget cuts and aggressive defunding maneuvers since the first Trump administration — it was his move to delay aid to Ukraine that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. He then spent his four years in exile from power at a think tank he founded, expanding on his vision of a budgetary process more controlled by the executive branch.
But as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote back in January, during the first Trump administration Vought would regularly draw up budgets that would feature dramatic cuts and then Republicans in Congress would undo them and spending would continue on in a bipartisan manner.
This time, Trump has gotten Voughtier, and Republicans in Congress have gotten more compliant. Vought has already said he wants to take the normally bipartisan appropriations process and turn into a partisan one, in part by letting the president control spending that’s authorized by Congress. Though the president and Republican leadership in Congress might want the public to see a budget director run amok, it’s clear that all of the above relish the prospect of Vought as a kind of wildcard, unleashed with a red pen on the federal budget.
Echoes of Vought’s ideology have made their way into policymaking across branches of government. The White House has already struck some foreign aid programs authorized by Congress, and the Supreme Court recently allowed those cuts to stand. Republicans in Congress passed a rescissions package that cut previously appropriated funding for public broadcasting and other foreign aid. Vought also effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a formerly independent agency, while cuts to the Department of Education have left it a shell of itself.
The cuts Vought has announced so far during the shutdown, including funding for a bunch of clean energy and sustainability projects largely in blue states and transit projects in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, aren’t entirely shutdown-related. It doesn’t take a tremendous leap to arrive at the idea that they might have been planned all along and timed to punish Democrats.
At least some of the cuts seem to be intended to be permanent and would not revert when the shutdown inevitably ends. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told CNN on Thursday that the grant cancellation decisions were made by the Department of Energy, and that “projects will not be restored” once the government is funded again.
It remains unclear the full extent of the cuts Vought will attempt to make, and how the judicial process will ultimately handle them. But the prospect of further major cuts — especially in contrast to the Republican offer of a continuing resolution to resolve the spending standoff — has raised eyebrows among at least a few congressional Republicans.
Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota, told Semafor that Vought is “less politically in tune than the president,” and that by using the shutdown to pursue large cuts, Republicans risk ceding the “moral high ground” in the shutdown fight. Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who chairs the Appropriations Committee, has also criticized some legally aggressive cuts.
But most in the majority, especially in leadership, have expressed no problem with Vought’s prospective cuts, or see them purely as something Democrats are responsible for due to failing to vote yes on their continuing resolution. Which could mean the cuts, if they come, could prove more enduring than Musk’s more slapdash efforts.
The shutdown could cement a shift in the balance of power between Vought and figures in the administration or Congress who are more cautious about the slash and burn approach. This may overwhelm any sense of caution from Cabinet secretaries or congressional leaders defending their turf. They’re all still Republicans at the end of the day.
A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.
Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.
In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.
As it turns out, the Fort Wayne data center is not an exception: Approximately 44% of all data centers proposed in Indiana are in counties that have restricted or banned new renewable energy projects. This is according to a review of Heatmap Pro data in which we cross-referenced the county bans and ordinances we track against a list of proposed data centers prepared by an Indiana energy advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the power going to these data centers is consistently fossil. Data centers can take years to construct and often rely on power fed to them from a distributed regional energy grid. But this does mean it would be exceptionally costly for any of these projects to build renewable generation on site, as a rising number of projects choose to do – not to mention that on a macro level, data centers may increasingly run up against the same cultural dynamics that are leading to solar and wind project denials. (See: this local news article about the Fort Wayne data center campus).
Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, told me the Fort Wayne facility will get its power off of the PJM grid, and sent me links to solar projects and hydroelectric facilities in other states on the PJM it has power purchase agreements with. I’d note the company claims it “already matches” all of its global annual electricity demand with “renewable energy purchases.” What this means is that if Google can’t generate renewable energy for a data center directly, it will try to procure renewable energy at the same time from the same grid, even if it can’t literally use that clean power at that data center. And if that's not possible, it will search farther afield or at different times. (Google is one of the more aggressive big tech companies in this regard, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo details.) Google has also boasted that it will provide an undisclosed amount of excess clean electricity through rights transfers to Indiana Michigan Power when the tech company’s load is low and demand on the broader grid is peaking, as part of Google’s broader commitment to grid flexibility.
I reached out to Tom Wilson, an energy systems technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-focused organization that studies modern power and works with tech companies on flexible data center energy use, including Google. Wilson told me that in Indiana, many of the siting decisions for data centers were made before counties enacted moratoria against renewable energy and that tech companies may not always be knowingly siting projects in places where significant solar or wind generation would be impractical or even impossible. (We would just note that Fort Wayne, Indiana, has an opposition risk score of 84 in Heatmap Pro, meaning it would have been a very risky place to build a renewable energy project even without that restrictive ordinance.) It also indicates some areas may be laying down renewables restrictions after seeing data center development, which is in line with a potential land use techlash.
Wilson told me that two thirds of data centers rely on power from the existing energy grid whereas surveys indicate about a third choose to have at least some electricity generation on site. In at least the latter case, land use constraints and permitting problems really can be a hurdle for building renewable energy close to where data is processed. This is a problem exacerbated when centers are developed near population centers, which Wilson said is frequently the case because companies want to reduce “latency” for customers. In other words, they want to “reduce the time it takes to get answers to people” via artificial intelligence or other data products.
“The primary challenges are the size of the data center and the amount of space it takes to build renewables,” he said. “They are moving from 20 megawatt or 40 megawatt data centers to 100, 200, 300 megawatt data centers. It’s really hard to locate that much renewable [energy] right near a population center. So that requires transmission, and unfortunately right now in the U.S. and in many other countries, transmission takes a significant amount of time to build.”
