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Nuclear

New Jersey and electricity.
Energy

New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About  Electricity Prices

Though high costs have become central to the upcoming election, they’re mostly out of the state’s control.

Energy

How the Loan Programs Office Became the Energy Dominance Financing Office

In a press conference about the newly recast program’s first loan guarantee, Energy Secretary Chris Wright teased his project finance philosophy.

Politics

The Fiscal Contradictions of Trump’s Energy Policy

The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.

Ideas

China Can’t Decide if It Wants to Be the World’s First ‘Electrostate’

The country’s underwhelming new climate pledge is more than just bad news for the world — it reveals a serious governing mistake.

Chris Wright.

What Is Going On With Chris Wright’s Twitter?

You might even call the Energy Secretary ... Chris Wrong.

Atomic AI.

An AI Startup for Nuclear Developers Just Raised $10.5 Million

The company, Nuclearn, aims to speed development and licensing processes with the help of a specially trained large language model.

Podcast

Shift Key Summer School: How Do Power Markets Work?

Jesse gives Rob a lesson in marginal generation, inframarginal rent, and electricity supply curves.

Power lines.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

Most electricity used in America today is sold on a wholesale power market. These markets are one of the most important institutions structuring the modern U.S. energy economy, but they’re also not very well understood, even in climate nerd circles. And after all: How would you even run a market for something that’s used at the second it’s created — and moves at the speed of light?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key Summer School, Rob and Jesse talk about how electricity finds a price and how modern power markets work. Why run a power market in the first place? Who makes the most money in power markets? How do you encourage new power plants to get built? And what do power markets mean for renewables?

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Energy

The Nuclear Power Dealmaking Boom Is Real

Thank data center developers and, yes, Trump.

A nuclear power plant.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.

“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”

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