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Yet another U.S. reactor startup hoping to build a prototype plant under the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program has won the agency’s approval for its safety blueprint. On Thursday, Last Energy plans to announce the regulator’s official endorsement of the microreactor developer’s preliminary documented safety analysis — a key procedural step known as PDSA — for its 5-megawatt demonstration reactor at Texas A&M University. The reactor, set to be a quarter the size of Last Energy’s commercial-scale model, is designed to show regulators the technology can safely split atoms and generate heat for electricity production. The approval is only from the Energy Department and limited to the pilot project. To produce commercial electricity, Last Energy still needs to go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license. But the data from this pilot project is likely to count for Last Energy’s eventual application to the NRC for its first commercial plant. “Last Energy’s PWR-5 uses the same physical reactor geometry as the company’s commercial PWR-20, with reduced fuel enrichment scaled for 5 megawatts of electrical output,” the company told me. “The PWR-5 pilot project is a direct bridge to Last Energy’s commercial PWR-20 deployment.”
The approval makes Last Energy at least the fourth company so far to pass the PDSA phase after rival microreactor developers Antares, Radiant, and Deployable Energy. But it isn’t the only one. On Wednesday afternoon, an official at the Idaho National Laboratory posted on LinkedIn that he had approved the PDAS for two reactors in the Energy Department’s pilot program. It wasn't immediately clear which company was the second after Last Energy. “I couldn’t be prouder of the exemptional nuclear safety review team,” wrote Bob Boston, the Energy Department’s Idaho operations manager. “The public can rest assured that any and all approvals for new reactors under DOE will be safe.”
Two of the most populous states in the nation’s largest electric grid just released new rules for data centers looking to set up shop. In Pennsylvania, the largest state in PJM Interconnection, Governor Josh Shapiro issued a new set of standards for companies seeking to fast-track development, including requiring developers to generate their own electricity, give out millions of dollars in local support, and follow stricter sustainability rules on water. The Democrat, per the public radio station WVIA, “also wants to change a tax exemption program for data center owners and operators” to require companies to meet the new standards to qualify for tax breaks. The idea mirrors a proposal from Searchlight Institute senior fellow Jane Flegal, who argued last month for conditioning tax incentives on meeting best-practice industry standards for data centers. In New Jersey, the sixth-largest of PJM’s 13 states, Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill released her own set of guidelines for data center companies that includes requiring public reporting of water and electricity usage and plans to develop “strong statewide standards” that provide “state resources to ensure municipalities can negotiate from positions of strength, ensuring data centers address impacts like light, noise, and pollution while making meaningful local investments” and “delivering good-paying jobs.”
Meanwhile in Alaska, where the Trump administration is clearing the way for all kinds of new infrastructure, the Anchorage-based startup Stak Energy is proposing one of the largest data centers in the nation on the Arctic North Slope. The $500 million project would take up an entire square mile with multiple buildings off the Dalton Highway, where proponents say cold temperatures and an abundant supply of land and natural gas for power can bolster the facility. The project could, according to the Northern Journal, produce up to 3 gigawatts of power for its own use, “making it competitive with some of the largest data centers under development in the Lower 48.” In a Tuesday segment on Alaska Public Radio, Northern Journal reporter Nathaniel Herz said the below-freezing average temperature on the North Slope meant the project would “be using what they expect to be 90% less water than a facility in the Lower 48.” Perhaps the biggest benefit though is the sparse population in the Arctic. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained of the latest Heatmap Pro data, the number of data center projects being canceled due to public backlash is soaring.
