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Now it’s coming closer. On Tuesday, KHNP inked a memorandum of understanding with the nuclear division of U.S. utility giant Southern Company to work together on engineering atomic power stations. It’s not a financing deal. Signed at KHNP’s headquarters in Gyeongju, the companies said the partnership would involve technology exchanges, workshops, and sharing best practices. “This agreement is expected to serve as an opportunity for KHNP engineers to expand their horizons globally and provide a growth chance for the domestic engineering system to take a leap forward,” Kim Young-seung, the head of KHNP’s engineering division, World Nuclear News. “We will continue to do our utmost to complete the Korean-style engineering system through close cooperation with overseas operators and international organisations.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with a new way to speed up construction of data centers, power plants, and other industrial facilities: Let them start building before they obtain required federal air permits. The proposal would “bring flexibility to building non-emitting components or structures,” including cement pads and wiring, piping, and support structures. “Today’s proposal works to provide solutions to issues that have held up critical American infrastructure and advance the next great technological forefront,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. “Through commonsense permitting reform, the Trump EPA is fixing the broken system of government interference, while continuing to uphold our core mission to protect human health and the environment.”
Surging demand and shortages of raw materials are pushing lead times for high-capacity electrical transformers to as long as four years, PricewaterhouseCooper analysts said at a Reuters event this week. Demand for step-up transformers, which increase the voltage of electricity as it travels across power lines, increased by 274% between 2019 and 2025, while demand for substation transformers soared by 116%. Prices for essential components, meanwhile, have jumped by roughly 80% in five years. As a result, according to PV magazine, some firms are now paying premiums for production slots on projects that aren’t even finalized yet, while others buy refurbished as a stopgap until newer units arrive.
Transformers aren’t the only grid equipment attracting investment. Just this morning, TS Conductor, a manufacturer of advanced conductors that can bolster the capacity of existing power lines, announced the grand opening of its newest factory in South Carolina. The $134 million facility is now “poised to strengthen U.S. domestic supply chains as utilities work toward building a stronger, higher-capacity, more-efficient power grid — all with the speed that American industry needs and the affordability that American ratepayers deserve,” the company said.
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The Trump administration has removed the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, replacing the political appointee with a 30-year agency veteran who held senior positions in several previous administrations. On Tuesday, E&E News reported that the exit of Karen Evans, a political appointee put in charge of the embattled agency in December, would be the third such departure since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Her temporary replacement as acting administrator is Robert Fenton, who began work as a regional administrator in 1996 and held the acting chief job twice under the first Trump and Biden administrations — for six months in 2017 and four months in 2021. “I know this year has been challenging for many across the agency,” Fenton wrote in a staff memo Tuesday, a copy of which the newswire obtained.
FEMA has struggled under Trump. As I told you last summer, the agency cracked down aggressively on internal dissent from staffers. Meanwhile, the funding shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA is housed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “starved” local disaster responses, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported in February..
Alsym Energy, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last year, “thinks it can break the U.S. battery manufacturing curse.” And not just by besting the incumbents already producing the market’s lithium-ion packs, but actually commercializing a whole new type of battery chemistry that instead relies on cheaper and far more abundant sodium as the main energy carrier. On Tuesday, the Massachusetts-headquartered startup inked a deal with the renewable developer Juniper Energy to deploy 500 megawatt-hours of Alsym’s battery systems in California. The deal, the companies said in a press release, “marks a significant shift away from fire-prone lithium-ion dependencies, prioritizing safety, domestic production, and operational efficiency in some of the United States’ most demanding climates.”
Star Catcher transfers energy down Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility to commercial off-the-shelf solar panels commonly found on spacecraft. Star Catcher Industries
If you thought building batteries or transformers was tricky, how about an electricity distribution network in space? That’s what Star Catcher Industries is promising to do. The Jacksonville, Florida-based startup said Tuesday it had raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series A round. The investment — led by venture capital firms B Capital, Shield Capital, and Cerberus Ventures — brings Star Catcher’s total capital raised so far to $88 million. Founded less than two years ago, the company is developing space-based infrastructure that can deliver electricity on demand to satellites and spacecraft using optical power beaming, a wireless technology involving high-intensity laser light. “This investment underscores the conviction that orbital infrastructure is now as fundamental as terrestrial infrastructure,” Andrew Rush, co-founder and chief executive of Star Catcher, said in a statement. “Every major application driving the space economy — connectivity, computing, security, sensing — is power-limited today. Star Catcher is lifting that ceiling — making it possible to build in orbit at the scale the next century of life on Earth will demand.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the location of Terrapower’s isotope plant.
