1. An unconventional breakthrough for conventional geothermal energy

When I was in Salt Lake City in August reporting a feature on a lithium project in the Utah desert, I stopped by the offices of the geothermal company Zanskar before my flight home to New York. The company had long stood out to me as promising contrarian amid the next-generation geothermal hype cycle. Unlike companies such as Fervo Energy, Sage Geosystems, or XGS Energy that I’d been writing about recently, Zanskar wasn’t using special drilling strategies or new next-generation technologies to create artificial geothermal reservoirs in hot rocks. Instead, Zanskar was doing conventional geothermal — that is, finding steamy underground pockets of water and harnessing that to make electricity. But the company wasn’t just playing the incumbent industry’s old hits. It was using artificial intelligence to predict where pockets of conventional geothermal resources were located underground. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the industry, the company’s founders believed that there’s a lot more regular geothermal resources out there that we haven’t yet mapped out, both at previously untapped sites and at existing facilities. The most expensive part of building a geothermal plant is drilling lots of holes until you find the right spot. The AI was meant to help with that.

Well, it’s working. As I wrote for Canary Media earlier this month, Zanskar made the largest “blind” geothermal discovery in the United States in more than three decades. (Blind, in this case, is an industry term for a geothermal formation that hasn’t been mapped out before and shows no visible signs on the surface such as vents or geysers.) You can read that story here.

2. New York’s public utility is investing in 5.5 gigawatts of renewables

You may remember when I told you over the summer about the New York Power Authority’s plan to build the Empire State’s first new nuclear station in a generation. The legal mandate the largest government-owned utility in the U.S. after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority used to justify the investment came from a bill passed in the 2023 state budget that allowed NYPA to take majority ownership stakes in renewable energy projects. On Tuesday, NYPA finalized its plans for its portfolio of solar, wind, and battery projects.

As I wrote last night for Canary Media:

In a unanimous decision, the board of trustees voted to greenlight the utility’s new strategic plan for renewables. Though the 5.5 GW figure is an increase over the utility’s initial plan, released this January, it also represents a reduction from the 7 GW draft plan NYPA unveiled over the summer.

The utility blamed the slimmer target on private renewable-energy developers pulling out of 16 joint ventures. Activists, however, accused NYPA of dropping projects to boost plans for new fossil-fuel infrastructure recently approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat.

The 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act requires New York to generate 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and the rest of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. It’s one of the most ambitious decarbonization goals in the country, but the state is lagging behind on meeting its legally mandated benchmarks in virtually every category of clean power except for distributed energy sources that include rooftop solar.

Today, natural-gas-fired power stations provide about half New York’s electricity. Aging hydroelectric stations, backed up by additional dams in Canada, provide nearly one-quarter of the state’s power, closely followed by nuclear reactors from plants upstate. Solar and wind each account for only a single-digit share of the state’s power mix, below the U.S.-wide share and far below that of California, Texas, and other states.

You can read that full story here.

3. The former CEO of bankrupt Sunnova returns to solar with a ‘AAA for rooftop repairs’

Over the summer, the solar installer Sunnova went bankrupt, leaving purported former customers complaining on Reddit that the bankrupt company “is not offering the service of removing and reinstalling their own panels.” Well, Sunnova’s founder and chief executive John Berger has returned to the industry to do just that.

As I wrote in an exclusive for Latitude Media:

In September, he licensed the name Otovo from an eponymous Norwegian startup that has built a business across 13 European countries providing round-the-clock maintenance service to customers with solar panels, batteries, and generators in need of repair. Like many U.S. drivers do with AAA, these customers pay a subscription fee for speedy fixes.

Tomorrow, Latitude Media has learned, the Texas-based U.S. company is set to merge with its sister firm in Oslo. Berger will serve as CEO of the trans-Atlantic company, which is publicly traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange and plans to eventually dually list on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ.

“At Sunnova, I was always focused on service,” Berger told Latitude Media in the lead-up to the merger’s announcement. “If you go back and look at earnings calls, I looked at the new build market and financing as ways of getting service customers.”

In the solar industry, “everyone else viewed it the opposite,” he said. “They wanted new builds and financing but had to deal with service. As a result, you had a service problem — and hence a reputation problem in the industry.” At Otovo, Berger added, they’re “going to keep financing out of it.”

Berger told me he expects a lot more solar companies to go bankrupt, meaning there will be many more customers looking for help managing their rooftop units.

In Europe, solar companies are going bankrupt after the war in Ukraine drove up electricity prices that sent demand surging, only to fall again as interest rates climbed, household purchasing power fell, and the power price spike eased. Meanwhile, in the U.S. the market has struggled with what Berger characterized as “the policy whipsaw.” The U.S. industry outlook could change yet again if Democrats take back Congress in next year’s midterm election, or when Trump leaves office in 2028.

“That doesn’t really matter to us though,” Berger said. To meet his target of a quarter-million customers in the next three years, “business can be extremely slow,” as he only needs a tiny sliver of the tens of millions of households whose panels and batteries could need service.

“What’s the risk? Things stop breaking?” Berger added with a laugh. “Pretty sure that’s not going to happen.”

You can read that full story here.

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Signing off a chilly Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the New York City ferry system has finally established a direct route to Staten Island — meaning that if you want to ride our bikes there, we no longer have to drive them across the bridge or schlep into Manhattan to take the Staten Island Ferry. Very cool.

Hydrogen is a rainbow. There’s green hydrogen, the version of the fuel made by zapping water with enough electricity generated by renewables to separate a hydrogen molecule from the oxygen. There’s pink hydrogen, basically the same thing except made with electricity produced from nuclear reactors, a distinction that only committed anti-nuclear activists would really care to draw. Then there’s gray hydrogen, the most common version of the fuel that comes from separating out the hydrogen from methane, better known as natural gas, in a process that produces plenty of planet-heating emissions.

Given that the gray stuff makes the vast majority of the world’s supply, blue hydrogen — the type of H2 made the traditional way except with carbon capture equipment to keep the emissions from entering the atmosphere — could represent one of the more promising alternative methods for making the fuel. That seemed particularly true as the Trump administration cuts back on funding for green hydrogen experiments.

But in my latest piece for Canary Media, I explain how blue hydrogen is facing many of the same problems as the green hydrogen industry. The story revolves around Exxon Mobil’s cancellation of what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production facilities in Baytown, Texas.

“Exxon’s decision reflects a broader reality: Large-scale hydrogen projects depend on long-term market signals, stable policy environments, and customers ready to commit,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, the founder and executive director of the United States Hydrogen Alliance, an industry group. ​“These dynamics take time to mature.”

But it’s not just the Energy Department’s decision to shutter its Industrial Demonstrations Program, which had given Exxon Mobil the grant, and the cuts to the 45V federal tax credits, which support low-carbon hydrogen production, that have put the industry on shaky ground.

Trump administration moves have also undermined demand for low-carbon hydrogen. In October, the U.S. government thwarted an effort at the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization to put a price on carbon emissions from the shipping sector, pressuring foreign delegates to back off a proposal that would have expanded the market for low-carbon hydrogen.

Then there were some problems for blue hydrogen specifically:

Late last month, the European Parliament passed legislation outlining rules for low-carbon hydrogen that require producers to demonstrate not only that carbon capture equipment catches at least 70% of emissions but also ​“pretty rigorous accounting of upstream methane leakage,” according to Pete Budden of the Natural Resources Defense Council. A study published last year in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy found that carbon-capture equipment could reduce emissions by 60%, below the threshold set in the European Union law.

“Based on the work we’ve done tracking emissions from blue hydrogen, it’s going to be really tough for U.S. hydrogen producers to meet that reduction with fossil fuels and [carbon capture and storage],” said Budden, the lead hydrogen advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. ​“It’s a really ambitious emissions reduction because you need a really, really high capture rate, and you need to minimize all your upstream leakage.”

Here’s yet another data point: British oil giant BP announced today it was pulling out of a blue hydrogen project in England.

I’m particularly pleased with the kicker on this Canary Media story, so be sure to check out the whole thing. You can read the full story here.

In September, I broke news in Latitude Media about Atomic Canyon’s deal with the Idaho National Laboratory to work on national standards for assessing how well AI software served nuclear.

In a new exclusive for Heatmap this morning, I reported that the startup has now inked an agreement to take its work global with the International Atomic Energy Agency:

On Wednesday, Atomic Canyon is set to announce a partnership with the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to begin cataloging the United Nations nuclear watchdog’s data and laying the groundwork for global standards of how AI software can be used in the industry.

“We’re going to start building proof of concepts and models together, and we’re going to build a framework of what the opportunities and use cases are for AI,” Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s chief executive, told me on a call from his hotel room in Vienna, Austria, where the IAEA is headquartered.

The memorandum of understanding between the company and the UN agency is at an early stage, so it’s as yet unclear what international standards or guidelines could look like.

In the U.S., Atomic Canyon began making inroads earlier this year with a project backed by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the Electric Power Research Institute to create a virtual assistant for nuclear workers.

In the piece, I noted that AI for nuclear has been booming this year:

Atomic Canyon isn’t the only company applying AI to nuclear power. Last month, nuclear giant Westinghouse unveiled new software it’s designing with Google to calculate ways to bring down the cost of key components in reactors by millions of dollars. The Nuclear Company, a startup developer that’s aiming to build fleets of reactors based on existing designs, announced a deal with the software behemoth Palantir to craft the software equivalent of what the companies described as an “Iron Man suit,” able to swiftly pull up regulatory and blueprint details for the engineers tasked with building new atomic power stations.

Lauderdale doesn’t see that as competition.

“All of that, I view as complementary,” he said.

“There is so much wood to chop in the nuclear power space, the amount of work from an administrative perspective regarding every inch of the nuclear supply chain, from how we design reactors to how we license reactors, how we regulate to how we do environmental reviews, how we construct them to how we maintain,” he added. “Every aspect of the nuclear power life cycle is going to be transformed. There’s no way one company alone could come in and say, we have a magical approach. We’re going to need multiple players.”

Go over to Heatmap to read the entire piece, which — if I may be so bold — has much pithier lede than the one I used for this newsletter. You can read the full story here.

Electricity demand in the U.S. is growing so quickly that the consultancy BloombergNEF this week raised its forecast by nearly 40% over its prediction from just seven months ago, as I covered in my Heatmap newsletter this week. The gas turbines needed for the most popular kinds of fossil fueled power plants are backordered by years. Nuclear reactors take years to build and there’s still plenty of debate over where to put new ones. Solar and wind are facing new policy pushback from the Trump administration. That makes the prospect of tapping into the energy assets already sprinkled around the country that much more appealing when electricity demand from data centers is soaring faster than new generation can be built.

All that is context for the latest scoop I published yesterday in Latitude Media:

The Brooklyn-based EnergyHub, whose grid software is already in use by more than 120 utilities, is set to acquire smart-thermostat heavyweight Resideo Grid Services, Latitude Media has learned.

The two companies have a history. They worked together more than a decade ago, in the days when virtual power plants were still largely thought of as emergency options to balance demand when the grid is overtaxed. In the years that followed, Resideo Grid Services — launched as a division of industrial giant Honeywell — emerged as a leading provider of tools to patch smart thermostats into virtual power plant networks. EnergyHub, meanwhile, made deals to deploy its software on wires controlled by utility giants such as APS, Duke Energy, National Grid, and Southern California Edison.

