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Experts explain what you can do about the smoke engulfing the East Coast and Midwest.
Canadian wildfire smoke has descended upon large swaths of the Midwest and Eastern United States this week, and as of publication tens of millions of Americans are living under air quality alerts warning them not to go outside. As my colleague Jeva Lange writes, the air in New York City today is reminiscent of a time before the Clean Air Act existed.
Wildfires, for the most part, have historically been the purview of the West; East Coasters, accustomed to hurricanes and blizzards, have mostly managed to avoid the fallout from forest fires. That’s not quite so true anymore, and this week’s smoke is a likely preview of how things will work in the future. So how should people react when smoke makes its way to their cities?
To find out, I called up two doctors from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science; and Kimberly Humphrey, an emergency physician and a fellow at the school’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. I spoke separately to Dominici and Humphrey; our conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.
Dominici: I think the way to think about it is not to be overly panicking, but maybe it’s a day to not spend hours outside exercising. For people that have compromised immune systems or existing respiratory or cardiovascular diseases, it would be good to limit outdoor exposure as much as possible. So don't panic but be cautious.
Humphrey: Smoke from wildfires is a complex mixture of things. The thing about wildfires is they can burn anything. If a house is burning, for example, you have really complex mixtures of whatever is in that house that’s going into the air.
The one that we really worry about is the fine particles, which are known as PM 2.5 (i.e. particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They’re very little particles that people breathe in which have really significant impacts on heart and lung function, particularly in people who have chronic health conditions. But the impacts are still significant for people who are healthy previously and have no underlying health problems. It can cause coughing, wheezing, difficulty breathing, eye irritation, and short-term issues with lung function, even in people who don’t have any previous problems with their lungs.
Dominici: It’s not like walking by, for example, a construction site. You can see that dust, and those are not small particles. Those are coarse particles that make you cough or sneeze or bring tears to your eyes. That’s actually good, because you’re basically filtering them out. But these small particles, you don’t feel them. They penetrate very deep into the lungs, and then they cause inflammation that makes our immune response less effective.
Dominici: We know that these exposures to high-level fine particulate matter have both an immediate effect and a very acute effect. So we see an increase in, for example, hospital admissions, which go up the same day and the day after. But there have also been lots of studies that have documented that this effect can last for a very long time. We see chronic effects including effects on cognitive function like an exacerbation of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Humphrey: The first thing we would say is stay inside, shut your windows, stay away from the smoke, maybe buy an air purifier, exercise indoors.
But one of the tricky things with giving this kind of advice is that wildfire smoke affects people who are from disadvantaged socioeconomic communities more predominantly. And those are often the people that can't do the things that we would recommend to protect their health. For instance, many people have to go out to work or may be sleeping rough or have housing insecurity, and they don't have access to well-structured houses that protect them against wildfire smoke. So there's a real inequity there about the ability for people to follow the advice to keep themselves safe.
Dominici: You can totally take your dog for a walk or your kid to the playground, but if your child has asthma that’s something to watch out for. Maybe don’t spend hours outside, and make sure you have their asthma medications. People with pre-existing conditions should contact their primary-care physicians and discuss if they should potentially change their medication dosage to make sure their exposure to smoke doesn’t exacerbate whatever problem they have.
Humphrey: We’re seeing health impacts at levels below what the EPA recommends as safe levels of PM 2.5 exposure, so when our apps say “sensitive people” it’s probably actually a message for all of us. It’s important, I think, for people who call themselves healthy to understand that you can be a marathon runner and any exposure to wildfire smoke is going to have some kind of impact on you.
Humphrey: It’s very similar to COVID, so cloth masks and surgical masks offer some protection, they’re better than nothing, but they’re not as good as N95 masks. We’d recommend a really high-quality mask like an N95 because it does filter out those very, very tiny particles and offers really good protection.
Humphrey: I think we have the tools. What’s missing is education. So many people have access to air quality data, it’s on an app or on the internet, but they need more education about what to do with it. I’m very, very concerned with the socioeconomic inequities in particular. It’s a lot of the same issues as COVID: All of these issues are really, really hard to solve but are part of this whole piece.
Dominici: In a certain way, COVID has been a wake-up call. We are much more cautious about what’s in our air. I think it’s always important to keep in mind that when we’re talking about the health effects, we have to really understand that they’re a manifestation of the climate crisis. It’s not something we’re going to see in the future. It’s something that’s happening right now.
Read more about wildfire smoke:
The World's Wildfire Models Are Getting Torched
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy fights.
1. Jefferson County, New York – Two solar projects have been stymied by a new moratorium in the small rural town of Lyme in upstate New York.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The Delaware legislature is intervening after Sussex County rejected the substation for the offshore MarWin wind project.
