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Oil prices spiked again in response to the president’s announcement. Already, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported last week, the war has cost Americans $17 billion at the pump. And even with the ceasefire in place, the end of the energy shock looked hazy at best, analyst Rory Johnston said on the most recent episode of the Heatmap podcast Shift Key.
The Russian and Hungarian flags fly side by side at the Paks II building site. Janos Kummer/Getty Images
For nearly two decades, Viktor Orbán ruled over Hungary with an increasingly tight-gripped fist, maintaining the closest relationship between Russia and any NATO country and providing what’s widely considered a blueprint for the West’s illiberal right to reduce checks on the power of the ruling party in a democracy. In February, his government oversaw the official start of construction on Paks II, a major new nuclear project Hungary hired the Russian state-owned Rosatom to build. Now Orbán’s 16-year tenure is coming to an end after rival conservative Péter Magyar won Sunday’s election in a landslide. During the heated campaign, which saw Vice President JD Vance visit Hungary to campaign on Orbán’s behalf in the closing days, Magyar depicted the incumbent right-wing ruler as a corrupt authoritarian selling out the country to its former Soviet imperial rulers in Moscow and vowed to rebuild Budapest’s ties with the European Union and NATO. That could spell trouble for Paks II. The project has stood out as the Kremlin’s last new commercial foothold in the West’s nuclear industry. At the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, Finland canceled a domestic joint venture with Rosatom. The U.S. nuclear giant Westinghouse, meanwhile, has cut deal after deal to supply Russian-made VVER reactors in Slovakia and Bulgaria with America-made fuel assemblies. Last summer, the Orbán administration said it had, as a result of its chummy relationship with the Trump administration, persuaded Washington to exempt Paks II from U.S. sanctions. The project’s fate under a Magyar government is uncertain, though at least one expert I spoke to on Sunday afternoon suggested the new prime minister may seek to renegotiate the deal with Rosatom to provide for more EU oversight or better terms. Canceling Paks II, which would significantly bolster the grid in a country already reliant on nuclear power for nearly half its electricity, seems unlikely at this point.
Meanwhile, Russia is getting some new competition from a European rival. Until recently, Rosatom was the only foreign company willing to invest in nuclear reactors in India, where a civil liability law passed in 2010 threatened to bankrupt developers if any accident occurred. In December, as I reported to you at the time, India passed legislation reforming the statute in a bid to attract more overseas investments into its growing atomic power sector. It’s working. The U.S. nuclear heavyweight Holtec International, which is attempting to build its 300-megawatt small modular reactors in Michigan, has expressed interest. Now the French nuclear giant EDF is exploring potential projects in the world’s most populous nation, World Nuclear News reported last week. In another bullish sign, regulators in South Korea, the democratic world’s most competent reactor builder, just approved the country’s latest plant to start up.
Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei notched a major legislative win last week after lawmakers in the lower house of the country’s legislature approved an overhaul of a landmark glacier protection law in a 137-to-11 vote. The victory opens “the door to mining near some of South America’s most important freshwater reserves,” the Financial Times reported, by giving provincial authorities greater discretion to determine which glacial areas warrant protection. The bill already passed in the Argentinian Senate, meaning Milei only needs to sign the legislation. He’s expected to do so. Milei pitched the bill as a way to free up areas “incorrectly classified as glaciers” to mineral extraction as his government seeks to tap Argentina’s rich lithium resources. But critics aren’t so sure. “This will not give investors the legal certainty they are looking for,” Andrés Nápoli, executive director of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, told the newspaper.
Milei signed a critical minerals pact with the U.S. in February as the Trump administration looks to secure non-Chinese supplies of key metals.
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Maybe the attacker was angry about data centers. Maybe the assailant took issue with OpenAI itself, or the way Sam Altman — a lightning rod figure in the American tech industry and the subject of a recent investigation in The New Yorker that raised questions about a uniquely powerful executive’s judgment — operates. Maybe the man who threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home on Friday was just compelled by illness or altered brain chemistry to act out violently against a public figure who’s been unmissable in the media. But the fact that the incident occurred less than a week after a gunman fired bullets into the home of an Indianapolis city councilmember who spoke out in support of a data center project does appear to be part of a worrying trend of violence. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last week, the Indianapolis shooting, in which (thankfully) the lawmaker and his young son were not hurt, was the third such incident this year, “indicating the bubbling angst against data centers really does have potential to turn violent.”
