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An age-old tension, resolved.
For as long as I’ve been an energy reporter, I’ve been asked a scoffing question by moderates and conservatives: If Democrats really cared about climate change, shouldn’t they embrace nuclear power?
It’s a fair question. Nuclear energy, after all, can produce vast amounts of electricity without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It already generates more zero-carbon electricity in America than wind turbines and solar panels do combined; unlike renewables, it can provide power all day and night, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The countries that have seen the largest year-over-year drops in carbon pollution — e.g. France — have generally done so by building a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
It’s also a factual question. For years, even as Democrats railed against fossil fuels, they dilly-dallied on nuclear issues. The party’s leaders in statehouses and legislative chambers around the country worked to shut down aging nuclear reactors or approved nuclear-skeptical regulators. President Barack Obama cheered next-generation nuclear in speeches, but appointed extremely nuclear-skeptical regulators to oversee the industry. (One of his first appointees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, has called for a global ban on nuclear energy since leaving the government.)
Even though nuclear reactors produced most of America’s zero-carbon electricity, they remained the, well, glowing-blue-haired step-child of America’s grid: Democrats regularly railed against fossil fuels, and they felt comfortable paying lip service to far-off atomic technologies, but they did not lavish nuclear with the unqualified support that they gave renewables. Instead, they let the nuclear industry slip into senescence. This mild toleration was punctuated by moments of extreme cognitive dissonance, such as when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021 without lining up new zero-carbon generation to replace it — leading the state’s carbon emissions to soar.
Of course, Democrats didn’t have to do much to kill nuclear: At the same time, the market was doing a perfectly good job of it. As cheap natural gas flooded the American energy system in the 2010s, more and more nuclear plants became too expensive to run. From 2012 to 2022, 12 nuclear reactors shut down in the U.S., taking nearly 10,000 megawatts of low-carbon generation offline.
That was the status quo as recently as 2020 or even 2022. And it has remained the status quo in energy commentary. “What role, if any, does [Vice President Kamala Harris] see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans?” asked The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last month, in a column titled “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” At the vice presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee JD Vance even alluded to the argument amid a broader paean to fossil fuels. “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production,” Vance said. “We haven't built a nuclear facility — I think one — in the past 40 years.”
In fact, Vance is wrong: The United States recently turned on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first newly built reactors in America in 30 years. But this idea — Why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors? Why don’t Democrats do more to help nuclear? — has been a throughline of energy punditry since well before Vance was a best-selling author.
So I want to intervene in this conversation and note that the answer has now changed. Democrats are a pro-nuclear party now — not uniformly, but then again, neither are Republicans. Over the past several years, Democratic lawmakers and officials have adopted a slate of aggressively pro-nuclear policies and characterized the technology as pro-climate. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has called for America to build a new wave of conventional nuclear reactors — going much further than Obama ever did. Sometimes working with Republicans — but sometimes working alone, too — Democrats have pushed billions of dollars of support toward conventional nuclear reactors and the nascent advanced nuclear industry.
It’s worth stepping back here and going over what has actually changed.
For the past 10 years at least, both parties have been credibly committed to building up the advanced nuclear industry — the theoretical next generation of nuclear reactors that will be smaller, cleaner, and safer than the behemoths built during the Cold War. During the Trump administration, Congress passed a bipartisan bill meant to push along the advanced nuclear industry. It also passed the Energy Act of 2020, which authorized a demonstration program for advanced nuclear reactors.
The Biden administration has continued this support. The bipartisan infrastructure law created a $6 billion program that would pay existing nuclear power plants to stay open. At least $1.1 billion of that money will go to keeping Diablo Canyon, California’s only operating nuclear facility and its largest power plant, from shutting down; it was originally slated to close in 2025.
Earlier this year, Biden also extended a key program that indemnifies the nuclear industry for the cost of nuclear accidents and disasters above $16.1 billion.