“We reached the conclusion about a year ago that the industry was ready for a little consolidation, and that we really need to move faster with VPPs,” Seth Frader-Thompson, EnergyHub’s president, told Latitude Media. “We’re all acutely aware at this point of the pressures on the grid, and this felt like an opportunity to join forces and start doing this at a greater scale.”

Resideo, the parent company of Resideo Grid Services, specializes in smart thermostats. But to catch up to where EnergyHub was in the VPP business, “we needed a big investment,” said Dave Oberholzer, the general manager at RGS.

“We were always strong in thermostats since Resideo is a thermostat company. But we were just starting to get into batteries. We were far behind on EVs,” Oberholzer told Latitude Media. “This really accelerates our roadmaps significantly.”

There’s a particularly interesting detail I learned while reporting this piece. The VPP industry has a standard called the Huels test, essentially a Turing test for their software networks. I explain here:

In the coming weeks, the company plans to release a report on when it expects to pass what’s known in the industry as the Huels test. Akin to the Turing test, which describes the threshold at which artificial intelligence would become indistinguishable from a person to a human, the Huels test defines the point at which a grid operator can no longer tell the difference between a virtual power plant and a conventional generating station.

“Today, I think a VPP can convincingly pass a narrow version of the Huels test for a peaking gas plant that doesn’t run that much,” Frader-Thompson said. “But what we need to do is get more hours and more megawatts for each hour.”

The growing demand for VPPs, he said, should help provide that opportunity.

“VPPs are the fastest thing to deploy out there,” Frader-Thompson said. “They tend to be 50% the cost of traditional generation and are by far the most consumer friendly. Fastest, cheapest and most customer friendly? Not a bad place to be.”

There’s more interesting details in the story, so check it out. You can read the full story here.

Last year’s election split Taiwan’s government with President Lai Ching-te of the effectively pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party leading the executive branch and the pro-China Kuomintang party controlling the legislature. KMT lawmakers repeatedly blocked Lai’s agenda on issues such as defense and energy. Earlier this year, civil society groups accusing the KMT of undermining Taiwanese democracy triggered recall elections against two dozen legislators in a bid to give the DPP a chance at a governing majority.

On Saturday, voters rejected the effort. All 24 recall elections failed to win over the 25% of the district’s voters required to oust the incumbent KMT legislators from power.

The result could deepen Taiwan’s political divides. But it may signal hope for reviving nuclear energy on the island.

In May, the DPP fulfilled its decades-old pledge to end atomic power generation on Taiwan, rendering the country dependent almost entirely on imported fossil fuels for its electricity. That same month, the KMT won enough support to set a date for a referendum on whether to restore operations at the last Taiwanese nuclear plant to shut down, the Maanshan station located near the island’s southern tip.

Despite the government’s opposition, a majority of Taiwanese adults support nuclear power, according to polling from the consultancy Radiant Energy Group. Yet sources in Taiwan whom I have spoken to over the past few months have repeatedly warned me that the partisan divide in Taiwan would cripple the effort, since DPP voters would be primed from the July recall election to either cast ballots against a KMT referendum or decline to vote at all. Unless at least 50% of qualified voters turn out, a plebiscite is automatically invalidated under Taiwan’s referendum law.

When I texted Angelica Oung, a Taiwanese pro-nuclear advocate who opposed the recalls, this morning to ask whether she Saturday’s outcome left her optimistic about the upcoming nuclear vote, she responded: “Yes… cautiously.”

“The problem is even if the referendum passes the DPP can find procedural reasons to drag their feet,” she told me.

The referendum, after all, is nonbinding. “But,” she added, “the political pressure will mount!”

This newsletter provides something AI can’t: Original reporting and commentary from a real live human. If you value that, I invite you to consider supporting my work with a paid subscription:

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: I have much to share since my last update on my work outside of this newsletter.

On Monday, I started a new gig: I’m now the chief writer of Heatmap’s weekday morning newsletter. You can find the latest edition here and find the previous days’ issues on my author’s page here.

This morning, I made my debut in New York Focus, the finest local publication covering the Empire State, with a story looking ahead at the state’s plan to build the first new nuclear plant in my lifetime.

Last week, I went back on the Singapore broadcaster CNA’s climate podcast with my friends Jack Board and Liling Tan to talk about the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

I also had a scoop in the MIT Technology Review on California’s grid operator becoming the first in the nation to deploy AI in its outage management system.

In The Atlantic, I had another scoop on President Donald Trump’s threat to fire the remaining members of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board of directors as part of what my sources fear is the first step toward privatizing the federally-owned utility.

Over at Latitude Media, meanwhile, I wrote about Google’s deals for deploy CO2 batteries and save old hydropower plants, why the answer to a more reliable grid is better planning, green steel startup Boston Metal’s latest funding round, and the dubious methodology behind the Trump administration’s grid reliability report.

On Thursday, I made my usual scheduled appearance on the BBC World Service’s “Business Matters” to talk about the Fed’s independence, why I think people should be more upset at CBS for what happened with “60 Minutes” than Stephen Colbert, and why I think Comic Con is a quasi-religious event.

I also went back on CNN last week to talk about the recent flash flooding in New York, Texas and beyond.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Nightwalk,” the 1967 masterpiece by Nuyorican jazz king Joe Torres, a track that can ease the soul on a hot summer Saturday.

Signing off from a bright and humid Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where invasive spotted lanternfly nymphs have made a comeback, pulling amateur exterminators into an erratic dance as they swiftly hop away from incoming shoe heels. Unfortunately for them, I can report that the insects don’t seem to have adapted to dodging baby stroller wheels just yet.

Thank you for reading. If you like this, please consider sharing to help grow the audience:

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At the start of this century, the United States had plans to start burying its spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at a giant vault in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Shortly after taking office in 2009, then-President Barack Obama cut all funding to the project. Two years later, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog, released a report that found the reasons for the White House’s decision were entirely political, not technical – confirming that Obama had canceled Yucca Mountain on behalf of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who opposed the waste dump in his state.

The problem was that the federal law that put the federal government in charge of dealing with the waste piling up at nuclear power plants around the country designated Yucca Mountain as the nation’s first nuclear waste repository. To move on and find another option, Congress would need to change the law. After the March 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, the issue – if you’ll forgive the pun – became politically radioactive. Who wanted to volunteer for the waste site Nevada had rejected?

More than a decade later, the U.S. and much of the world is finally outgrowing its squeamishness over atomic energy and recognizing that the utility and remarkable safety record of the most efficient, carbon-free source of power yet harnessed merit seriously considering building more reactors to meet global needs for electricity to curb climate-changing fossil fuels and power all kinds of things that demand electrons.

In some cases, that has meant recognizing that nuclear waste isn’t a huge problem. All the spent fuel from decades of the U.S. operating the largest commercial reactor fleet in the world would fit on a single high-school football field. But as plans for a reactor buildout the likes of which the West hasn’t seen since the 1970s solidify, many see this as the time to figure out a permanent solution to the waste.

Finland recently became the first country to build a permanent repository for waste. Sweden is following suit. And momentum is growing in the U.S. to start using the recycling technology France and Russia have long used to extract more energy out of spent fuel and leave behind even less waste that needs to be buried or stored.

Either way, “the time has come” to spend the nearly $50 billion accrued in the federal Nuclear Waste Fund to figure out a solution.

That’s according to a letter eight top nuclear advocacy groups sent to Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Monday.

The letter – a copy of which this newsletter obtained exclusively – was signed by both industry and public interest groups. The signatories include: the American Nuclear Society, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Decommissioning Plant Coalition, Energy Communities Alliance, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the Nuclear Industry Council, the Sustainable Fuel Cycle Task Force, and the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition.

“It is time to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. It is time to be accountable to the communities that have long supported our national security, energy, and government-sponsored research and development activities,” the letter reads. “In doing so, it may bolster interest in some of these same communities to host new nuclear and nuclear waste projects.”

Overcoming the hurdles that have so far stopped the government from taking action would lead “to greater confidence in the nation's ability to manage current and future waste” and facilitate “deployment of new, advanced nuclear technologies,” the groups argued.

It may be easier said than done. The Biden administration had established funding for community outreach aimed at winning local support – programs that faced cuts under the Trump administration.

New Mexico – still scarred from the radioactive effects of poorly-regulated uranium mining and bomb testing – passed a law in 2023 to block construction of a nuclear waste repository in the state. Even states that want more nuclear power have sought to block waste sites. Just last month, the Supreme Court rejected Texas’s bid at the Supreme Court to block the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of a waste site in the West Texas town of Andrews. Despite ordering her state-owned utility to fund construction of a new nuclear plant, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul bowed to anti-nuclear activists and signed legislation that same year that halted routine releases of low-level radioisotopes from New York City’s defunct Indian Point plant in apparent violation of federal law.

Which is to say: much like the radioactive waste itself, the problem of social acceptance lingers.

Signing off from a rainy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I’m too late for a podcast taping right now to ask my wife to check this piece for typos. Apologies in advance, but wanted to deliver you some breaking news.

All 94 commercial nuclear reactors in the United States run on low-enriched uranium, a version of fuel that taps into – at most – 5% of its energy potential. But there are other types of nuclear fuel enriched as high as 20%, meaning reactors can run hotter and burn up a lot more of the super-radiative nasty stuff that forms during the fission process.

One of those types of fuel is called TRISO. Short for tristructural-isotopic, U.S. government researchers invented the fuel – which consists of a uranium-containing kernel coated with layers of ceramic materials that form a miniature containment system – in the 1950s. It was best used for reactors that used coolants capable of withstanding higher temperatures than water. But the whole U.S. fleet ended up cooling the heat from splitting atoms with water. So TRISO never really went mainstream.

That’s now changing. Last December, China hooked its first commercial high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, powered by TRISO, onto the grid. In the U.S., the Amazon-backed X-energy is working on its own high-temperature gas-cooled small modular reactor, while Google-backed Kairos is advancing a molten-salt-cooled reactor. Both use TRISO. Until recently, there was a third major player in the mix. But right around the time tech giants threw their weight behind those two companies last fall, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation – which had aimed to both develop microreactors and produce the TRISO to fuel them – declared bankruptcy.

Last month, Standard Nuclear rose from its ashes. Founded by venture capitalists seeking to establish a fuel vendor that could take a share of the potentially growing TRISO market, the Oak Ridge, Tennessee-based startup vaulted ahead to a launch by buying USNC’s fuel business instead of building the company from scratch.

“With USNC, it was like if Toyota was making its own car but also making its own petroleum. So if you drive a Toyota car, you have to go to a Toyota gas station, and Ford was doing its own thing,” Kurt Terrani, Standard Nuclear’s chief executive (and a former vice president at USNC), told me. “That’s not the case. The model is to be a fuel supplier that’s agnostic about the reactor technology.”

One thing it’s not agnostic about: Dealing with nuclear waste. On Tuesday, Standard plans to announce a strategic partnership with nuclear waste recycler SHINE Technologies, this newsletter can exclusively report. As part of the deal, Standard will work with SHINE to turn spent fuel that would otherwise sit on site at nuclear plants waiting to be buried for millennia into TRISO fuel that, in a reactor, will burn through much of the radioactive material that makes atomic waste so dangerous.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

“We see through their scrappiness that they understand the nuclear industry needs to be remade,” Greg Piefer, the chief executive at SHINE Technologies, told me. “Traditionally in the nuclear industry, people tend to move slower. But they understand the importance of recycling.”