3. Clark County, Indiana – A BrightNight solar farm is struggling to get buy-in within the southern region of Indiana despite large 650-foot buffer zones.
4. Tuscola County, Michigan – We’re about to see an interesting test of Michigan’s new permitting primacy law.
5. Marion County, Illinois – It might not work every time, but if you pay a county enough money, it might let you get a wind farm built.
6. Renville County Minnesota – An administrative law judge has cleared the way for Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project in southwest Minnesota.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – I have learned this county is now completely banning new wind and solar projects from getting permits.
8. Fresno County, California – The Golden State has approved its first large-scale solar facility using the permitting overhaul it passed in 2022, bypassing local opposition to the project. But it’s also prompting a new BESS backlash.
A conversation with Robb Jetty, CEO of REC Solar, about how the developer is navigating an uncertain environment.
This week I chatted with REC Solar CEO Robb Jetty, who reached out to me through his team after I asked for public thoughts from renewables developers about their uncertain futures given all the action in Congress around the Inflation Reduction Act. Jetty had a more optimistic tone than I’ve heard from other folks, partially because of the structure of his business – which is actually why I wanted to include his feelings in this week’s otherwise quite gloomy newsletter.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Shall we?
To start, how does it feel to be developing solar in this uncertain environment around the IRA?
There’s a lot of media out there that’s oftentimes trying to interpret something that’s incredibly complex and legalese to begin with, so it’s difficult to really know what the exact impacts are in the first place or what the macroeconomic impacts would be from the policy shifts that would happen from the legislation being discussed right now.
But I’ll be honest, the thing I reinforce the most right now with our team is that you cannot argue with solar being the lowest cost form of electrical generation in the United States and it’s the fastest source of power generation to be brought online. So there’s a reason why, regardless of what happens, our industry isn’t going to go away. We’ve dealt with all kinds of policy changes and I’ve been doing this since 2002. We’ve had lots of changes that have been disruptive to the industry.
You can argue some of the things that are being discussed are more disruptive. But there’s lots of things we’ve faced. Even the pandemic and the fallout on inflation and labor. We’ve navigated through hard times before.
What’s been the tangible impact to your business from this uncertainty?
I would say it has shifted our focus. We sell electricity to our customers that are both commercial customers, using that power behind the meter and on site for their own facilities, or we’re selling electricity to utilities, or virtually through the grid. Right now we’ve shifted some of our strategy toward the acquisition of operating assets instead of buying projects from other developers that could be more impacted by the uncertainty or have economics that are more sensitive to the timing and uncertainty that could come out of the policy. It’s had an impact on our business but, back to my earlier comment, the industry is so big at this point that we’re seeing lots of opportunity for us to provide value to an investor.
As a company that works in different forms of solar development – from small-scale utility to commercial to community solar – do you see any changes in terms of what projects are developed if what’s in the House bill becomes law?
I’m not seeing anything at the moment.
I think most of the activity I’ve been involved in is waiting for this to settle. The disruption is the volatile nature, the uncertainty. We need certainty. Any business needs certainty to plan and operate effectively. But I’m honestly not seeing anything that’s having that impact right now in terms of where investment is flowing, whether its utility scale to the smaller behind-the-meter commercial scale we support in certain markets.
We are seeing it in the residential side of the solar industry. Those are more concerning, because you only have a short amount of time to claim the [investment tax credit] ITC for a residential system.
The company is well-positioned to take advantage of Trump’s nuclear policies, include his goal of installing a microreactor on a military base within the next few years.
At one point during his 12-year stint at SpaceX, Doug Bernauer turned his attention to powering a Martian colony with nuclear microreactors. Naturally, these would also fuel the rocket ships that could shuttle Mars-dwellers to and from Earth as needed. Then he had an epiphany.“I quickly realized that yes, nuclear power could help humanity become multiplanetary in the long term, but it could also transform life on Earth right now,” Bernauer wrote in 2023.
As nuclear power reemerges as a prominent player in the U.S. energy conversation, its potential to help drive a decarbonized future has crystallized into a rare bipartisan point of consensus. Radiant Nuclear, the Earth-based microreactor company that Bernauer founded after leaving SpaceX in 2019, is well positioned to take advantage of that, as its value proposition might as well be tailor-made for the Trump administration’s priorities
The startup’s aim is to make highly portable 1-megawatt reactors that can replace off-grid power sources such as diesel generators, which are ubiquitous in remote areas such as military bases. It’s fresh off a $165 million Series C funding round, with plans to begin commercial deployment in 2028. That aligns neatly with Trump’s recently announced goal of deploying a reactor on a military base by the same year. It’s an opportunity that Radiant Chief Operating Officer Tori Shivanandan told me the company is uniquely well-suited to take advantage of.