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Deep under California’s traffic-clogged streets, rolling farmland, and sprawling deserts are vast caverns — many the legacy of wells drained of oil during the heyday of Chevron’s Great Depression-era homestate drilling bonanza — capable of storing carbon dioxide captured before it enters the atmosphere. Until now, the state could only theoretically return carbon to the Earth’s crust. But on Tuesday, the oil and carbon management developer California Resources Corporation injected its maiden load of carbon dioxide into a depleted oil reservoir, marking the first time a carbon capture and storage project has come online in the state’s history. The project, called Carbon TerraVault I, is located in Kern County, the vast inland stretch northeast of Santa Barbara that’s home to California’s largest active oil fields. The site will draw out the dregs of oil left in the depleted wells in the Elk Hills Field by permanently returning up to 30 million tons of carbon dioxide to the formation roughly a mile deep underground. It’s part of a vertically integrated operation. California Resources Corporation, which calls itself CRC, operates a nearby cryogenic gas plant. The company captures the carbon dioxide from the facility and ships it to the so-called Class IV well in the oil and gas field. The first injection “demonstrates that California can lead on climate solutions that are practical, scalable, and cost-effective,” CRC CEO Francisco Leon said in a statement. Investors remain skeptical. Shares of CRC fell nearly 3% yesterday.
With gas turbines selling faster than manufacturers can keep up, technology that could capture carbon from gas-fired plants and thus preserve their value even in a scenario where the government prices emissions commands a new premium. It wasn’t long ago that activists uniformly dismissed the technology as a “false solution,” and experts cautioned that carbon capture and storage would be limited to hard-to-abate industrial sectors. But last October, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Google backed a project to build a gas plant with CCS, launching what may be one of the most promising efforts yet to commercialize the technology.
Fresh off wrangling a biting pair of eastern racer snakes he grabbed off the patio of Dr. Oz’s vacation home, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is trying to find ways to round up and get rid of the microscopic plastic particles circulating in Americans’ bodies. A new $144 million program, launched last month but featured in E&E News on Wednesday, aims to measure, understand, and remove micro- and nanoplastics, and marks the biggest federal investment to date in a field of study that coalesced just five years ago.
While the move was “welcomed by researchers, industry, environmental, and Make American Healthy Again advocates as well as online wellness gurus promoting nascent ‘detoxification’ methods,” the newswire quoted Kennedy’s own experts, who said the controversial health government chief was “focused on the wrong questions.” Marcus Eriksen, a marine plastics scientist who heads up the nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute and has advised Kennedy for years, said: “Getting it out of our bodies? That seems extremely tough to me.” So, why put resources there? Well, Eriksen said, it’s politically easier to sell than cracking down on the fossil fuel companies with growing businesses producing the ingredients for plastics. “I get that’s kind of the narrative that’s going to fly with this administration — focus on the downstream stuff, less on the prevention side,” he said.
The world's first floating nuclear plant and SMR: the Akademik Lomonosov. Rosatom
For all the hype around small modular reactors, only two of the 440 some-odd commercial nuclear reactors in operating in the world today would qualify. One of them is a high-temperature gas-cooled plant in China, which generates 210 megawatts of electricity. (The cutoff for what qualifies as an SMR is widely agreed to be under 300 megawatts but over 20 megawatts, the threshold for microreactors.) The other was the world’s first SMR: Russia’s floating nuclear plant on a barge in the Siberian Arctic, capable of generating 70 megawatts of power. Nearly seven years after the vessel Akademik Lomonosov started producing electricity, Russia’s state-owned nuclear firm is preparing for another floating nuclear station. On Wednesday, World Nuclear News reported that Rosatom had finished manufacturing a 58-megawatt reactor for a serialized floating power station set to power a copper mining complex in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, in the country’s northeasternmost corner. “Rosatom continues to expand its range of floating power units, and the completion of the first reactor for the lead floating nuclear power unit is a significant milestone,” Alexey Likhachev, the director general of Rosatom, said in a statement. “Today, Russia is the only country with an operating floating nuclear power plant, and we intend to maintain our leadership in the development of small-scale technologies.”
The Karachi nuclear plant, where China built two Hualong One reactors.Str/Xinhua via Getty Images
China is constructing more reactors at home than any other country by far, and it’s gotten quite good at building its standardized designs for large light water reactors faster and more cheaply than anyone else in the business. Yet Beijing has been slow to make export deals, so far selling just six reactors to two separate power plants in Pakistan. But the People’s Republic is stepping up. With a growing number of countries now seeking to build their first or latest nuclear stations, China is now bidding on major projects. Beijing went head to head with Washington in Riyadh when offering to build Saudi Arabia’s first atomic power station. Now China has submitted what Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called “an incredible proposal” to build what would be the country’s first nuclear project in a European country, according to NucNet. It’s part of a broader investment scheme that includes $1.1 billion to boost production of artificial intelligence, automobiles, and robots, Bloomberg reported.