While France and Russia recycle their nuclear waste, the U.S. sacrificed its first commercial waste recycling project in the 1970s under then-President Jimmy Carter at the altar of nonproliferation. The technology to separate useful materials out of nuclear waste puts a country one step closer to generating weapons-grade materials. And though the U.S. arsenal of bombs already led the world, the Carter administration banned nuclear waste recycling as a symbolic gesture in the wake of India becoming the first nation since the signing of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop an atomic weapon. Ronald Reagan overturned the ban soon after, but it was too late. After losing billions of dollars, Allied Corporation, the industrial giant behind the first commercial recycling plant, abandoned the project and no one else bothered to try.

The U.S. tried advancing plans to bury its nuclear waste in the federal government's Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. But the Obama administration bowed to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and killed the project before real construction began. Since then, the U.S. has been in limbo over its nuclear waste.

That isn’t a huge problem. After decades of generating roughly a fifth of the nation’s electricity from fission, all the nuclear waste in the country could fit stacked on a single high-school football field. Absent a final solution, it’s stored quite safely on site at nuclear plants in canisters that allow the blazing-hot fuel rods to cool down over years while the federal government debates a final place to put the stuff.

The Biden administration started tiptoeing toward waste recycling. President Donald Trump’s executive orders outright embraced the idea. Other companies are moving into the space. In April, this newsletter exclusively reported on a deal between the French nuclear giant Orano and the U.S. waste recycler Curio LV.

Recycling not only dramatically reduces how much waste would ultimately need to be buried, it extracts loads of resources. Rare types of isotopes needed for cutting edge cancer treatments can be pulled from nuclear waste. And there’s enough energy left in spent fuel waste to power the U.S. for the next century. That could be turned into low-enriched uranium for traditional reactors. But it’s particularly well suited for high-assay low-enriched uranium, the fuel known as HALEU, and TRISO – both of which are enriched between 10% and 20%, and both of which are currently sold by the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom.

“We’re desperate right now to get these things. We don’t want to buy them from Russia. We don’t want to buy them from our adversaries,” Terrani said. “This is something we should be doing in this nation.”

While recycled fuel could, in theory, be recycled again, the higher burnup rate of TRISO in an advanced nuclear means Standard’s fuel pellets could be the end of the fuel cycle for a particular ton of waste, Terrani said.

Still, there’s ample reason for skepticism. Recycling is expensive and difficult, and experts I have spoken to over the years doubt that recycled fuel will prove cheaper than stuff made from fresh uranium, to which the U.S. has plenty of access if demand rises as much as expected.

But Standard already has $100 million in non-binding fuel sales lined up for 2027. Among its customers are the microreactor developers NANO Nuclear Energy, which acquired other USNC assets in the bankruptcy auction, and Radiant Nuclear, which is backed by Decisive Point, the main backer in Standard’s latest round of funding.

The company announced $42 million in financing from Decisive, Andreesen Horowitz, Crucible Capital, Fundomo and Washington Harbour Partners.

Asked what kind of federal support would help his business move faster, Terrani balked and took a dig at Virginia-based TRISO producer BWXT for taking federal grants.

“I don’t want a federal grant. There’s so much private capital out there,” he said. “We’ll sell [federal agencies] fuel. We’ll sell them the advanced core materials they need. But I see this as a mature technology and a mature business. It’s a little bit confusing when they’re still giving grants to other companies to do this work. As far as I’m concerned, the commercial sector has already solved this.”

He knows a thing or two about relying on the government. In 2023, USNC lost out on a bid to build a nuclear reactor for the military at a U.S. Air Force base in Alaska. A year later, the company was bankrupt.

“We went through that process, not something a nuclear fuels engineer or scientist wants to do,” Terrani, who spent more than a decade working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory before entering the private sector, told me of the bankruptcy. He had served on USNC’s board of directors during the decision to file for Chapter 11 protections. “But, you know, it was an incredible experience.”

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: It’s been a busy few weeks since I last updated you on my work outside this newsletter.

Last Friday, I made my debut in Foreign Policy magazine with a story on Taiwan’s potential push into geothermal energy.

Earlier that week, I had a feature in Sherwood News on the looming collapse of New Fortress Energy, the gas company heaving under $9 billion in debt that Puerto Rico put in charge of its grid when its own state utility was struggling with … $9 billion in debt.

Over at Latitude Media, I had stories on Peter Thiel-backed surveillance giant Palantir’s unusual push into atomic energy with The Nuclear Company and why solar manufacturers were faring Republicans’ cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act better than most solar companies. I also had an exclusive on nuclear reactor developer Terrestrial Energy’s deal to use gas as a bridge fuel to SMRs.

And at Canary Media, I published a feature on clean ironmaking offering a bridge spot in the rollbacks on green steel.

This edition’s soundtrack is “El Sol” by the French instrumentalist Quetzal, whose other work I plugged in the most recent Sunday Revue. The xylophone in this would be worth it alone, but the smooth R&B vocal track is perfect.

Signing off from a dusky Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the waterfront is currently bursting with the lavender blossoms of the common chicory – one of New York City’s underappreciated wildflowers. On a long morning walk on Sunday, baby Eve and I picked some.

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The biggest hurdle to building a new nuclear power station in the United States? Getting someone to pay for it.

In the 1990s, much of the U.S. liberalized electricity markets, breaking up the monopoly utilities that once owned the power plants, managed the distribution system and sold the electrons to ratepayers in favor of competitive auctions. This made financing a project that takes a decade and costs billions of dollars virtually impossible to justify when cheaper natural gas plants or renewables were an option.

As a result, the U.S. has only built three new reactors this century. Two were constructed in Georgia, where Southern Company’s old-fashioned monopoly model gave the utility giant the leeway to fund the pair that just came online at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. The other was the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority’s reactor that came online in 2016 after starting construction decades earlier. While there are pilot projects to build next-generation small modular reactors at early stages right now — including one that relies on the TVA copying what Ontario’s state-owned utility pulls of there are no new commercial nuclear plants actively under construction anywhere in the country.

New York wants to change that by putting the state government in charge of building its new nuclear plant in nearly 40 years.

Like much of the nation, the Empire State built all four of its nuclear power stations by the end of the 1980s, before liberalizing its electricity market in 1996. But New York has something other states do not: the largest government-owned utility in the country other than the TVA.

On Monday morning, Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to order the New York Power Authority to build “at least one” new nuclear power station generating 1 gigawatt of electricity somewhere in Upstate New York by 2040. A gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, is enough to power over a million homes.

“As New York State electrifies its economy, deactivates aging fossil fuel power generation, and continues to attract large manufacturers that create good-paying jobs, we must embrace an energy policy of abundance that centers on energy independence and supply chain security to ensure New York controls its energy future,” Hochul said in a statement.

Less than two years ago, Hochul backed a bill that hamstrung decommissioning on New York City’s shuttered nuclear plant, the Indian Point facility, in apparent violation of federal law. In January, however, the Democrat released a nuclear “master plan” that aimed to put New York at the forefront of a bipartisan coalition of more than a dozen states aiming to hasten deployment of nuclear reactors. She even sought common ground with President Donald Trump during recent meetings by urging the White House to work with Albany on expanding nuclear power.

The Hochul administration had already tasked NYPA with speeding up construction of transmission lines and renewable power, as mandated under the Build Public Renewables Act the state legislature passed in 2023. In May, NYPA announced its first project under the expanded authority the legislation granted – a 20 megawatt solar farm in Washington County, north of Albany.

But the governor’s nuclear order would bring 50 times as much steady, zero-carbon power to the grid from a single facility, avoiding some of the blowback in rural communities to renewables that require vast areas of open land.

New York’s legally-enshrined decarbonization goals under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act require the state to generate 100% of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. Meeting those goals “will require not only maximizing renewable energy, but also ensuring a stable supply of clean, dispatchable electricity,” said Lindsay Anderson, a professor and senior faculty fellow at Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

“This is especially critical as the state prepares for a surge in electricity demand driven by the rapid growth of data centers and high-tech manufacturing,” she said in a statement. “A 1 gigawatt advanced nuclear power plant in New York would be a strategic investment.”

At 42%, natural gas generates the bulk of the state’s power currently, followed by hydroelectric at 23% and nuclear power at 21%, according to the latest federal data from March. Renewables such as wind and solar make up just under 14%.

Under the order, Hochul – a Democrat running for reelection next year – directed NYPA to “immediately begin evaluation of technologies, business models, and locations for this first nuclear power plant.” NYPA can develop the project “either alone or in partnership with private entities.”

“Hochul has guts,” Dietmar Detering, the chairman of the advocacy group Nuclear New York, told me.

“We have a very clear and very strong signal showing real leadership in New York. What New York has and other states do not is we have NYPA,” he added. “It’s awesome for Hochul to draw on that strength and make use of it.”

The NYPA announcement won praise from labor unions and manufacturers.

“New York’s clean energy future depends on reviving and expanding nuclear power,” said Maro Cilento, the president of the New York State chapter of the AFL-CIO. “Without it, emissions are rising, and grid reliability is at risk.”

Micron Technology, the semiconductor maker building a $100 billion megafab in Onondaga County, called the nuclear plant “essential to supporting high-tech manufacturing.”

The news came as New York City is bracing for potential brownouts. The densely populated downstate region is facing a shortage of electricity since the shutdown of New York’s fourth nuclear plant, the Indian Point Energy Center, in 2021. With surging demand from air conditioning, the city’s power provider is already warning ratepayers to cut back on electricity usage in triple-digit temperatures to avoid power cuts.

Subscribe

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I have had a bunch of new stories out since my last update.

What I’m most excited about: I made my debut in the MIT Technology Review with a long print feature on the costs of Puerto Rico’s doubling down on fossil fuels.

I had a new piece up in The Atlantic on the confusing logic of Trump’s energy efficiency rollbacks.

Over at Fortune, I published a feature on how Southern Company’s made nuclear history with a new type of reactor fuel in one of the older units at Plant Vogtle.

At Canary Media, I had a piece about the U.S. losing its landmark entry to the global race for green steel.

And over at Latitude Media, I wrote about Facebook-owner Meta’s bet on geothermal startup XGS, the frustrating “misuse” of the metric known as levelized cost of energy in debates over power plants, the transformer startup Heron Power’s bid to make the Tesla of grid tech, and the surge of energy sector mergers last year.

I made some appearances as well. I was on the BBC World Service twice, once for my usual gig on the “Business Matters” program and again for a segment on “World Business Report” about the Meta-XGS geothermal deal.

I also flew out to Chicago last Tuesday just for the day to moderate a two-hour panel with an all-star lineup at the American Nuclear Society conference. You can watch it here:

This edition’s soundtrack is one of the great hip-hop classics of my childhood, which needs no introduction from me.

Signing off from a sweltering Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where our utility, ConEdison, is warning us of potential brownouts on Tuesday when voters go to the polls to cast ballots in a primary election for mayor that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo – who is responsible for shutting down the nuclear power plants that once provided the bulk of our electricity – is favored to win.

Share

The biggest hurdle to building a new nuclear power station in the United States? Getting someone to pay for it.