But perhaps the most important nuclear law passed in the past five years is the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate package. For the first time ever, that law embraced the idea of “technology neutrality,” which means that electricity generated by nuclear reactors is now on the same footing as power from wind turbines or solar panels. If a method of electricity generation emits almost no carbon, then the government subsidizes it under the IRA.
The law is already helping restart nuclear reactors that have recently closed such as the Palisades reactor in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The utility giant NextEra is also exploring plans to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which closed in 2020. If those go through, then it will be able to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funding, as well.
Lawmakers from both parties have continued to back advanced nuclear research and deployment. Under Biden, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, containing a hodgepodge of policies meant to help the advanced nuclear industry. Among other changes, it instructs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move faster when approving new reactor designs, and it changes that agency’s mission statement to more affirmatively support nuclear development.
Biden administration officials haven’t just backed that legislation, they’ve also asserted that it will “help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” as Michael Goff, who leads the Energy Department’s nuclear office, bragged in a statement.
The irony is that nuclear plants are now doing well enough that Congress has clawed back some of the money from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The industry, seemingly, doesn’t need it any more, and no additional nuclear reactors have been scheduled to shut down. In 2024, Congress stripped up to $3.7 billion to pay for a program to produce a type of high-assay used in next-generation nuclear reactors.
Democrats have begun to brag about their nuclear policymaking efforts on the campaign trail, as well. In her speech on economic policy earlier this month, Kamala Harris included “advanced nuclear” in a list of technologies that her administration would support.
“We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing,” she said, “so the next generation of breakthroughs — from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear — are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.”
The party’s Senate candidates have become even more positive about nuclear energy. Candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, and Texas have all backed nuclear power, as the reporter Alexander Kaufman at Huffpost has shown.
This transformation has happened even though the big big environmental groups that have historically set the party’s energy priorities have not changed their mind on nuclear. Although many green groups have scaled back or defunded their anti-nuclear activism, their rhetoric remains staunchly anti-nuclear. The Sierra Club calls nuclear power a “uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and states on its website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”
The party’s approach to nuclear hasn’t informed all its policy yet. The Biden administration’s nominations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been criticized by pro-nuclear advocates for continuing the status quo or for not knowing enough about the advanced nuclear industry.
But Democrats are, by any measure, much more pro-nuclear now than they were 10 years ago — and much more pro-nuclear than they were a decade before that. (It’s often forgotten now that President Bill Clinton’s would-be climate policy, the BTU tax, also would have levied a fee on nuclear reactors.) Republicans also remain fairly pro-nuclear: Donald Trump has promised to approve “hundreds of new power plants,” including “new reactors,” during his presidency.
What remains unclear is whether both parties can persist in this new pro-nuclear formation. Nuclear energy is popular with a majority of the public, but only just; 56% of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants, according to the Pew Research Center. And there are signs, if you squint, of a potential coming era of GOP skepticism of nuclear power — part of the party’s broader turn against science and high-trust institutions.
Signs like: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been added to Trump’s transition team, believes that nuclear power is unsafe and uneconomical. Even Trump himself, in conversation with Elon Musk, has worried about “nuclear warming” — it’s not clear what he was talking about, but it might be nuclear war — and said that nuclear has a “branding problem.” Even if Trump continues to support the idea of building “new reactors,” his potentially illegal plan to claw back the Inflation Reduction Act’s unspent funding may lead to pandemonium in the sector. If the nuclear industry is now planning on receiving IRA subsidies, then ending those subsidies — especially in a messy or chaotic way — could spell disaster.
There are identity-driven reasons for Republicans to turn on nuclear, too: The nuclear energy industry is more unionized than any other energy source, and it requires a highly institutionalized and educated workforce. (Yet not all the trends augur a realignment: Nuclear power remains much more popular with men than women.)
For now, though, both parties — including Democrats — support building new nuclear power plants. The economics are good for once, too. The question now is how long that will hold.
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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.