You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
“People talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming.”
Donald Trump is slipping. I don’t mean in the polls (although he’s slipping there, too), but he’s slipping where it really matters: branding.
Dismiss Trump and his gold Stymie Extra Bold font as tacky and tasteless if you want, but you can’t claim that the namesake behind Trump Ice, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, and the Trump footlong hotdog doesn’t know how to make something stick. He arguably won the 2016 Republican primary on the power of branding his opponents as Low Energy, Lyin’, Little, and Crooked — but lately, his heart hasn’t seemed in it. I mean, “Kamabla”? Come on.
Still, sometimes you can see flashes of his former self, such as last night when Trump appeared in a “conversation” with Elon Musk on Twitter, the social media platform now a year into its own rocky rebrand as X. Musk’s justification for the call was to give listeners “a feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation” in a non-adversarial setting (as if Trump doesn’t do friendly media appearances all the time). But the lengthy, wide-ranging interview also offered a decent opportunity to hear Trump speak about policy without the usual teleprompter.
That included some of Trump’s newly Musk-friendly thoughts about climate.In addition to spouting some seriously dubious emissions science — Bill McKibben dubbed their two-hour chat “the Dumbest Climate Conversation of All Time” — Trump and Musk also touched on the problems facing the buildout of nuclear energy.
Here is the relevant part of the conversation (I’ve omitted some of the exchange in brackets, but you can read the whole 61-page transcript here if you like):
Trump: You know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that's very dangerous. [...]
Musk: Yeah, and actually, there’s the bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s also, I think — nuclear electricity generation is underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation. [...]
Trump: Maybe they’ll have to change the name. The name is just, it’s a rough name. There are some areas, like when you see what happened — bad branding, the branding problem. We’ll have to rebrand it. We’ll have to give it a good name. We’ll name it after you or something.
Let’s say right off the bat, they are getting into some real stuff here. Nuclear war is, indeed, “very bad”! To give Trump credit on the branding front, too, “nuclear warming” is a pretty creative way of saying “a mass detonation of atomic bombs that ends all life on Earth.” (And possibly a clever play on nuclear winter.)
Perhaps more importantly, though, nuclear is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. is generally considered crucial to balancing out intermittent renewables as the grid decarbonizes and electricity demand blows up. Talking about nuclear in a serious way will be important — which is tricky if you buy that it has “a rough name.”
Not everybody does, of course. Bloomberg’s Steve Hou disputed Trump’s theory (on Musk’s X, no less), “Nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. It has a NIMBY problem that everyone’s ok with it in theory as long as the nuclear plant’s in someone else’s neighborhood.” Most Americans support nuclear power — more than offshore oil and gas drilling, fracking, or coal mining. It’s the rare issue both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
But that doesn’t mean nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. Why else would Americans not want a nuclear plant in their backyard if not for anxiety about radiation (or, relatedly, the Soviet unsightliness of cooling towers)? Trump went on in his conversation with Musk to cite the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan and, seemingly, Chernobyl (“in Russia, where they had a problem, where they, you know, a lot of bad things happened”) as the reasons why Americans are, in his opinion, rightfully jittery about nuclear energy.
Musk pushed back on Trump’s examples, asserting that nuclear energy is “not as scary as people think” and that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re, like, full cities again.” Seeing as Musk mostly just let Trump say stuff during their conversation, his moment of objection is telling: Trump’s distrust of nuclear energy suggests possible policy implications that people on the right might not like. (Trump has expressed far more enthusiasm, however, for building up our nuclear arsenal.)
Many in climate communications or the nuclear industry have thought long and hard about how to make nuclear energy more palatable to the public, with strategies ranging from creating imagery invoking the atom (rather than the more obvious and ominous hourglass-shaped cooling tower) to hiring Miss America as an industry advocate. Last fall, John Marshall, the CEO and founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, explained on a podcast that his group had found the term “new nuclear” tests as less intimidating to the public.
So sure, we may need something like a Reddy Kilowatt of nuclear energy to improve messaging. That’s where Trump’s creativity runs out, though. As Heatmap’s own polling suggests, rebranding nuclear power as “Musk power” will probably not help.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.