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You know who also wants to see more investment in SMRs? Arizona senator and rumored Democratic presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who released an energy plan Wednesday calling on the Energy Department to ease the “regulatory, scaling, and supply chain challenges” new reactors still face.
Since he first emerged on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has made the proverbial forgotten coal miner a central theme of his anti-establishment campaigns, vowing to correct for urbanite elites’ neglect by putting workers’ concerns at the forefront. Yet his administration is now considering overhauling black lung protections that miners lobbied federal agencies to enact and enforce. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer will “reconsider and seek comments” on parts of the Biden-era silica rule that mining companies and trade groups are challenging in court, the agency told E&E News. It’s unclear how the Trump administration may seek to alter the regulation. But the rule, finalized last year, reduced exposure limits for miners to airborne silica crystals that lodge deep inside lung tissue to 50 micrograms from the previous 100 microgram limit. The rule also required companies to provide expanded medical tests to workers. Dozens of miners and medical advocates protested outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October to request that the rule, expected to prevent more than 1,000 deaths and 3,700 cases of black lung per year, be saved.
Rolling back some of the protections would be just the latest effort to gut Biden-era policy. On Wednesday, the White House invited automotive executives to attend what’s expected to be an announcement to shred fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, The New York Times reported late on Tuesday.
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A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA
The average American spent a combined 11 hours without electricity last year as a result of extreme weather, worse outages than during any previous year going back a decade. That’s according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Blackouts attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2025, compared to an average of roughly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023. Major hurricanes accounted for 80% of the hours without electricity in 2024.
The latest federal grants may be good news for third-generation SMRs, but one of the leading fourth-generation projects — the Bill Gates-owned TerraPower’s bid to build a molten salt-cooled reactor at a former coal plant in Wyoming — just cleared the final safety hurdle for its construction permit. Calling the approval a “momentous occasion for TerraPower,” CEO Chris Levesque said the “favorable safety evaluation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”
TerraPower’s project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is meant to demonstrate the company’s reactors, which are designed to store power when it’s needed — making them uniquely complementary to grids with large amounts of wind and solar — to avoid the possibility of a meltdown. Still, at a private lunch I attended in October, Gates warned that the U.S. is falling behind China on nuclear power. China is charging ahead on all energy fronts. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese had started up a domestically-produced gas turbine for the first time as the country seeks to compete with the U.S. on even the fossil fuels American producers dominate.
It’s been a rough year for green hydrogen projects as the high cost of producing the zero-carbon fuel from renewable electricity and water makes finding customers difficult for projects. Blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment, isn’t doing much better. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. abandoned plans to build what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production plants in Baytown, Texas. This week, BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen project in England. At issue are strict new standards in the European Union for how much carbon blue hydrogen plants would need to capture to qualify as clean.
You’re not the only one accidentally ingesting loads of microplastics. New research suggests crickets can’t tell the difference between tiny bits of plastics and natural food sources. Evidence shows that crickets can break down microplastics into smaller nanoplastics — which may be even worse in the environment since they’re more easily eaten or absorbed by other lifeforms.
The first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to spark occurred at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022. Since then, billions of dollars have flowed into fusion energy research and a number of prominent companies have proposed building power plants harnessing the technology. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it, it’s “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” But the U.S. risks losing its edge, according to a new report by the Congress-backed Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. “While the United States has long been at the forefront of fusion research, the international competition is intensifying,” the report published last month concluded. “China, in particular, is rapidly advancing its fusion energy capabilities through massive state investments and aggressive technological development, narrowing the window for American leadership.”
A coal plant in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Photo by Getty Images
China’s emissions remained flat for another quarter in a row, continuing a downward trend that started last year, as I wrote here earlier this month. Backing up that data is new research from Greenpeace East Asia, which found that China approved just under 42 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity nationwide in the first nine months of 2025. That may sound like a lot, but if the current pace continues, 2025 is on track to be the second-lowest year for approvals since the COVID-19 shock in 2021. It would also be the second consecutive year of decline. “China’s power-sector emissions peak is within reach as early as 2025. Yet maintaining momentum to curb coal approvals remains critical,” Gao Yuhe, Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing-based project manager, said in a statement. “Clear policy signals to cap coal and boost renewables are essential to accelerate both the power sector and societal emissions peaks.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency filed a motion late Monday evening asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to eliminate a Biden-era rule tightening limits on soot. The regulation, E&E News reported, was “predicted to save thousands of lives by tightening the exposure limit to a pollutant tied to a higher risk of strokes, lung cancer and other cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”
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Since 1980, the Department of the Interior has run National Environmental Policy analyses on every five-year offshore drilling plan. But, as E&E News reported Tuesday, the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management called that step “discretionary” in its latest proposal. To justify the change, the Trump administration cited two past rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that rejected challenges to NEPA assessments of five-year plans.
It’s a striking dichotomy with how the administration has dealt with offshore wind, most easily communicated via the meme of Shaquille O’Neal sleeping in one frame and awake with eyes ablaze in the next. Environmental damage from offshore oil and gas drilling? “I sleep,” as the meme goes. Environmental damage from offshore wind turbines? Now that, as I have written in this newsletter, has the Trump administration’s attention.
Iran “no longer has a choice” but to move its capital city as ecological strain on Tehran’s water and land make the metropolis impossible to sustain. In remarks carried on state media Thursday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the government had “no option” but to consider an alternative city for the capital. “When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget,” he said, according to the London-based news service Iran International, which broadcasts in English and Farsi. “If we had, maybe it would have been done. The reality is that we no longer have a choice; it is an obligation.” As the capital sinks by near one foot per year and water supplies shrink, Tehran faces “catastrophe” and “a dark future,” he said. “Protecting the environment is not a joke. Ignoring it means signing our own destruction.”
Tehran wouldn’t be the only major city on the move. Indonesia is designing a new capital in Borneo called Nusantara to replace Jakarta, which is also slowly sinking.
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has cut dozens of workers as the company scales back some of its projects to focus on tapping into demand for grid-scale batteries, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The layoffs took place this month and were spread across the company, amounting to up to 6% of the total workforce. Redwood is now focusing on repurposing old batteries for the grid and extracting critical minerals from scrapped power packs.
Here’s a statistic for the vegetarians to whip out on Thanksgiving: A 16-pound turkey has a carbon footprint as big as the gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits, and apple pie combined, research from Carnegie Mellon University found. Before you go off starting a fight with your truck-driving, meat-loving uncle, the scientists noted that, “compared to all the environmental lifestyle decisions that an American family could make, these are very, very small potatoes.” I wish you all a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.