That’s far from the country where green technology is finding ways out of China. On Tuesday, InsideEVs reported that Jeep-owner Stellantis is considering manufacturing Chinese-branded cars in Mexico and Canada. Stellantis already owns a majority stake in the Chinese joint venture Leapmotor, and maintains a small North American factory footprint for the brand. The company is using one of its factories in Spain to produce Leapmotor cars in Europe, and now it’s also in talks with the Chinese automaker Dongfeng about adding its more expensive Voyah models to its lineup in France. Still, Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa warned that such vehicles won’t be hitting American streets anytime soon. “I believe that there is space in Mexico. There is, maybe, space in Canada. We’ll see,” Filosa told CNBC. “Now there is no space in the United States. We don’t see that.” Maybe not for long. As Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman put it in January: “Chinese EVs are at the gates.”
The United States achieved energy dominance over Europe as the continent started buying loads of liquified natural gas from America to replace pipeline fuel that once flowed west from Russia once the war in Ukraine began. The Iran War looked set to only deepen that advantage as the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz kept shipments of Qatari LNG at bay. But North America’s other big energy producer is muscling in. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Canada had struck a deal to export up to a million metric tons of LNG to Germany each year from a Pacific Coast terminal in British Columbia. The first deliveries would be due in the early 2030s, and the contract would continue for 20 years. Officials told the newspaper the deal would be announced today.
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Last week, I told you about Otovo, a U.S. -Norwegian startup that billed itself as a kind of AAA for rooftop solar panels and other home energy systems. Founded by the former chief executive of the bankrupt solar installer Sunnova, Otovo aims to serve the very customers “orphaned” by the Chapter 11 and left without a go-to company to fix faulty panels, batteries, or generators. So far, Otovo has built a base of about 30,000 customers subscribed to its repair service, two-thirds of whom are in Europe. On Wednesday morning, I can report exclusively for this newsletter, the company plans to announce that it acquired the customer book from SunSystem Technology. The customer base covers nine U.S. states, nearly tripling Otovo’s footprint to 14 states in total. The deal marks Otovo’s seventh acquisition since its relaunch less than a year ago.
Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published an interim final rule axing a key step from the environmental review process for large, federally-backed developments. Environmental assessments conducted by HUD staff on projects with more than 200 units will now, according to E&E News, “no longer need an additional review by the field environmental clearance officer.” The change, set to take effect June 22, is meant to streamline affordable housing construction.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s effort to smooth the permitting rules for companies looking to start a whole new sector the deep seafloor is similarly picking up pace. The Metals Company, the U.S.-Canadian startup that helped pioneer the latest effort at establishing a global industry, is the well-known frontrunner racing for U.S. approval, even as the United Nations body that regulates commerce in international waters has yet to lay out its own ground rules for tapping the ocean floor for minerals. As I told you back in March, that U.N. entity, the International Seabed Authority, promised to broker a deal for a global permitting regime this summer. In the meantime, E&E News reports that at least eight ventures are now vying for federal permits in the U.S.
Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were among the companies to sign onto a new initiative designed to support investment in next-generation energy and materials technologies meant to reduce the environmental impact of data centers. The Data Center Innovation Initiative, organized by the nonprofit investor group Elemental Impact, “will test and validate critical technologies in data center environments, creating potential pathways for future adoption across broader energy and industrial sectors.” Other participants include Salesforce and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy. “Data centers are uniquely positioned to serve as catalysts for clean energy and sustainable building materials,” Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of energy and sustainability, said in a press release. “By sharing what we learn together, we can support entrepreneurs to scale faster and move these innovations to real-world impact.”
Update: This article originally misidentified a signatory of the Data Center Innovation Initiative. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.