In the 1990s, much of the U.S. liberalized electricity markets, breaking up the monopoly utilities that once owned the power plants, managed the distribution system and sold the electrons to ratepayers in favor of competitive auctions. This made financing a project that takes a decade and costs billions of dollars virtually impossible to justify when cheaper natural gas plants or renewables were an option.

As a result, the U.S. has only built three new reactors this century. Two were constructed in Georgia, where Southern Company’s old-fashioned monopoly model gave the utility giant the leeway to fund the pair that just came online at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. The other was the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority’s reactor that came online in 2016 after starting construction decades earlier. While there are pilot projects to build next-generation small modular reactors at early stages right now — including one that relies on the TVA copying what Ontario’s state-owned utility pulls of there are no new commercial nuclear plants actively under construction anywhere in the country.

New York wants to change that by putting the state government in charge of building its first new nuclear plant in nearly 40 years.

Like much of the nation, the Empire State built all four of its nuclear power stations by the end of the 1980s, before liberalizing its electricity market in 1996. But New York has something other states do not: the largest government-owned utility in the country other than the TVA.

At a Monday morning press conference at the state’s biggest power station, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the New York Power Authority to build “at least one” new nuclear power station generating 1 gigawatt of electricity somewhere in Upstate New York by 2040. A gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, is enough to power over a million homes.

“Some people say you can’t clean the grid and grow it at the same time. Sounds like defeatism to me,” Hochul said from a podium at the the NYPA-owned Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, a hydroelectric facility near Niagara Falls. “This is New York. That’s not how we think. We don’t back down from the hard problems. We solve them and we build bigger and bolder than anyone could have imagined.”

Less than two years ago, Hochul backed a bill that hamstrung decommissioning on New York City’s shuttered nuclear plant, the Indian Point facility, in apparent violation of federal law. In January, however, the Democrat released a nuclear “master plan” that aimed to put New York at the forefront of a bipartisan coalition of more than a dozen states aiming to hasten deployment of nuclear reactors. She even sought common ground with President Donald Trump during recent meetings by urging the White House to work with Albany on expanding nuclear power.

“There's only one commercially viable option that can deliver that much clean, renewable, reliable power, and that's what's been operating in New York for decades,” Hochul said. “Nuclear energy, harnessing the power of the atom is the best way to generate steady, zero emission electricity.”

The Hochul administration had already tasked NYPA with speeding up construction of transmission lines and renewable power, as mandated under the Build Public Renewables Act the state legislature passed in 2023. In May, NYPA announced its first project under the expanded authority the legislation granted – a 20 megawatt solar farm in Washington County, north of Albany.

But the governor’s nuclear order would bring 50 times as much steady, zero-carbon power to the grid from a single facility, avoiding some of the blowback in rural communities to renewables that require vast areas of open land.

New York’s legally-enshrined decarbonization goals under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act require the state to generate 100% of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2040. Meeting those goals “will require not only maximizing renewable energy, but also ensuring a stable supply of clean, dispatchable electricity,” said Lindsay Anderson, a professor and senior faculty fellow at Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

“This is especially critical as the state prepares for a surge in electricity demand driven by the rapid growth of data centers and high-tech manufacturing,” she said in a statement. “A 1 gigawatt advanced nuclear power plant in New York would be a strategic investment.”

At 42%, natural gas generates the bulk of the state’s power currently, followed by hydroelectric at 23% and nuclear power at 21%, according to the latest federal data from March. Renewables such as wind and solar make up just under 14%.

Under the order, Hochul – a Democrat running for reelection next year – directed NYPA to “immediately begin evaluation of technologies, business models, and locations for this first nuclear power plant.” NYPA can develop the project “either alone or in partnership with private entities.”

“Hochul has guts,” Dietmar Detering, the chairman of the advocacy group Nuclear New York, told me.

“We have a very clear and very strong signal showing real leadership in New York. What New York has and other states do not is we have NYPA,” he added. “It’s awesome for Hochul to draw on that strength and make use of it.”

The NYPA announcement won praise from labor unions and manufacturers.

“New York’s clean energy future depends on reviving and expanding nuclear power,” said Maro Cilento, the president of the New York State chapter of the AFL-CIO. “Without it, emissions are rising, and grid reliability is at risk.”

Micron Technology, the semiconductor maker building a $100 billion megafab in Onondaga County, called the nuclear plant “essential to supporting high-tech manufacturing.”

The news came as New York City is bracing for potential brownouts. The densely populated downstate region is facing a shortage of electricity since the shutdown of New York’s fourth nuclear plant, the Indian Point Energy Center, in 2021. With surging demand from air conditioning, the city’s power provider is already warning ratepayers to cut back on electricity usage in triple-digit temperatures to avoid power cuts.

Subscribe

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I have had a bunch of new stories out since my last update.

What I’m most excited about: I made my debut in the MIT Technology Review with a long print feature on the costs of Puerto Rico’s doubling down on fossil fuels.

I had a new piece up in The Atlantic on the confusing logic of Trump’s energy efficiency rollbacks.

Over at Fortune, I published a feature on how Southern Company’s made nuclear history with a new type of reactor fuel in one of the older units at Plant Vogtle.

At Canary Media, I had a piece about the U.S. losing its landmark entry to the global race for green steel.

And over at Latitude Media, I wrote about Facebook-owner Meta’s bet on geothermal startup XGS, the frustrating “misuse” of the metric known as levelized cost of energy in debates over power plants, the transformer startup Heron Power’s bid to make the Tesla of grid tech, and the surge of energy sector mergers last year.

I made some appearances as well. I was on the BBC World Service twice, once for my usual gig on the “Business Matters” program and again for a segment on “World Business Report” about the Meta-XGS geothermal deal.

I also flew out to Chicago last Tuesday just for the day to moderate a two-hour panel with an all-star lineup at the American Nuclear Society conference. You can watch it here:

This edition’s soundtrack is one of the great hip-hop classics of my childhood, which needs no introduction from me.

Signing off from a sweltering Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where our utility, ConEdison, is warning us of potential brownouts on Tuesday when voters go to the polls to cast ballots in a primary election for mayor that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo – who is responsible for shutting down the nuclear power plants that once provided the bulk of our electricity – is favored to win.

Share

Dear reader,

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Sunday Revue of the FIELDS NOTES newsletter.

It feels strange to write this on Saturday night, on the hottest day of the year so far, just hours after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran. I was a middle schooler on Long Island on 9/11. Rumors swirled all day about why so many kids were disappearing and why the teachers were acting so strange. I remember being on the bus coming home and asking my friend, Ivan, whether it could be true that someone destroyed the Twin Towers. Neither of us could believe it. I remember waiting for the bus with my dad the morning the U.S. invasion of Iraq began 18 months later and hearing news of the war on the radio. I loved G.I. Joes then, and, having grown up in the heyday of World War II nostalgia and spent the formative last year and a half steeped in jingoism, the idea of the war seemed righteous to me, thrilling. I said so to my dad. He shook his head. Seeing the fear in my father’s eyes, hearing the concern in his voice, I recall feeling confused and ashamed.

It was a scorcher today in Brooklyn. My brother and I went to Midwood, where he voted early in the mayoral primary. We got Georgian ice-cream bars and walked around for a while, then drove up to Flatbush and picked up Trinidadian takeout to bring home to my wife. We went out for an evening walk with the baby. When I got home, one of my group texts was blowing up over a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post about the strike.

I don’t know what happens next. So much seems to hinge on how or whether Iran retaliates. Iranian state TV claims the sites the U.S. bombed were long since emptied, casting doubt over the efficacy of this initial American attack. Then again, who knows? Fog of war, and all that. The known details will almost certainly have changed by the time you read this. But war it is – the question now is, how long? And to what extent? The parallels to 2003 seem to offer such a limited guide to this moment. Few deny that WMDs were a real factor this time. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s documented stockpiling of uranium enriched about 20% does, in fact, suggest a real weapons program. It’s difficult to imagine U.S. ground forces invading and occupying Iran. Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a MAGA isolationist who lauded Trump’s previous restraint on war with Iran, surmised on X that this attack would be “one and done.” The front page headlines in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Drudge Report, The Los Angeles Times and CNN narrowly described the specific “strikes” or “attack,” at least as of late Saturday. The New York Times, the nation's newspaper of record, framed the story in more history-defining language, blaring five words across the homepage: “U.S. Enters War Against Iran.”

“What does Khamenei do now? He’s long believed if you cave in to pressure it will project weakness and invite more of it. Yet he’s the longest serving dictator in the world, ie not a reckless gambler,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote last night. “His survival instincts and defiant instincts are in great tension now.”

While the purpose of this newsletter is not to serve as a news digest for this specific major story, I have tried to include some relevant material in this edition. I hope it’s useful.

Twenty-two years after that morning with my dad, I’m a father. I know why he was scared. To look at your innocent child and recognize you’re incapable of preventing the world they’re inheriting from slipping into greater violence — even as you live in relative safety — is a peculiar feeling of impotence. Like a jellyfish floating in history’s crashing waves, hoping those you love do not end up beached on hot, desiccating sand, helpless to swim in any direction, thanking luck and fearing chance.

As a reminder, this carefully curated weekly roundup will soon go behind a paywall for premium subscribers only. It’s the kind of thing artificial intelligence software can’t yet compile with this degree of artfulness.

Please support the independent journalism I work hard to deliver to your inbox by upgrading your subscription today for just $5 a month. Purchasing an annual subscription saves 20%.

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NUMBERS GAME

8 – the number of months roughly 40 employees of the nuclear fuel startup Standard Nuclear toiled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, without pay to get the company launched. The Wall Street Journal

1,920 – how many megawatts Talen Energy will provide Amazon through a newly tweaked version of its big nuclear deal in Pennsylvania. Ignition

$518 – how much average Georgians’ power bills have risen over the past year ahead of a new public utility commission election. The New York Times

$85.2 million – how much Korean Zinc will invest in the American deep-sea mining startup The Metals Company as part of a new strategic partnership. Press Release

6 – the number of Supreme Court justices that ruled against Texas in a lawsuit challenging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to permit a waste repository in the Lone Star State. Landmark

95% – how much growth in American electricity demand could be met with existing grid technology. Latitude Media

$650 million – how much money Bill Gates’ reactor startup TerraPower just raised. Press Release

4.9% – the share of European Union’s new car sales that Chinese electric vehicles comprised in April, up from 2.4% a year earlier. The New York Times

60% – how big a downturn solar developers are expecting in the U.S. as a result of Republicans’ repeal of key renewable tax credits. The Financial Times

260 – the metric tonnage of the giant hydrogen-fueled mining trump China just debuted at a trade show. China Hydrogen Bulletin

LINES OF ARGUMENT

On the limitations of destroying Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant, Richard Nephew in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Ultimately, Israel chose a high-risk path to try to eliminate the threat from the Iranian nuclear program. Although there was a chance that Iran would try to break out to nuclear weapons possession soon, this was not certain. And a diplomatic approach might have been able to contain this threat too—as it did in 2015.

Having embarked on a military path, Israel either now needs to prevent Iran from breaking out using military means or to coerce Iran into accepting the sorts of intrusive inspections and dismantlement activities it previously refused. This may be theoretically possible; Iran is now under considerable attack and stress, with even calls by President Trump for its “unconditional surrender.” But the odds of a future Iranian breakout—either using Fordow or another site—are not going to go away even with the decimation of Iran’s existing nuclear sites.