The majority of data centers are served by regional power grids, Wilson told me. Companies like Google, Meta, and others continue to invest in renewable energy procurement while building facilities in areas that have restricted new solar or wind power infrastructure. In some cases, companies may feel they’re forced to seek these places out because the land is just plain cheap and has existing fiber optic cable networks.
At the same time, there are large data centers getting energy generated on site, and how they each approach their energy sources varies. It’s also not always consistent.
For instance, Meta’s new Prometheus supercluster complex in New Albany, Ohio — potentially the world’s first 1 gigawatt data center — will reportedly have a significant amount of new gas power generation constructed at the facility, even though the company also struck a deal with Invenergy over the summer to procure at least 400 megawatts of solar from two projects in Ohio that already have their permits. One is in Clinton County and was fully permitted but resulted in a years-long fight before the Ohio Power Siting Board and included conservative media backlash. The other is in Franklin County and got its permits in 2021, before a recent wave of opposition against solar projects. Prometheus itself will be sited on the Licking County side of New Albany, where solar has been extremely difficult to build, even though most of this Columbus suburb is in solar-supporting Franklin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI data center notoriously relies on a polluting gas plant in Memphis, Tennessee. The surrounding Shelby County had a solar moratorium until mere months ago that residents want to bring back. An affiliate company of xAI used for the project’s real estate is subleasing land near the data center for a solar farm, but it is unclear right now if it’ll power the data center.
In the end, it really does seem like data centers are being sited in places with renewable energy restrictions. What the data center developers plan to do about it — if anything — is still an open question.
Current conditions: After walloping Bermuda with winds of up to 100 miles per hour, Hurricane Imelda is veering northeast away from the United States • While downgraded from a hurricane, Humberto is set to soak Ireland and the United Kingdom as Storm Amy in the coming days and bring winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Typhoon Matmo is strengthening as it hits the Philippines and barrels toward China.
The Department of Energy is canceling two regional hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest as part of a broader rescinding of 321 grants worth $7.5 billion for projects nationwide. Going after the hydrogen hubs, which the oil and gas industry lobbied to keep open after President Donald Trump came back to office, “leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday.
The list of canceled projects that Emily got her hands on “does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit,” she wrote. But, she found, “many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds,” including a $20 million grant for a manufacturing plant in Texas that was slated to create 200 jobs.
Tesla’s global deliveries rose 7% in the third quarter, hitting a new record as Americans rushed to buy electric vehicles before the federal tax credit expired on September 30. The automaker delivered 497,099 vehicles in the three months leading up to that date, up from 462,890 in the same period last year, according to the Financial Times. That was well above analyst forecasts of 444,000.
That may do little to turn around the headwinds blasting the EV giant. While the company benefited from buyers scrambling to tap the federal EV tax credit, Tesla sank to its lowest-ever share of the electric vehicle market in August as drivers flocked to offerings from other automakers. It’s not just a problem in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.”
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservatives, has vowed to repeal the United Kingdom’s landmark climate law if her party, colloquially known as the Tories, wins the next election. Eliminating the Climate Change Act, passed almost unanimously under a Tory government in 2008, would dismantle controls on greenhouse gas emissions and remove what The Guardian described as “the cornerstone of green and energy policy for successive governments” for the past 17 years.
The move rankled past Tory leaders. Former Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the campaign pledge as a “catastrophic mistake.” Calling it a “retrograde” step, she said that “while consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.” Alok Sharma, the former Tory minister who led the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, told The Guardian in a separate article that a repeal risked “many tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment and accompanying jobs.”
Sea ice in Antarctica reached its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 47 years ago, according to a new analysis by Carbon Brief. Provisional data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctic sea ice reaching a winter maximum of just under 6.9 million square miles as of September 17. That’s nearly 350,000 square miles below the average between 1981 and 2010, the historical baseline against which recent changes in sea ice extent are compared. The “lengthening trend of lower Antarctic sea ice poses real concerns regarding stability and melting of the ice sheet,” one expert told the publication.
The finding comes as a “groundbreaking” study the European Geosciences Union published Thursday in the journal Earth System Dynamics found that Antarctic sea ice has emerged as a key predictor of accelerated ocean warming. Using Earth system models and satellite images from 1980 to 2020, the researchers found higher sea ice extent enhances cloud cover, which has a cooling effect overall by reducing incoming solar radiation. As a result, ongoing sea ice loss is linked to larger reductions in clouds, stronger surface warming, and even more ocean heat uptake, accelerating the cycle.
Duke Energy plans to meet surging demand for electricity by increasing its natural gas and battery capacity, keeping coal plants open for up to four years longer than previously estimated, and evaluating new sites for nuclear reactors. The 100-page biennial proposal published this week dials back plans for more renewables such as wind and solar. It also pushed back the earliest start date for a new reactor to 2037, declined to commit to either small modular reactors or large traditional units, and said the utility still needs extra protections against cost overruns before embarking on construction.
In the meantime, the added years of coal burning “will result in millions of tons in additional greenhouse gases over the next decade when combined with other proposed changes to the utility’s fuel mix,” Inside Climate News reported. In a statement to Axios, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, called on the state’s utilities commission to “require significant changes” and condemned Duke for “retreating from the state’s clean energy future.”
New research by a team of scientists from the U.K. and New Zealand has found that new analytical methods could bolster conservation breeding programs by offering a better understanding of why eggs don’t hatch. The researchers used fluorescent dyes to discover that nearly 66% of 174 unhatched eggs examined in the study had been fertilized, whereas previous methods suggested that only 5.2% had been fertilized. “There are many different factors that contribute to breeding success,” Gary Ward, a co-author from the London-based ZSL Institute of Zoology, said in a statement, “and the more understanding we can have into why an egg might not hatch, the more we can refine our care for these birds and the better chance of recovery we can give them.”