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Lawmakers today should study the Energy Security Act of 1980.
On Google’s energy glow up, transmission progress, and South American oil
The hyperscaler is going big on human intelligence to help power its artificial intelligence.
A lookahead with Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo, Matthew Zeitlin, and Jillian Goodman.
Forget data centers. Fire is going to make electricity much more expensive in the western United States.
The administration has already lost once in court wielding the same argument against Revolution Wind.
On Redwood Materials’ milestone, states welcome geothermal, and Indian nuclear
Current conditions: Powerful winds of up to 50 miles per hour are putting the Front Range states from Wyoming to Colorado at high risk of wildfire • Temperatures are set to feel like 101 degrees Fahrenheit in Santa Fe in northern Argentina • Benin is bracing for flood flooding as thunderstorms deluge the West African nation.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul. John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit
New York Governor Kathy Hochul inked a partnership agreement with Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday to work together on establishing supply chains and best practices for deploying next-generation nuclear technology. Unlike many other states whose formal pronouncements about nuclear power are limited to as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors, the document promised to establish “a framework for collaboration on the development of advanced nuclear technologies, including large-scale nuclear” and SMRs. Ontario’s government-owned utility just broke ground on what could be the continent’s first SMR, a 300-megawatt reactor with a traditional, water-cooled design at the Darlington nuclear plant. New York, meanwhile, has vowed to build at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear power in the state through its government-owned New York Power Authority. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote about the similarities between the two state-controlled utilities back when New York announced its plans. “This first-of-its-kind agreement represents a bold step forward in our relationship and New York’s pursuit of a clean energy future,” Hochul said in a press release. “By partnering with Ontario Power Generation and its extensive nuclear experience, New York is positioning itself at the forefront of advanced nuclear technology deployment, ensuring we have safe, reliable, affordable, and carbon-free energy that will help power the jobs of tomorrow.”
Hochul is on something of a roll. She also repealed a rule that’s been on the books for nearly 140 years that provided free hookups to the gas system for new customers in the state. The so-called 100-foot-rule is a reference to how much pipe the state would subsidize. The out-of-pocket cost for builders to link to the local gas network will likely be thousands of dollars, putting the alternative of using electric heat and cooking appliances on a level playing field. “It’s simply unfair, especially when so many people are struggling right now, to expect existing utility ratepayers to foot the bill for a gas hookup at a brand new house that is not their own,” Hochul said in a statement. “I have made affordability a top priority and doing away with this 40-year-old subsidy that has outlived its purpose will help with that.”
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla cofounder J.B. Straubel, has entered into commercial production at its South Carolina facility. The first phase of the $3.5 billion plant “has brought a system online that’s capable of recovering 20,000 metric tons of critical minerals annually, which isn’t full capacity,” Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, posted on X. “Redwood’s goal is to keep these resources here; recovered, refined, and redeployed for America’s advantage,” the company wrote in a blog post on its website. “This strategy turns yesterday’s imports into tomorrow’s strategic stockpile, making the U.S. stronger, more competitive, and less vulnerable to supply chains controlled by China and other foreign adversaries.”
A 13-state alliance at the National Association of State Energy Officials launched a new accelerator program Friday that’s meant to “rapidly expand geothermal power development.” The effort, led by state energy offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia, “will work to establish statewide geothermal power goals and to advance policies and programs that reduce project costs, address regulatory barriers, and speed the deployment of reliable, firm, flexible power to the grid.” Statements from governors of red and blue states highlighted the energy source’s bipartisan appeal. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, called geothermal a key tool to “confront the climate crisis.” Idaho’s GOP Governor Brad Little, meanwhile, said geothermal power “strengthens communities, supports economic growth, and keeps our grid resilient.” If you want to review why geothermal is making a comeback, read this piece by Matthew.
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Yet another pipeline is getting the greenlight. Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved plans for Mountain Valley’s Southgate pipeline, clearing the way for construction. The move to shorten the pipeline’s length from 75 miles down to 31 miles, while increasing the diameter of the project to 30 inches from between 16 and 23 inches, hinged on whether FERC deemed the gas conduit necessary. On Thursday, E&E News reported, FERC said the developers had demonstrated a need for the pipeline stretching from the existing Mountain Valley pipeline into North Carolina.
Last week, I told you about a bill proposed in India’s parliament to reform the country’s civil liability law and open the nuclear industry to foreign companies. In the 2010s, India passed a law designed to avoid another disaster like the 1984 Bhopal chemical leak that killed thousands but largely gave the subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Corporation that was responsible for the accident a pass on payouts to victims. As a result, virtually no foreign nuclear companies wanted to operate in India, lest an accident result in astronomical legal expenses in the country. (The one exception was Russia’s state-owned Rosatom.) In a bid to attract Western reactor companies, Indian lawmakers in both houses of parliament voted to repeal the liability provisions, NucNet reported.
The critically endangered Lesser Antillean iguana has made a stunning recovery on the tiny, uninhabited islet of Prickly Pear East near Anguilla. A population of roughly 10 breeding-aged lizards ballooned to 500 in the past five years. “Prickly Pear East has become a beacon of hope for these gorgeous lizards — and proves that when we give native wildlife the chance, they know what to do,” Jenny Daltry, Caribbean Alliance Director of nature charities Fauna & Flora and Re:wild, told Euronews.
The fourth-generation gas-cooled reactor company ZettaJoule is setting up shop at an unnamed university.