On the hype around artificial general intelligence, Margaret Mitchell in The Financial Times:

Some might say it’s snake oil…. the basic premise that the public is being sold something that isn’t actually real and can’t actually meet the needs that they’re being told that it can meet, that does seem to be happening, and that is a problem, yes. This is why we need a more rigorous evaluation approach, better ideas about benchmarking, what it means to know how a system will work, how well it’ll work, in what context, that sort of theme. But as for now, it’s just like vibes, vibes and snake oil, which can get you so far. The placebo effect works relatively well.

On David Wright’s nomination to lead the NRC, Ted Nordhaus and Erik Funkhouser in The Breakthrough Journal:

Bipartisanship has been critical as Congress and now four administrations of both parties have finally gotten serious about creating a globally competitive advanced nuclear industry in the U.S. For the good of the country and the future of nuclear energy, it is essential that this bipartisanship extends to the nomination and confirmation of NRC commissioners and to the work of the commission itself. It is unrealistic to expect every Democratic and Republican member of the Senate to agree on every commission nominee. And Democratic and Republican commissioners will not always agree on every issue. But we hope most will agree that at this critical juncture, Chair David Wright is a great choice to continue to lead at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

On the effects of the war in Iran, Yossi Mekelberg in the Arab News

Iranian citizens who see their country under attack are more likely to rally round the flag. To the regime, meanwhile, the conflict provides a further excuse to take even harsher action against any signs of domestic discontent.

Moreover, regime change commonly suggests a desire among the external forces that attempt to initiate it to install an administration more favorable to them — yet past experiences do not provide much reassurance that this is what would happen; quite the reverse, in fact.

Netanyahu has taken the gamble of his life and in doing so he is also gambling with Israel’s long-term security, and possibly that of the wider region as well.

No one will benefit from a prolonged war that could entangle other regional powers. Diplomacy must step in quickly and play a central role in resolving the conflict or this will be a long and bloody summer.

GRAPHIC DETAIL

NEWS BITES

• Scientists are launching an international campaign to stop research to create synthetic bacteria that could cause mass death by mirroring the effects of natural microbes while circumventing immune systems. The Financial Times

• Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang met in St. Petersburg to discuss ways to “deepen practical cooperation in the energy sector.” Global Times

• Trump’s obsession with seizing Greenland eerily follows the plot of Joseph Conrad’s long-forgotten lone sci-fi novel from 1901. Jacobin

• Kazakhstan, already a major source of uranium, is finally building its first nuclear power plant, and split the difference between its two giant neighbors by making plans to use Russian and Chinese technology. Haveli

• Amid repeated denials of aid to help states prepare for disasters, the Trump administration has laid out plans to “abolish FEMA” in a memo. Bloomberg

• The White House has quietly proposed shutting down the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the little-known agency in charge of investigating industrial accidents. Grist

• For all the excitement over perovskite crystals for solar panels, the technology still needs a lot more durability tests to make sure it works. Nature Energy

• Elon Musk’s xAI is facing a lawsuit for operating 400 megawatts of gas turbines without permits. TechCrunch

• Nuclear-powered cargo ships are starting to gain steam. Bloomberg

WATCHING

Former CIA analyst Michael Shurkin’s analysis on the threat Iran’s military poses to the U.S., including how it could take down American Navy ships.

The history of why there’s a Republic of the Congo and a Democratic Republic of the Congo:

How the language spoken by the Pirahã people of Brazil’s Amazon defies everything linguists know about communication, with no words for colors, no numbers, no past and no future.

LISTENING

Podcasts

• The Rachman Review on Israel’s decision to strike Iran.

• Open Circuit on the gap between how much smarter grid technology is getting and how stagnant our use of that technology remains.

• The Diplomat on how South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s new progressive administration will shake up Northeast Asian geopolitics.

Music

• “Bruca Maniguá,” a lush and truly beautiful Cuban song featuring singer Ibrahim Ferrer, a defining song from my adolescence.

• “Exitus” an upbeat, atmospheric track by the Asheville, North Carolina-based jazz pianist Okonski.

• “Del Dareh Pir Misheh,” a groovy track from the early 1970s by the mustachioed Iranian psychedelic rocker Kourosh Yaghmaei.

Signing off from a muggy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the thunderous roar of fireworks someone set off by the waterfront this evening felt eerie and caused me to look out the window in a panic as I waited for President Trump’s brief speech on the strikes in Iran.

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Dear reader,

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Sunday Revue of the FIELDS NOTES newsletter.

As a reminder, this carefully curated weekly roundup will soon go behind a paywall for premium subscribers only. It’s the kind of thing artificial intelligence software can’t yet compile with this degree of artfulness.

Please support the independent journalism I work hard to deliver to your inbox by upgrading your subscription today for just $5 a month:

Subscribe

NUMBERS GAME

30 – the percentage by which copper supplies could fall short by 2035 “due to declining ore grades, rising capital costs, limited resource discoveries and long lead times.” International Energy Agency

28 – the percentage by which generating electricity with coal was more expensive than in 2021. Energy Innovation

$9.4 billion – the cost data centers have added to the largest U.S. grid, the PJM Interconnection, a 180% increase so far. Bloomberg

$350 million – the cost of a single new offshore oil drilling platform in Alaska. Northern Journal

1,700 – the number of megawatts’ worth of new renewables Nigeria expects to build in the next decade. GlobalData

$34 – the target price per share Morgan Stanley set for MP Materials, the only active rare earths miner in the U.S. CNBC

11,684 – the number of new jobs the Biden administration’s energy policies spurred in Ohio. Inside Climate News

$65 – how much more expensive producing a ton of corn in the U.S. was on average compared to Brazil between 2015 and 2019. The Breakthrough Institute

LINES OF ARGUMENT

On the shift in approach the Trump administration brings to American foreign policy, U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack on X:

A century ago, the West imposed maps, mandates, penciled borders, and foreign rule. Sykes-Picot divided Syria and the broader region for imperial gain—not peace. That mistake cost generations. We will not make it again. The era of Western interference is over. The future belongs to regional solutions, but partnerships, and a diplomacy grounded in respect.

On the value of reprocessing America’s nuclear waste, Emmet Penney in The American Conservative:

If Trump flexed his executive muscles, he could issue an executive order that establishes reprocessing as a national priority for energy dominance. Effectively, the president would mandate the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the State Department step out of the way of commercial entities that want to harvest and clean up our waste in order to produce more fuel. By establishing waste reprocessing as part of the national mission, Trump would shore up our energy security while locking in American energy dominance for generations.

On the need to double down on clean industrial policy, Ben Beachy in Heatmap:

Crafting an agenda for clean energy abundance requires precision, not abstraction. We need to add industrial policies that offer a foundation for clean energy growth. We need to end parochial policies that deter buildout on behalf of private interests. And we need to build on labor and equity policies that enable workers and communities to reap material rewards from clean energy expansion. Differentiating between those needs will be essential for Democrats to build a clean energy plan that actually delivers abundance.

GRAPHIC DETAIL

NEWS BITES

• "If Russia is the Coca-Cola of nuclear power, then China is the Pepsi." The Observer

• China has built a nationwide “diamond ring” of sensors on its grid to protect against blackouts like what Iberia recently suffered. South China Morning Post

• Offshore wind is basically dead in the U.S. – but not overseas. Heatmap

• Massachusetts-based green steel startup Boston Steel is on the verge of making its first commercial revenue. Canary Media

• The Pentagon has, at times, deliberately fanned the flames of UFO conspiracy theories in targeted disinformation campaigns. The Wall Street Journal

• Spending on producing more fossil fuels is falling for the first time since the pandemic. The Financial Times

• Russia’s rosy public relationship with China obscures a deep distrust over Beijing’s espionage, new secret documents show. The New York Times

  ---

WATCHING

An hour of 1980s footage from Britain’s Thames TV on the Lebanese Civil War:

An 80-minute interview with academic Catherine Liu on the psychological significance of words like “trauma” and “care” in liberal political discourse today:

This short Wall Street Journal explainer rounding up comments from a bunch of economists on when and why the national debt matters:

LISTENING

Podcasts

• Capitol Press Room’s “Drafting Political Movies,” featuring my hilarious wife Amanda Henning Santiago explaining why I have not seen Barry Lyndon

• Gideon Rachman’s “The Rachman Review” on Xi Jinping’s classically strongman tendencies.

• Odd Lots’ interview with JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest on everything AI.

Music

• “Focus” by German producer Leon Flydal

• “Massive,” the latest track by New York City house star DJibouti

• “Bori,” the latest ode to Nuyorican girls by East New York rapper Ryan Witherspoon

Signing off from an overcast Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the blasts of rain last night broke the humidity and left the evening air crisp and dank but electric in a way that made the air feel fragile.

The mayor of New York City has limited say over how the nation’s largest metropolis generates its electricity.

But if elected, Whitney Tilson, the former hedge fund investor making a long-shot bid for the Democratic nod for mayor, said he’d use City Hall’s bully pulpit to push for reopening the Indian Point nuclear power plant that permanently closed four years ago.

The power station, located in the suburbs just north of the city in the Westchester town of Buchanan, was the largest in New York, providing 13% of the state’s electricity in its final years of operation. The plant’s three reactors generated one-quarter of the electrons that flowed in the five boroughs, and upward of 80% of the carbon-free power used in the metropolitan area. But environmental campaigners, including now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claimed for years that the infinitesimal risk of a significant radiation leak from Indian Point posed too great a threat to allow its continued operation. The effort ultimately won over then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who owned a home near the plant.

Since the final reactor shut down in April 2021, natural gas has replaced virtually all the lost atomic generation. The closure came the year before the war in Ukraine sent gas prices skyrocketing – a market dynamic made worse by the fact that New York had recently blocked construction of new pipelines to cheaply carry gas from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania into the Empire State. Increased demand and limited supply of gas spiked New York City’s already high power prices.

The city is also facing worsening blackouts. In November, New York’s grid operator warned that the city faced a 446-megawatt electricity shortfall at a time when data centers, air conditioners, and the electrification of vehicles and buildings are driving up demand.

Over iced tea at a Russian café in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following a few hours of canvassing at the nation’s oldest Memorial Day parade last month, Tilson, 58, told me he would work with Holtec International – the nuclear company that owns Indian Point – to reopen the facility. He said he would support either restoring what remains of the partially-demolished reactors, if possible, or deploying new ones to make use of the transmission lines and substations already located at the site.

“I’m a big champion of nuclear energy,” Tilson said. “Let’s take advantage of the infrastructure at Indian Point.”

Nuclear power, he said, “is one of the few things I agree with the Trump administration on.” He said he would engage with Holtec and “push them” to restore power generation at the site.

That wouldn't be easy. The decommissioning agreement between Holtec and the state bars additional nuclear power generation at the site. Despite her increasing support for atomic energy, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed legislation in 2023 that banned Holtec from carrying out routine releases of treated cooling water from the defunct power plant. The company accused the statute of violating federal law and suggested the state was bending to pseudoscientific fearmongering of nuclear energy.

But Tilson said he’d push for change.

“It’s not clear to me how much the mayor of New York has direct control here, but obviously there’s a bully pulpit,” he told me.

“Beyond the environmental costs of all that methane being released and replacing what was perfectly clean, cheap energy, New Yorkers are getting crushed by utility bills,” he added. “This is contributing to the affordability crisis.”

