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But the all-stock deal between TAE and Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, could capture more money from retail investors eager to get in on the fusion game. After all, the next-generation nuclear fission industry has a growing stable of startups whose stocks generate billions of dollars but whose businesses have no revenue. The merger shows “both the Trump administration’s commitment and investor appetite for clean, scalable fusion energy,” Greg Piefer, the chief executive of the rival fusion company SHINE Technologies, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Still, he said his startup, which Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote recently is already generating revenue selling medical isotopes, will be able “to scale faster than any other fusion company.” That’s a diplomatic way of analyzing a deal involving the president. When I called up Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF yesterday morning, he told me, “I’m just flabbergasted.”
The House voted 221-196 Thursday to pass the SPEED Act, a bipartisan permitting reform bill to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act. Eleven Democrats supported the bill, and just one Republican voted no. But GOP lawmakers made last-minute changes to appease right-wing critics of offshore wind, causing some Democrats who planned to vote yes to defect, Politico reported. That provision will almost certainly make passage in the Senate a challenge. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported last week, top Senate Democrats vowed to oppose the legislation unless the bill barred executive branch agencies from yanking already-granted permits, a move designed to halt the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind. As our colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, passing the House was one thing, “but now comes the hard part.”
Easing federal environmental assessments isn’t the only approach to speeding up energy deployment. As our other colleague Matthew Zeitlin explained yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing to make it easier to plug data centers directly into power plants.
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The Department of Energy’s independent watchdog is opening an investigation into the agency’s decision to cancel $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects in California and other Democratic-leaning states. The bulk of the projects, including a $1.2 billion regional hydrogen hub, were located in California, the Los Angeles Times noted. The audit by the Energy Department’s Office of the Inspector General came in response to a plea from nearly 30 California lawmakers raising concern that the states were illegally targeted “for their perceived lack of support for President Trump.”
At the same time, a coalition of cities, consumer advocates, and green groups sued the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday over new Treasury Department rules “that unfairly and illegally discriminate against wind and solar projects.”
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A rendering of a future Blykalla power plant in a quintessential Nordic landscape.Blykalla
The Swedish nuclear startup Blykalla raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding to hasten its work on building small modular reactors. The most interesting name among the investors? The American nuclear startup Oklo. In a statement to NucNet, the companies said that by aligning two of the fastest-moving reactor developers in the world, the companies could shorten “critical paths to development, reducing schedule risks and unlocking supply chain efficiencies.” While Oklo’s as-yet-unbuilt microreactors would use liquid metal as a coolant, Blykalla’s design uses lead. But both models qualify as fourth-generation reactors.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra may have identified her heir apparent, but first she plans to put him through a “tough test” in his new role as chief product officer. Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot division, first joined the Detroit giant in May, in what the electric vehicle site Electrek called “a surprising move that put a tech executive in charge of the legacy automaker’s entire vehicle development program.” Now a new report from Bloomberg stated that Barra sees Anderson as a frontrunner to replace her when she eventually steps down.
Flying drones over whales to collect samples of exhaled breath from blowholes is considered a breakthrough in non-invasive health monitoring for marine giants in Arctic regions. Now, however, a study of wild humpback, sperm and fin whales in northern Norway has revealed for the first time a potentially deadly virus known as cetacean morbillivirus circulating above the Arctic Circle. The upside is that the new use of drones could support conservation by detecting the virus, which is connected to mass strandings, early before major death events. “Drone blow sampling is a game-changer,” Terry Dawson, a co-author of the study and a professor at King’s College London, said in a statement. “It allows us to monitor pathogens in live whales without stress or harm, providing critical insights into diseases in rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems.”
The latest capacity auction in PJM Interconnection, where power generators in the nation’s largest electricity market bid to provide power when the grid is especially stressed, ended at the legally-mandated cap of $333.44 per megawatt. This adds up to some $16.4 billion, a record-setting figure following the past two auctions, which brought in $16.1 billion and $14.7 billion.
This auction covers 2027 through 2028, and is the last that will be subject to the price cap. Despite the dizzying spending, it failed to procure enough power to meet PJM’s preferred 20% reserve margin for a severe demand event. The auction procured 145,777 megawatts of capacity, 6,623 megawatts short of the target, giving the grid a 14.8% margin. Much of that projected demand will come from data centers, which, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, have stressed the grid operator nearly to the breaking point.
A view of Puerto Rico's lone coal plant. Alexander C. Kaufman
Global coal use is set to start declining over the next five years as renewables and liquified natural gas gobble up its market share, the International Energy Agency projected in its latest annual forecast Wednesday. Demand is on track to inch upward 0.5% this year to a record 8,845 million tons before dropping 3% by 2030. Analysts warned Bloomberg that coal has remained “stubbornly strong” given high levels of consumption in China and India, and the Paris-based IEA cautioned that its five-year outlook “is subject to significant uncertainties that could impact it materially.”
Among the factors that look increasingly certain: That the Trump administration won’t allow any more U.S. coal plants to shut down. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy ordered the 730-megawatt TransAlta Centralia Generation in Washington to remain past its retirement at the end of this month, despite the state’s ban on coal operations. There’s just one big problem with that plan, as Matthew wrote last month. Old coal plants keep breaking down.
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Nuno Loureiro, a professor of nuclear science and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, died Tuesday after being shot multiple times in his home near Boston the night before. Police statements made no mention of a suspect or motives, but Loureiro’s coveted position as one of the United States’ leading fusion scientists stoked speculation that the killing was politically motivated. Prominent influencers including the Trump adviser Laura Loomer falsely claimed that Loureiro, who was from Portugal, was Jewish and a vocal activist for the Israeli government. But The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli intelligence officials are investigating potential links between the murder and the Iranian government, though the newspaper cautioned that the assessment “has not yet been verified.” As of now, there is no clear evidence of who killed Loureiro or why. His death shocked the field of research in which he was lauded as a leader. A former colleague in Portugal who started working at the same laboratory with Loureiro years ago in Lisbon and “knew him well” told me, “Everyone here is in shock.”
Back in June, Matthew wrote a good piece explaining why the commonly used metric known as levelized cost of energy was “wrong.” Essentially, LCOE represents the energy output of a given source in terms of its construction and operating expenses — the lower the LCOE, the more efficient it is operationally. But the metric fails to capture all the other things that make an energy source valuable, such as the frequency with which it operates, how long it lasts, or how much infrastructure is required to make use of it. When Ontario Power Generation assessed the cost of building new nuclear reactors at its Darlington station, the LCOE showed solar and batteries costing far less. But a full systems analysis found that nuclear reactors would last longer, require fewer transmission upgrades, and would not need back-up generation. A report published this morning by the consultancy FTI has proposed two new metrics instead: Levelized value of energy, or LVOE, “which reflects the total value a project can create for its owners, and Levelized Net Benefit (LNB), which quantifies the broader value a project can deliver to the overall system.” While the LCOE for solar is roughly 40% lower than nuclear power in both Texas’ ERCOT grid system and PJM, a chart from the report shows that nuclear has an LVOE roughly 10 times greater.
A chart comparing LVOE of nuclear and solar in two major grids. FTI
Record rainfall last month has revived an ancient lake in an unusual place. When ice covered the Sierra Nevada between 128,000 and 186,000 years ago, a lake 100 miles long and 600 feet deep sat in what is today the Mojave Desert in eastern California. That lake, called Lake Manly, has returned. As the science site Phys.org reported, “now Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth and the lowest point in North America, has a desert lake framed by snow-capped mountains.” But the “marvel” is likely to disappear soon.