“A diesel generator that operates at 1 megawatt you have to refill with diesel about every three to five days,” Shivanandan explained. That means having regular access to both fuel and the generator itself, “and that’s just not reliable in many locations.” The company says its reactors only need refueling only every five years.
Radiant’s goal is to be cost competitive with generators in far flung locales — not just military bases, but also distant mines, rural towns, oil and gas drilling operations, and smaller, more dispersed data centers. “A customer who’s on the North Slope of Alaska, they might pay $11 or $12 a gallon for diesel,” Shivanandan told me. That’s a price she said Radiant could definitely compete with.
“The military’s interest in microreactors has been coming for quite a long time,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at the venture firm DCVC told me. The firm led Radiant’s Series C round. Some of Radiant’s appeal is “right place, right time,” she said. “Some of it is putting in a lot of work over a long time to make it the right place, right time.”
Trump’s recent nuclear-related executive orders also have Shivanandan and her team over the moon. As the administration looks to streamline nuclear licensing and buildouts, one order explicitly calls for establishing a process for the “high-volume licensing of microreactors and modular reactors,” which includes “standardized applications and approvals.” These orders, Shivanandan told me, will keep Radiant on track to start selling by 2028, and set the stage for the company’s rapid scale up.
Alongside DCVC, the company's latest round included funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s “American Dynamism” team, Union Square Ventures, and Founders Fund. This raise, Shivanandan told me, will cover Radiant’s expenses as it builds out its prototype reactor, which it plans to test at Idaho National Lab next year. It will be the first fueled operation of a brand new reactor design in 50 years, she said.
“My perspective is the bigger reactors are important and interesting, and there are a lot of great companies, but they’re not a very good fit for venture investing, Slaybaugh told me. “We like microreactors, because they just need so much less capital and so much less time.”
That potential buildout speed also means that even as the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits look poised for a major haircut, Radiant may still be able to benefit from them. In the latest version of the budget bill, nuclear projects are only eligible for credits if they begin construction by 2029 — a tall order for the many startups that likely won’t start building in earnest until the 2030s. But if all goes according to plan, that’s a timeline Radiant could work with — at least for its initial reactors, which would be the most expensive and thus most in need of credits anyway.
The company aims to reach economies of scale relatively quickly, with a goal of building 50 reactors per year at a yet-to-be-constructed factory by the mid 2030s. The modular design means Radiant can deploy multiple 1-megawatt reactors to facilities with greater power needs. But if a customer wants more than 10 or so megawatts, Radiant recommends they look to microreactors’ larger cousins, the so-called small modular reactors. Companies developing these include Last Energy, which makes 20-megawatt reactors, as well as NuScale, Kairos, and X-energy, which aim to build plants ranging from 150 megawatts to 960 megawatts in size.
While it could take one of these SMR companies years to fully install its reactors, Radiant’s shipping container-sized products are not designed to be permanent pieces of infrastructure. After being trucked onsite, the company says its reactors can be switched on the following day. Then, after about 20 years of continuous operation, they’ll be carried away and the site easily returned to greenfield, since there was no foundation dug or concrete poured to begin with.
This April, the Department of Defense selected Radiant as one of eight eligible companies for the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations Program. The winner(s) will design and build microreactors on select military installations to “provide mission readiness through energy resilience” and produce “enough electrical power to meet 100 percent of all critical loads,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit’s website.
Also on this list was the nuclear company Oklo, which counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman among its primary backers and went public last year. This Wednesday, the Air Force announced its intent to enter into a power purchase agreement with the company to build a pilot reactor on a base in Alaska. The reactor will reportedly produce up to 5 megawatts of power, though Oklo’s full-scale reactors are set to be 75 megawatts. Whether the military will opt to contract with other nuclear companies is still an open question.
Perhaps more meaningful, though, is the show of support Radiant recently gained from the Department of Energy, which selected it as one of five companies to receive a conditional commitment for a type of highly enriched uranium known as HALEU that’s critical for small, next-generation reactors. Much of this fuel came from Russia before Biden banned Russian uranium imports last year, in a belated response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine and an attempt to shore up the domestic nuclear supply chain.
America’s supply of HALEU is still scarce, though, and as such, Shivanandan considers the DOE’s fuel commitment to be the biggest vote of confidence Radiant has received from the government so far. The other companies selected to receive fuel are TRISO-X (a subsidiary of X-energy), Kairos Power, TerraPower, and Westinghouse, all of which have been around longer — the majority a decade or more longer — than Radiant.
Though the company is currently focused on Earth, Radiant hasn’t completely abandoned its interplanetary dreams. “We do believe that, should you want to colonize Mars and also create the environment in which you could refuel your rocket and send it back, then you would need 1-megawatt nuclear reactors,” Shivanandan told me. Anything larger might be too heavy to put in a rocket.
Good to know.