Tilson – who is polling at just over 1% – declined to criticize Cuomo, his frontrunner rival in the race for the Democratic mayoral nomination, for Indian Point’s demise. It’s perhaps a tactical move. A moderate centrist, Tilson has trained his fire on Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist whose charismatic campaign focused on cost of living has fueled a surge to second place just behind Cuomo.

Holtec is currently working to restore the single reactor at its Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. If successful, it would mark the first time the U.S. has revived an atomic station after what was supposed to be its permanent closure. The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office provided a $1.5 billion loan to complete the reopening – and the deal remains one of the few with which the Trump administration has vowed to move forward.

Given that the demolition is already underway, it’s unlikely that Indian Point’s existing reactors could come back online.

But in February, Holtec unveiled plans to construct the first of its proprietary 300-megawatt small modular reactors at the Michigan site before embarking on a nationwide buildout.

Indian point only “closed early due to short-sighted political policy that did not value clean, baseload energy,” Patrick O’Brien, Holtec’s director of government of affairs, told me in a text message on Saturday.

Still, he said the site could serve as a home to future SMRs.

The Indian Point “property, with a knowledgeable local community and educated workforce, remains a viable potential source of future clean energy generation should the State of New York look to decarbonize the grid and provide the future power of the growing commercial and consumer demands,” he said.

PROGRAMMING NOTES: On Thursday, I had a new story up on Heatmap about the philanthropy Founders Pledge nabbing $50 million to expand its climate fund, which has focused on center-right groups with influence over Republicans. The piece, if I do say so myself, doubles as a brief history of how climate became such a partisan issue since the 2008 election, when Republican John McCain ran on a more ambitious decarbonization plan than Democrat Barack Obama.

On Friday, Canary Media published my look into how the Trump administration’s cuts to the heavy industry projects deal “a big blow” to efforts to slash emissions from heat used at factories. I talked to a former Energy Department official who also explained why the agency relied on contracts that were easily canceled. The short of it: the Energy Department is “way, way behind” agencies such as the Commerce Department in adopting newer approaches to government financing.

As a reminder: the latest edition of the Sunday Revue will be out tomorrow. Only a few more will be available for free. If you want to continue receiving the full weekly roundup of lovingly curated material, upgrade your subscription to premium today. Buying a $60 annual subscription saves you 20%. Now, is that a deal, or what?

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This edition’s soundtrack is “Sleepwalking” by Leven Kali, the Dutch-born American R&B singer best known for his work with Beyoncé, Drake and Playboi Carti. The track is sunny and silky with an impossibly catchy chorus. A great early summer song for your weekend.

Signing off from a humid Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where twice this week I have tried my hand at making the Catalan dish fricandó. I made a particularly nice one last night and managed to impress both my wife and my sister by turning the leftovers into a killer sandwich with focaccia, chèvre and arugula baby Eve and I copped at the farmers market this morning.

Rare earths aren’t rare. You can find deposits of the family of metals needed for all kinds of modern energy, military and consumer technologies all over the world. What is hard to find is the expensive, heavily-polluting processing plants that can turn rare earth-laced rocks into materials that can go into magnets and other hardware. And China, after years of consolidating the industry, enjoys a near monopoly over that production.

Finding deposits that are rich enough in minerals to ease the cost and impact of that refining process are widely considered key to bringing production back to the United States. That’s why the backers of one increasingly talked-about project called Sheep Creek in the woods north of Helena, Montana, call their find a “geological unicorn” – it has a particularly high grade of rare earths but lacks the radioactive contaminants that typically make processing harder.

Now the U.S. Critical Materials Corp., the Salt Lake City-based exploration company that owns the mineral rights to the tract of National Forest Service land, has inked a contract to build its first pilot-scale processing plant with help from the Idaho National Laboratory, this newsletter can exclusively report.

The company was already working with INL through what’s called a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement to confirm the high concentrations of minerals such as gallium and rare earths at the Sheep Creek site.

As part of the new agreement set to be announced Thursday morning, U.S. Critical Materials will develop its proprietary processing technologies alongside researchers at the lab.

"There is no more pressing national security issue than securing America’s supply of rare earths and critical minerals," Jim Hedrick, U.S. Critical Materials’ president who previously worked as a specialist in rare earths at the US Geological Survey, said in a statement. "This pilot plant will accelerate the development of next-generation separation and refining methods to ensure America no longer relies on foreign adversaries for resources essential to national defense."

It’s a major step forward for the company, which aims to partner with a larger miner to do the actual excavation at the site.

“We don’t consider ourselves a mining company,” Harvey Kaye, U.S. Critical Materials’ executive director, told me when we last spoke in March. “We consider ourselves an exploration company, a developer of the property and a technology company.”

If federal researchers prove that U.S. Critical Materials’ processing technology produces less pollution than others, Kaye said, “we’ll not only respect the environment, we can also go out and use it as a counterweight politically” to compete with China for minerals overseas by promising to deploy cleaner tools.

That could prove vital closer to home. Since exploration began at the site, Montana conservations have warned that mining risks damage to the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. The northward-flowing 84-mile long river is popular with hikers and trout fishermen.

“The risks to our water, agriculture, and fisheries are too high,” the advocacy group Bitterroot Trout Unlimited said in a statement earlier this year. “If developed, this mine would wreak unimaginable damage on the landscape and likely degrade water quality.”

U.S. Critical Materials has said modern mining techniques would avoid such damage and noted that its processing technologically would render a once-polluting industry “environmentally benign.”

For more on the project, read my previous newsletter from March.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: Over at Latitude Media, I published two new stories in the past few days. One examines Finland’s push to upgrade its power lines with state-of-the-art dynamic line rating technology, potentially clearing the way for 30% more electricity to travel on the country’s national grid by the end of the year thanks to software from the Estonian startup Gridraven. The other is an exclusive on the U.S. grid software startup Nira Energy securing its first major investor to grow its business of unclogging the interconnection queue stymying the growth of new power plants at a time when electricity demand is surging.

At Canary Media, I wrote about the lasting confusion over President Donald Trump’s position on the Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s controversial bid to acquire its American rival U.S. Steel – and what the implications of the deal may be for the future of green steel and cleaner air.

I’m also pleased to share that Mother Jones last week republished my May 22 newsletter on the breakthrough in using microbes to extract copper.

This edition’s soundtrack is “Alencon,” a clean-sounding, upbeat, house track with a gurgling bassline. It’s by John Claude and Vano1337 – which, as far as I can tell, are the same Lisbon-based artist’s different monikers.

Signing off a sunny Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where on Wednesday evening as I wrote this, my precious no-longer-technically-a-newborn Eve figured out how to roll over – more than three weeks earlier than average. I’m kvelling.

Dear reader,

Welcome to the third edition of the Sunday Revue of the FIELDS NOTES newsletter.

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NUMBERS GAME

24 – the number of industrial projects for which the Department of Energy canceled $3 billion in funding this week, in a move nonpartisan analysts said harmed U.S. competitiveness. Department of Energy

7 – the number of other clean-energy projects from which the Energy Department plans to yank back loans. Semafor

4.6 million – the total pounds of U3O8, or triuranium octoxide, the uranium compound for the yellowcake that becomes enriched uranium fuel for reactors estimated to be available at a mining project the Department of the Interior just fast tracked as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to bring back the domestic nuclear supply chain. World Nuclear News

52 – the percentage by which reactor developer NuScale Power’s stock price jumped after Trump’s executive orders last week on nuclear power, the biggest bump out of any publicly traded reactor companies. Ignition

$40 million – the price industrial giant Glencore bid for the bankrupt battery recycling startup Li-Cycle’s assets. Canary Media

2.7 – the percentage by which the global economy may grow on average between now and 2030 if the Trump administration brokers a truce in its worldwide trade war. Inside Climate News

3 – the number of anti-renewables bills that died in the Texas legislature this week after the House failed to schedule votes before the end of the session, despite all three passing in the Senate. The Hill

52 million – the number of trips passengers took on bullet trains between Beijing and Shanghai as Chinese travelers abandon domestic flights in favor of rail. South China Morning Post

LINES OF ARGUMENT

On the need for an American-led Asian alliance to counter China, former Biden administration official Ely Ratner in Foreign Affairs:

With that in mind, the United States should help its allies prepare for China’s efforts to scuttle a collective defense arrangement in Asia. None of this will be easy. But neither was the great progress that Washington’s allies have already made, not only in acknowledging the threat from China but also in taking unprecedented steps to invest in their own militaries, build ties with their neighbors, and double down on their alliances with the United States. In fact, in recent years, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines have already made moves on defense and security matters that were previously deemed implausible. The conditions are now set for strong leadership to transform a collective defense pact in Asia from something once unimaginable into a defining feature of the region’s future peace and prosperity.

On the growing competition between the old petro states and the emerging electro states, Tatiana Mitrova and Anne-Sophie Corbeau in The National Interest:

The PetroStates Alliance is inherently unstable. While the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia may find tactical alignment, their strategic interests diverge—in oil pricing, political systems, and regional goals. ElectroStates face their own tensions, including trade frictions between China and the EU and intensifying competition for clean tech leadership—both of which reflect deeper geopolitical and economic rivalries. What lies ahead is not a binary clash but a volatile contest between legacy energy powers and new clean energy hegemonies. PetroStates may cling to pricing power and fossil revenues, but ElectroStates are capturing the commanding heights of industrial technology and green influence. Both camps are internally fractured, but it is the scale, speed, and state coordination—especially in China—that may ultimately determine the balance of power in the post-hydrocarbon global order.

On whether the so-called Abundance Agenda is a myth or a utopia, John Ganz in Unpopular Front:

“It’s pretty clear Abundance is a utopia. But a myth is something else: it’s a representation in images of a political movement’s inner convictions, “they are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” They embody a struggle. Very often, they are pessimistic rather than optimistic, and this pessimism is bracing; It communicates a whole worldview in a compelling story. Trumpism contains many myths, including the idea of the stolen election, which I contend is less a statement of fact than an imaginative projection of a shared sense of dispossession. Populism is mythic: it creates a world of heroic people and villainous elites, and a vision of a cataclysmic showdown between the two. People want a little more myth, struggles, enemies, battles, triumphs, etc. Not zoning restrictions. Now, to be fair to the Abundists, they will say it’s more a policy idea than a conception of politics. Politics is poetry, and governing is prose, as the old saw goes. No one has written the Democratic poetry of our era yet.

GRAPHIC DETAIL

NEWS BITES

• Federal authorities cracked down on an illegal Chinese fishing vessel whose squid hauls were sold in American groceries and served as calamari at U.S. military bases, public schools, prisons and the cafeteria in Congress. The Outlaw Ocean Project

• Years after the U.S. abandoned its thorium energy efforts, China is making major breakthroughs. MIT Technology Review

• Finland’s industrial giant Wärtsilä is betting on ethanol as a power source in Brazil. Reuters

• U.S. microreactor developer Oklo, whose chief executive appeared alongside Trump last week at the signing of the president’s executive orders on nuclear energy, signed a landmark deal with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, one of the world leaders in atomic power plant construction, to build its reactors. Oklo

• Kazakhstan, which long eschewed nuclear power despite providing a huge portion of the world’s uranium supply, is now looking to build its first nuclear plant – and just signed a deal with China to work together. Kazinform International News Agency

• In a rare address before the Canadian parliament, King Charles said the country will position itself to become an energy “superpower” in the face of U.S. threats to its sovereignty. E&E News

• Thin plastic films like those used to desalinate water could refine oil more cheaply and with less pollution, new research has found. Science

• Pakistan, already prone to blackouts, will set aside 2,000 in excess power for data centers. Barron’s

WATCHING

An hour-long SLICE History documentary by director Klaus Kastenholz on the rise and fall of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.