The appeal of next-generation nuclear technology is simple. Unlike the vast majority of existing reactors that use water, so-called fourth-generation units use coolants such as molten salt, liquid metal, or gases that can withstand intense heat such as helium. That allows the machines to reach and maintain the high temperatures necessary to decarbonize industrial processes, which currently only fossil fuels are able to reach.
But the execution requirements of these advanced reactors are complex, making skepticism easy to understand. While the U.S., Germany, and other countries experimented with fourth-generation reactors in earlier decades, there is only one commercial unit in operation today. That’s in China, arguably the leader in advanced nuclear, which hooked up a demonstration model of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to its grid two years ago, and just approved building another project in September.
Then there’s Japan, which has been operating its own high-temperature gas-cooled reactor for 27 years at a government research site in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 90 minutes north of Tokyo by train. Unlike China’s design, it’s not a commercial power reactor. Also unlike China’s design, it’s coming to America.
Heatmap has learned that ZettaJoule, an American-Japanese startup led by engineers who worked on that reactor, is now coming out of stealth and laying plans to build its first plant in Texas.
For months, the company has quietly staffed up its team of American and Japanese executives, including a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission official and a high-ranking ex-administrator from the industrial giant Mitsubishi. It’s now preparing to decamp from its initial home base in Rockville, Maryland, to the Lone Star State as it prepares to announce its debut project at an as-yet-unnamed university in Texas.
“We haven’t built a nuclear reactor in many, many decades, so you have only a handful of people who experienced the full cycle from design to operations,” Mitsuo Shimofuji, ZettaJoule’s chief executive, told me. “We need to complete this before they retire.”
That’s where the company sees its advantage over rivals in the race to build the West’s first commercial high-temperature gas reactor, such as Amazon-backed X-energy or Canada’s StarCore nuclear. ZettaJoule’s chief nuclear office, Kazuhiko Kunitomi, oversaw the construction of Japan’s research reactor in the 1990s. He’s considered Japan’s leading expert in high-temperature gas reactors.
“Our chief nuclear officer and some of our engineers are the only people in the Western world who have experience of the whole cycle from design to construction to operation of a high temperature gas reactor,” Shimofuji said.
Like X-energy’s reactor, ZettaJoule’s design is a small modular reactor. With a capacity of 30 megawatts of thermal output and 12 megawatts of electricity, the ZettaJoule reactor qualifies as a microreactor, a subcategory of SMR that includes anything 20 megawatts of electricity or less. Both companies’ reactors will also run on TRISO, a special kind of enriched uranium with cladding on each pellet that makes the fuel safer and more efficient at higher temperatures.
While X-energy’s debut project that Amazon is financing in Washington State is a nearly 1-gigawatt power station made up of at least a dozen of the American startup’s 80-megawatt reactors, ZettaJoule isn’t looking to generate electricity.
The first new reactor in Texas will be a research reactor, but the company’s focus is on producing heat. The reactor already working in Japan, which produces heat, demonstrates that the design can reach 950 degrees Celsius, roughly 25% higher than the operating temperature of China’s reactor.
The potential for use in industrial applications has begun to attract corporate partners. In a letter sent Monday to Ted Garrish, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy in charge of nuclear power — a copy of which I obtained — the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian oil goliath Aramco urged the Trump administration to support ZettaJoule, and said that it would “consider their application to our operations” as the technology matures. ZettaJoule is in talks with at least two other multinational corporations.
The first new reactor ZettaJoule builds won’t be identical to the unit in Japan, Shimofuji said.
“We are going to modernize this reactor together with the Japanese and U.S. engineering partners,” he said. “The research reactor is robust and solid, but it’s over-engineered. What we want to do is use the safety basis but to make it more economic and competitive.”
Once ZettaJoule proves its ability to build and operate a new unit in Texas, the company will start exporting the technology back to Japan. The microreactor will be its first product line.
“But in the future, we can scale up to 20 times bigger,” Shimofuji said. “We can do 600 megawatts thermal and 300 megawatts electric.”
Another benefit ZettaJoule can tap into is the sweeping deal President Donald Trump brokered with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in October, which included hundreds of billions of dollars for new reactors of varying sizes, including the large-scale Westinghouse AP1000. That included financing to build GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt BWRX-300, one of the West’s leading third-generation SMRs, which uses a traditional water-cooled design.
Unlike that unit, however, ZettaJoule’s micro-reactor is not a first-of-a-kind technology, said Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF.
“It’s operated in Japan for a long, long time,” he told me. “So that second-of-a-kind is an attractive feature. Some of these companies have never operated a reactor. This one has done that.”
A similar dynamic almost played out with large-scale reactors more than two decades ago. In the late 1990s, Japanese developers built four of GE and Hitachi’s ABWR reactor, a large-scale unit with some of the key safety features that make the AP1000 stand out compared to its first- and second-generation predecessors. In the mid 2000s, the U.S. certified the design and planned to build a pair in South Texas. But the project never materialized, and America instead put its resources into Westinghouse’s design.
But the market is different today. Electricity demand is surging in the near term from data centers and in the long term from electrification of cars and industry. The need to curb fossil fuel consumption in the face of worsening climate change is more widely accepted than ever. And China’s growing dominance over nuclear energy has rattled officials from Tokyo to Washington.
“We need to deploy this as soon as possible to not lose the experienced people in Japan and the U.S.,” Shimofuji said. “In two or three years time, we will get a construction permit ideally. We are targeting the early 2030s.”
If every company publicly holding itself to that timeline is successful, the nuclear industry will be a crowded field. But as history shows, those with the experience to actually take a reactor from paper to concrete may have an advantage.