The biggest natural gas-producing region in the United States isn’t in Texas. It isn’t in the oil-rich Dakotas either. It’s abutting the densely populated Northeast, in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Yet neighboring New England is the country’s largest destination for liquified natural gas imports arriving by tanker. Why bring in costly gas, often produced overseas, to the deepwater port in Massachusetts Bay, when American-made molecules are drilled just a few hundred miles away? Because, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has previously reported, there isn’t enough pipeline infrastructure to affordably pump gas from Pennsylvania into New York or New England, thanks in large part to policies from Democratic governors to halt pipeline infrastructure in the name of fighting climate change, even as the Northeast’s dependence on gas-fired electricity grew. That may soon change. Williams Companies broke ground on a new gas pipeline expansion in New York last month. Now the Calgary-based pipeline giant Enbridge is planning to extend the Algonquin Gas Transmission line, the company told the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, according to unnamed official cited by E&E News. It’s unclear when more details are due out, but Democratic governors that previously opposed pipelines are already signaling an openness to the infrastructure.
Oil exports from Alaska, meanwhile, are increasing as Asian buyers seek options for crude that don’t rely on passing the still mostly closed Strait of Hormuz. On Monday evening, Northern Journal reported that two tankers had departed the Alaskan port of Valdez for Asia in recent weeks. That’s the same number of crude shipments to Asia in all of 2025.
Another day, another large-scale Hualong One reactor begins construction in China. Crews poured the first major concrete for the fourth reactor at the Taipingling nuclear plant in Huizhou, in China’s southern Guangdong province. It’s the fourth of six Hualong Ones, Beijing’s flagship gigawatt-scale pressurized water reactor, planned at the site. Russia, meanwhile, remains so determined to move forward on international exports of its own gigawatt-sized pressurized water reactors that the Kremlin’s state-owned nuclear company, Rosatom, has said it’s still constructing the second two units at Iran’s first and only atomic power station, despite the ongoing conflict with the U.S. and Israel.
While at least two companies have broken ground on new commercial reactors in the U.S. in recent weeks, the U.S. industry’s most recent headlines offer a different snapshot of where the American atom is at. TerraPower, the Bill Gates-founded next-generation reactor developer that just began construction on its first power plant in Wyoming, has joined other nuclear startups in the race to generate early revenue by manufacturing and selling rare medical isotopes. Back in March, I broke news in this newsletter that the reactor startup Oklo had earned its first Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for a medical isotope facility. Now TerraPower is constructing its first medical isotope plant at a laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the other end of the U.S. industry, Fermi America, the startup founded by former Texas Governor Rick Perry to build a record-breaking data center complex powered by a series of giant Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, is scrambling to save itself from total collapse following the firing of its chief executive officer. In a bid to avert disaster, the company’s second-largest shareholder, the investment firm Caddis Capital, told NucNet it supports Fermi’s attempt to turn things around.
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The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will hold a lease auction for geothermal developers seeking federal land in New Mexico next month. The auction will cover 68 parcels spanning more than 197,000 acres across five counties of a state rich in hot rocks and eager to harvest more energy from underground. So far, the AI-enhanced geothermal startup Zanskar owns a site in New Mexico, and the next-generation company XGS Energy is planning its own 150-megawatt project. The lease sale will take place on June 16 for an hour starting at 10 a.m. ET, per Think GeoEnergy. The auction comes just three months after a new bipartisan bill to boost geothermal was introduced in Congress, as Matthew reported at the time.
Even in countries where the geothermal industry is well developed and generates much of the grid’s electricity, there are limits to how much hot rocks can meet surging demand from data centres. Microsoft had planned to build a $1 billion data center in Kenya to tap into the East African nation’s vast geothermal power network. But this week, Kenyan President William Ruto suspended the deal, which also included the United Arab Emirates-based AI firm G42, over concern that the gigawatt of electricity the data center would demand would devour more than a third of the country’s entire power supply.
The Lower Granite Lock and Dam on Washington’s Snake River.Greg Vaughn /VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Less than a year since the bipartisan Build More Hydro bill stalled in the House after passing the Senate in a unanimous vote, roughly 100 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity have been put on hold, and another 36 megawatts have been forced into limbo. Even more of the U.S. fleet is rapidly approaching a relicensing cliff in the coming years, with an uncertain future as the nation’s oldest and most reliable renewable plants suffer under a byzantine regulatory process that makes dam owners actually envy the notoriously heavily-regulated nuclear sector. Things just got slightly easier for a handful of U.S. hydroelectric plants. On Monday, Trump signed legislation directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to extend construction deadlines for roughly three dozen stations delayed due to the pandemic and supply chain shortages.
“Today’s law is a breakthrough that delivers 2,600 megawatts of clean hydropower and $6.5 billion in private investment critical to powering American homes, businesses, and industries,” Malcolm Woolf, the president of the National Hydropower Association, said in a statement.
Offshore wind may be moving forward in Virginia, but the Trump administration’s assault on the sector has spurred a major waterfront development in Norfolk to pivot away from the seaward turbines and instead double down on shipbuilding. The shift, reported in The Virginian-Pilot, comes after the Trump administration yanked Biden-era funding meant to support the industry. But Richmond isn’t abandoning offshore wind. As I told you the other week, Governor Abigail Spanberger just signed a bill meant to support training and expansion of the state’s offshore wind workforce.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the location of Terrapower’s isotope plant.