A thorough update and analysis on whether Al-Shabaab will storm Mogadishu the way Syrian Islamists took over Damascus and the Taliban seized Kabul from Warfronts.

A long, combative conversation between comedian Adam Friedland and disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner

LISTENING

• “Lilmore,” a grinding house song by Haus Geek

• “Automotivo Bayside,” a thumping house beat by Brazilian producers DJ NK3 and MC AIKA

• “Caux,” a deep-house banger by one of my favorite DJs, the Lisbon-based Vano 1337

• “Let’s Straighten It Out,” the funky 1978 blues hit by O.V. Wright

Signing off from a crisp Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where my friend Ivan and I spent the afternoon sharing qvevri wine and khachapuri at Ubani, then capped off the meal with a pot of Yemeni Jubani coffee at the new Qahwah House that opened on 86th Street, followed by a quick shopping visit to the Turkish Uncle Steve’s discount market for organic strawberries that were remarkably $2.99 per carton. Southern Brooklyn lifestyle at its best.

Geothermal energy used to be confined to locations with unique underground reservoirs of hot water, such as California or Iceland. Not anymore. A new generation of startups is now using the oil and gas industry’s latest drilling technologies to tap into the Earth’s molten heat to generate power in far more places than ever before. But drilling holes in the ground remains an expensive upfront cost, without the same kind of guaranteed payday from hitting a hydrocarbon reserve.

For Eavor Technologies, it’s not just about drilling down. The Calgary-based company’s systems work on a loop that requires boring two parallel holes at once that ultimately intersect deep underground in hot bedrock – far out of range of GPS or electromagnetic signals that could help engineers on the surface precisely steer the drilling equipment.

To get around this, Eavor helped design its own in-house drilling tool that allows the equipment boring each hole to communicate through magnetic signals while digging nearly as deep as 20 times the height of the Empire State Building. Until now, the company – which is building its debut project in Germany – had been slowly rolling out its drilling tool while still relying on traditional technology to dig the 48 separate underground loops per facility.

In a critical milestone, Eavor has completely switched over to its drilling technology as of Wednesday, this newsletter can exclusively report.

“In drilling, time is money. All the drilling equipment costs on an hourly basis,” Matthew Toews, Eavor’s chief technology officer, told me on a call. “This saves upward of 120 hours per multilateral. To put that in perspective, we have 12 multilateral pairs per Eavor Loop. That adds up quickly, there are four Eavor Loops per pad – so, 48 loops.”

Put in money terms, Toews said, “It’s saving tens of millions of dollars per project.”

Eavor worked with the drilling equipment supplier Erdos Miller, the geothermal drilling company Gunnar Energy Services, and oilfield services giant SLB to produce its specialized tool.

Once Eavor’s two boreholes link together in the hot rock, the company pumps water through the piping in its looped well. By absorbing the underground heat, the water works like a steam radiator, coming to the surface where it can be used for heating or spinning turbines to generate electricity.

The company expects to produce its first electrons at its debut plant later this year in Geretsried, Germany, roughly 45 minutes’ drive south of Munich.

Eavor’s overall business plan is deploy its drilling technology “multiple times and continuously drive down the cost of these Eavor loops by going deeper, faster, to higher temperatures.”

“We could drill anywhere on Earth – and you get hotter as you get deeper,” Toews said. “All these technologies combined is how we’ll make geothermal anywhere a reality.”

Original, exclusive reporting like this takes time and skill.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: I have a new story up on Latitude Media about the challenges ahead for President Donald Trump’s executive orders on nuclear power.

Got a tip? A document you want to leak? Is there a story that needs to be told? Get in touch with me via my website or on the encrypted messaging app Signal: @kaufman.11

The soundtrack to this edition is “Top 5” by Ryan Witherspoon, a rapper from East New York who has a real classic New York hip hop. I’m patiently awaiting his latest track, “Bori,” to drop next month, an ode – I presume – to Nuyoricans.

Signing off from a rainy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which held the 158th annual Memorial Day Parade on Monday – the nation’s oldest such procession marking the holiday.

On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump signed four executive orders aimed at overhauling the federal government's approach to building nuclear power plants. It’s part of a push to spur a renaissance of nuclear construction the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since the 1960s and to catch up to China’s widening lead in the race to bring new reactor technologies into commercial operation.

The first order cleared the way for the Department of Defense to deploy new reactor technologies at military bases. The second order proposed staffing cuts, tighter deadlines, and a new approach to measuring radiation risk at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The third order directed the Department of Energy to speed up testing of new reactors and approve at least three new designs by July 4, 2026. And the fourth order laid out a plan to “reinvigorate the nuclear industrial base” by making federal purchases of fuel to give enrichment companies the assurances to reopen facilities in the U.S.

“We’re not fast enough,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a press conference, standing next to the right of Trump at the president’s desk in the White House’s Oval Office. “We’re not keeping up with adversaries.”

Trump was flanked on both sides by the chief executives of companies such as Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear utility in the country, and Oklo, the Silicon Valley microreactor startup, each of whom heralded the orders as a historic step toward restoring American capacity to build reactors again at a significant pace.

The U.S. has built just three new reactors this century. The first – Unit 2 of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant – came online in 2016, but started its on-again-off-again construction in 1973.

The other two – a pair of state-of-the-art Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in northern Georgia – were the only two new units built to a new design in decades. Construction began on the reactors in 2009, and it took until last summer for both to come online and cost more than $30 billion thanks to cost overruns.

“We’re not going to have cost overruns,” Trump said. “The technology has come a long way both in terms of safety and cost.”

The orders come not just as the Trump administration slashes staffing at key agencies the actions call on to help build up the nation’s atomic energy capacities again, but as Republicans in Congress vote to pare down federal tax credits to bolster nuclear power.

Depending on whom you ask, Trump’s actions either dramatically change the existing system or slapped the president’s imprimatur on reforms that were already in the pipeline.

“Today’s executive orders reverse four decades of stagnant bureaucracy and regulatory capture unshackling the potential of the most abundant and powerful energy source ever discovered,” Bret Kugelmass, the chief executive of the small modular reactor developer Last Energy, told me. His Washington, D.C.-based company had previously vowed to forgo building its plants in the U.S. until the federal government reformed its licensing and permitting rules.

But Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the consultancy Veriten, warned that just because Trump ordered it doesn’t mean it will be done, and noted that certain directives – such as requiring 5 gigawatts of uprate improvements to get more power out of existing reactors or construction of new, large-scale reactors – were already underway.

“The majority of what’s in here is stuff that was already in process or stuff you can’t just handwave into existence,” he told me. “We were already doing uprates. We were already talking about new large reactors for the first time in this country in a long time. So, what do these executive orders do in those regards? Just reinforce and strengthen existing activities and trends.”

Adam Stein, the director of the nuclear energy innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute think tank, said the orders were, for the most part, “very good.” But the reforms to the NRC largely tracked with what was required under legislation former President Joe Biden signed last year.

“In terms of NRC, most of the order tells the agency to work on topics that are either mandated by the ADVANCE Act or otherwise already in process,” Stein told me in a text message.

A nuclear executive, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, called the press conference “hard to watch.”

“Feels like mostly stock pumping for Oklo, Nano and NuScale,” the executive told me, referring to a trio of publicly-traded U.S. small modular reactor startups. “Westinghouse has no shares to play with anymore. They’re like a bloody victorious gladiator and yet we hate them for their success.”

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I’m still digesting what’s in the orders and what they mean. But I rounded up some details that stood out to me so far:

1. Increasing U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts in 2050 from 100 gigawatts today.

The NRC order directs the federal watchdog to “facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.”

That additional 300 gigawatts of reactors will be difficult to achieve – requiring roughly one dozen new AP1000 reactors every year for the next quarter century, starting this year. At current construction rates, that’s not happening. But the target ups the ante on the Biden administration’s pitch from November to build 200 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by the middle of the century.

2. Clearing the way for at least 10 more large-scale reactors

The order on “reinvigorating the nuclear industrial base” calls on the Energy Department to “prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate” 5 gigawatts of power uprates to existing reactors “and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.”

Technically, there are other large-scale reactors with complete, NRC-approved designs that could meet that specification. While GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has focused its reactor efforts on the company’s 300-megawatt BWRX-300 SMR – which is slated to debut later this decade in Ontario before starting construction at a Tennessee Valley Authority plant – the joint venture between GE Vernova and the Japanese industrial titan first built its 1,300-megawatt ABWR in Japan. The U.S. planned to build its first ABWR in South Texas until the project was canceled in 2018.

Another option could be the APR1400, the leading South Korean reactor on the market. The NRC certified the reactor for use in the U.S. in 2019. But the Trump administration’s focus on building up domestic companies means the U.S. probably won’t tap in the Korean design to meet its target.

The most likely technology to fulfill Trump’s order would be the Westinghouse AP1000. Despite the massive cost overruns, Vogtle Unit 4 came in faster and cheaper than Vogtle Unit 3, and the completion for four AP1000s in China has helped bring down the cost. Now that the supply chains are established, the workforce is trained, and the design wrinkles are ironed out, modeling by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Koroush Shirvan projects that building another AP1000 would be the cheapest option for the U.S.’s next reactor.

3. Opening the door to recycling nuclear waste

The “industrial base” order calls for a study into how the U.S. could set up a program to recycle and reprocess nuclear waste.

Readers of this newsletter may recall my reporting on this subject last month. The nation’s stockpile of spent nuclear fuel is largely seen as a liability, given that the U.S. has had no permanent waste disposal solution. The U.S. had built a permanent repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but former President Barack Obama canceled the project in a move the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan in-house federal watchdog, declared a political decision, largely caving to pressure from then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

But part of what makes nuclear waste so radioactive is that it contains most of the energy locked in the uranium. So much, in fact, that within the U.S. stockpile of spent fuel there’s enough energy to supply the country’s power needs for more than a century.

This has spurred new interest in reprocessing and recycling that waste, as the French and Russians already do. The U.S. had started construction on a reprocessing plant in the 1970s, but then-President Jimmy Carter shut it down as a sacrifice at the altar of non-proliferation. Around that time, India became the first country to get the bomb since the signing of the global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The infrastructure for extracting fuel from waste mirrors what’s needed to enrich radioactive materials to weapons-grade levels. To show Washington was serious about limiting production of new warheads, Carter banned reprocessing. Former President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban a few years later. But between the billions of dollars the developer lost on the project and the federal government promising to take responsibility for nuclear waste, it was no longer worthwhile for an investor to pump money into a commercial reprocessing facility.

That has begun to change. Companies including the French nuclear fuel giant Orano and U.S. startups including Oklo and Curio LV are working on bringing reprocessing to America.

But the provision has already drawn a backlash from the Obama-era Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who warned that embracing recycling encouraged more countries to develop atomic weapons.

4. Ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do more with fewer staff

Despite the Trump administration’s push to speed up new nuclear plants, the president wants the federal regulator to do more with less.

The NRC order directs the agency to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization.”