In a post on his personal blog, Altman shared a photo of his husband, Oliver Mulherin, and their 1-year-old son and said he had “underestimated the power of words and narratives” amid what he admitted was an “extremely intense, chaotic, and high-pressure few years in the artificial intelligence industry. “A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology. This is quite valid, and we welcome good-faith criticism and debate,” Altman wrote. “I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn’t always good for everyone. But overall, I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.”
Battery recycling startup Ascend Elements will file for bankruptcy this Thursday, according to Bloomberg. The Massachusetts-based company raised more than $1.1 billion in equity and grants over the past 11 years as it sought to build out production from its factory reprocessing old batteries into cathode material in Georgia. But “the financial difficulties were insurmountable,” the company said.
Last summer, I told you about an abandoned green hydrogen project in Australia amid a spate of cancellations worldwide. But now a new 1.5-gigawatt project, the Murchison Green Hydrogen facility in Western Australia, has been selected for a fast-track approval under the national government’s new pilot program to speed up permitting, according to Hydrogen Insight. The program is reserved for projects of “national significance.”
We have all seen the viral photos of eye-popping numbers on price signs at Southern California gas stations. But the exact cost to American drivers nationwide hadn’t yet been quantified. Until now. Researchers at Brown University gave Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer a sneak peak at their new Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a hub for the team’s analysis and data. The war has cost the U.S. economy about $17 billion solely by increasing prices for gasoline and diesel fuel, the estimates show. The higher prices amount to a hike of $129 per household so far. “If you think about an individual paying $1 or $1.50 more for gasoline, that’s often just a nuisance,” Jeff Colgan, an author of the analysis and a political science professor at Brown University, told Rob. “But as a country, we consume 370 million gallons of gasoline per day. So when you add that all up, this is more than just a nuisance for the country. This is a major cost.”
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When the Trump administration became the biggest shareholder in MP Materials last summer, Biden-era officials admitted to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin that they were jealous of their Republican successors who marshalled the political will to experiment with quasi-nationalization. But at least one former official from President Joe Biden’s White House has a different take. “Bottom line: the MP deal is both too much & not enough,” Brian Deese, the former director of the National Economic Council, wrote in a post on X, announcing the findings of a new paper he co-authored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The deal delivers unprecedented support to one firm, creating new risks without long-term resilience.”
Uranium Energy Corp., meanwhile, has started up production at its Burke Hollow mine in Texas. It’s the first new mining operation using in-situ recovery, a process that includes chemical leaching out of ore. It’s the first new facility of its kind in the U.S. in more than a decade, World Nuclear News reported.
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Volkswagen is shifting production at its Chattanooga plant from the ID.4 electric SUV to the large Atlas SUV. The ID.4 will remain available throughout the U.S., and “future models are planned,” but the German automaker said it’s “exploring pathways for a new vehicle model to be assembled.” Instead, the facility will focus on churning out the Atlas, Volkswagen’s second-most popular vehicle. EVs “continue to challenge” the industry, requiring what the company called measured decisions. “The Chattanooga plant has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s strategy in the United States,” Volkswagen Group of America President and CEO Kjell Gruner said in a press release. “This strategic shift underscores the company’s commitment to Chattanooga and its workforce as we position the plant for long-term success and future product opportunities.”
A national map showing the paper’s findings. Nature
A team of scientists at Princeton University and the University of Arizona produced what the Los Angeles Times called “the most extensive estimate of the country’s groundwater to date.” The researchers took data from about 800,000 wells and applied a machine-learning model to project the depth of the water table in each location. The findings, published in Nature, could help local policymakers decide how to handle overpumping from stressed aquifers. “Groundwater is out of sight and out of mind for most people,” Reed Maxwell, a hydrologist at Princeton and co-author of the study, told the newspaper. “Knowing how much we have will be helpful in knowing how to use it wisely.”
The population of Antarctic fur seals, the smallest of the polar seals which live almost exclusively on the island of South Georgia, halved over the last 25 years, from 2.2 million adults in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025, Mongabay reported. Global experts now say half of the population loss is due to reduced food availability as warmer temperatures and shrinking sea ice spur large schools of krill, the seal’s main prey, into deeper and colder waters. To boot, the seals are facing more competition for their food. High-quality krill now appears in tins at supermarkets in New York City. But really demand is surging for use in fish farming.