Still, the order indicated that “certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”

5. Reassessing how we measure danger from radiation

The NRC order directs the agency to “reconsider” its reliance on the linear no-threshold model for radiation exposure that has long governed how the federal government measures nuclear risks.

The model assumes that even the smallest amount of radiation exposure increases cancer risks over time, requiring a standard of reducing radiation exposure to levels “as low as reasonably achievable.”

The so-called LNT model is controversial. The approach “fails numerous toxicological stress tests,” according to a paper published in 2022 by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Edward Calabrese.

A 2020 paper in the journal Dose Response argued that the “LNT model is incorrect and was adopted based upon false pretenses.”

“The use of the model has been corrupted by many to claim that even the smallest ionizing radiation dose may initiate carcinogenesis,” the authors wrote. “This claim has resulted in societal harm.”

Sources who reviewed the Trump administration’s earlier drafts of the order said the White House initially proposed eliminating the use of the LNT altogether, and welcomed the final order’s more cautious approach.

6. Spending federal dollars to shore up the nuclear supply chain

Guaranteeing the federal government will buy things is one of the most effective tools a president has to spur the private sector toward specific ends. To that end, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act, a relatively obscure Korean War-era statute, to encourage manufacturing of solar equipment and heat pumps.

As part of his “industrial base” order, Trump pledged to spend money through that same law on not just reactors but procurements of nuclear fuel. That includes not just the traditional low-enriched uranium that powers the nation’s reactors, but also the High Assay Low Enriched Uranium, or HALEU, that is needed for certain advanced reactors.

7. Ending National Labs’ monopoly on reactor testing

Right now, companies can partner with national laboratories to construct pilot versions of new reactors on site to prove out the technologies.

As part of the reactor testing order, Trump ordered the Energy Department to establish a new pilot program that would authorize test reactors under the agency’s “sufficient control” to be built outside of the labs.

8. Easing security rules so it’s no longer so militarized

If you go to any nuclear power plant in the U.S., prepare to see a lot of guys wielding assault rifles. Atomic power stations are basically designed to be staffed with an on-site militia as if the plant were operating in a warzone, a measure that ramped up after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

That may change.

Under the NRC reform order, Trump called on the agency to “revise the Reactor Oversight Process and reactor security rules and requirements to reduce unnecessary burdens and be responsive to credible risks.”

9. Exporting American nuclear technology to 20 more countries

Bangladesh, Egypt and Turkey are currently building their first nuclear power plants. All of them are working with Russia to do so.

The Kremlin’s state-owned Rosatom dominates global nuclear exports. China, which so far has only exported its reactor technology to Pakistan, is expected to start selling its atomic wares overseas in the coming years.

The U.S. has a long way to go to compete, not least of which because federal law requires special treaties called 123 Agreements to be approved by Congress before American companies can sell nuclear technologies to any foreign country. The U.S. currently has 25 such 123 Agreements covering 49 countries.

But the Trump administration’s Defense Department order called for the U.S. to “aggressively pursue at least 20 new 123 Agreements by the close of the 120th Congress to enable the United States nuclear industry to access new markets in partner countries.”

10. Loosening rules for licensing next-generation reactors

In 2023, the NRC voted to regulate nuclear fusion technology under a completely different legal framework than the fission that comprises modern nuclear generation today. The move was hailed at the time as a victory for the nascent fusion power sector, freeing the so-called holy grail of clean energy from the onerous restrictions that have made fission difficult to build.

Trump just ordered the NRC to do something similar for next-generation fission reactors.

Unlike the first three generations of reactors, so-called “advanced” or fourth-generation reactors use coolants other than water and come in a wide variety of sizes.

At least, they would – in theory. China last year beat the U.S. to hook up its first reactor cooled with a high temperature gas up to the grid. Beijing has several more in the works right now. The U.S. is, as a result, more than a decade behind.

To catch up, the Trump administration ordered the NRC to regulate so-called Generation IV as if they’re research or medical reactors under the Atomic Energy Act. That could dramatically speed up the time it takes to license the nation’s first such reactor.

11. Stopping the NRC from doubling up on what other agencies do

Currently, the Defense Department or the Energy Department can approve and build pilot reactors. But if the company wants to commercialize that technology, the NRC won’t consider the other agencies’ approvals in its own process.

As part of the NRC reform order, Trump directed the regulator to “establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”

12. Saving a bunch of plutonium waste to use as fuel

Under the “industrial base” order, Trump directed the Energy Department to halt a program to dilute and bury a bunch of plutonium, the highly radioactive material used in weapons.

Some next-generation reactor technologies can use plutonium as a fuel. Rather than waste the material, Trump has ordered the Energy Department to “establish a program to dispose of surplus plutonium by processing and making it available to industry in a form that can be utilized for the fabrication of fuel for advanced nuclear technologies”

13. Using the Energy Department’s embattled lender to improve existing plants

The Energy Department's Loan Programs Office has been under assault since the start of Trump’s presidency. The agency’s in-house lender, with a $400 billion loan authority, has faced major staffing cuts as questions swirled over whether Trump would shut it down.

In March, this newsletter reported that the Energy Department had approved the LPO to disburse only its second tranche of money since Trump took office to pay out pledged funding to finance the first-ever reopening of a closed nuclear plant in the U.S. Last month, advocates across the industry and political spectrum signed onto a letter calling on the Trump administration to preserve the LPO as a tool for rebuilding the nuclear industry.

In the industrial base order, Trump appears to have taken the calls to heart. The order directs the LPO to “prioritize activities that support nuclear energy, including actions to make available resources for restarting closed nuclear power plants, increasing power output of operating nuclear power plants, completing construction of nuclear reactors that was prematurely suspended, constructing new advanced nuclear reactors, and improving all associated aspects of the nuclear fuel supply chain.”

Whether that’s possible with a staff that’s cut by as much as 60% remains to be seen.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Ta’m-e Gilās” by Parviz, the music moniker of the Paris-based composer and producer Alain Parviz Soltani, whose lush jazzy house grooves aim to capture the musical sounds of pre-revolutionary Iran. I fell in love immediately with this track and its album art. I hope you enjoy.

Signing off from a brisk Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where parents are reportedly trying to stop the city from allowing an electric vehicle charging station to replace a former KFC that’s been shuttered for years. The reasoning? Supposed health risks. Never mind the fact that if you walk a block in each direction, there are gas stations.

Five years after President Donald Trump signaled his support for extracting metals from the moon, his new administration is seeking to satisfy the United States’ hunger for critical minerals by encouraging mining under the polar ice caps, amid warzones, and at the bottom of the ocean.

A breakthrough by a startup backed by two of the world’s biggest mining companies points to a different path to obtaining the metals needed for manufacturing next-generation energy and defense technologies: Microbes.

Last week, the Denver-based company Endolith announced the completion of tests on whether its mix of genetically-modified microbes could extract significant amounts of copper from the type of low-grade, hard-to-process ores left over in mining waste that make up 70% of the world’s known reserves of the metal.

The results “outperformed conventional approaches to low-grade heap leaching and revealed new value in mineralized waste previously considered uneconomic to process.”

In other words, the company said it proved its “microscopic miners” are “remarkably good at extracting metals that conventional chemistry leaves behind,” Endolith CEO Liz Dennett told me, noting that her company was prepared to deploy its microbes at scale.

"We don't need to mine the moon or venture 20,000 leagues under the sea to solve our copper shortage,” she told me over email. “The microbes have been doing this work for billions of years, we're just finally paying attention.”

The U.S. federal government is just starting to pump money into researching the use of microbes for mining. The Australian mining behemoth BHP provided Endolith with funding for testing and site-matched ore samples through its in-house innovation program. The London-based metals giant Rio Tinto, meanwhile, backed the Founders Factory startup accelerator that helped Endolith get started. Still, neither company has made a formal investment into Endolith.

Here’s how Endolith’s process works: First, the company analyzes the ore and the native microbes – which include both bacteria and archaea, the tinier single-celled organisms – at each site to understand the baseline conditions. Then, using a microbial library and genomic techniques, its researchers select and adapt strains that are best suited to the specific mineralogy and conditions of the site.

Once that’s established, Endolith grows the optimized microbes in portable bioreactors, ensuring that the microbes are fresh and consistent to the location. Finally, the company adds the microbes via liquid sprinkled or dripped onto heaps of wasted dirt at the mine, and continuously monitors the activity to make real-time adjustments to maximize how much copper the microbes are recovering.

“We're creating a new industrial paradigm at the intersection of biology and mining,” said Dennett, who earned a Ph.D in geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to work at NASA’s astrobiology program and run data architecture for Amazon Web Services before founding Endolith. “Our goal is simple: reshape supply chains for the most important technology transitions of our lifetime."

Extracting metals with microbes is nothing new. The process of using microbes to convert copper ions in liquid into metal through calcification dates back more than 2,000 years. While the actual biological function wasn’t yet understood, Han dynasty prince Liu An described using water to concentrate copper as far back as 120 BCE, a method Chinese scientists later put into practice in 1086 under the Northern Song dynasty.

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that miners found convincing evidence showing “that microbes were active participants in leaching copper and some other metals from ores,” according to a 2003 paper from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In recent years, scientists have ratcheted up research into different kinds of bacteria that could be used to produce rare earth metals. But there’s been little commercial activity outside laboratories.

Endolith’s test results are a “significant and potentially meaningful step forward in the field,” said Patricio Martínez Bellange, the director of biomining at Universidad Andrés Bello’s Center for Sustainable Biotechnology in Chile.

“While further validation is necessary, Endolith's reported results represent a promising advancement in unlocking significant copper resources from low-grade ores in a potentially more sustainable manner,” he told me in a LinkedIn message after reviewing the company’s announcement. “This could indeed be a meaningful milestone in the quest for a more secure and environmentally responsible supply of critical minerals.”

Still, he cautioned that different ore types, “the long-term stability of the microbial cultures under industrial conditions, and the overall economics at scale will need to be thoroughly evaluated.”

Competition with the naturally-occurring microbes at mines represents “the next challenge” to “fully scaling up this process in the field,” said Buz Barstow, an associate professor of biological engineering at Cornell University.

If Endolith’s real-time monitoring “can solve this problem,” then they will truly be onto something,” said Barstow, who reviewed the company’s announcement for this newsletter.

But one solution can beget another problem. “If they do solve this problem,” he said, “then it creates the new problem of containment of these genetically-engineered microbes.”

These are still the early days of researching biomining, Barstow said. National funding for researching metal-mining microbes has been scarce.

That was starting to turn around. In 2023, the National Science Foundation opened the door to financing research into the nascent field. Barstow said he and colleagues proposed a project called the Microbe-Mineral Atlas, consisting of 22 principal investigators at 11 universities in four countries – the U.S., Britain, Japan and Canada – that would discover new knowledge about how microbes interact with minerals and metals and how they could be engineered for biomining.

The British, Japanese and Canadian funders rejected the project as “too ambitious,” he said. But the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation “took a risk on the U.S. part of the team, and gave us a small down payment on the funding we asked for.”

Since January, Barstow said, his team has been working on sampling microbes from “geologically unusual environments, trying to figure out new genes that control mineral and metal interactions.”

But his hopes are dimming now with the Trump administration slashing all kinds of federal grants.

“With funding cuts from the government,” Barstow said, “this type of work is in danger of never getting off the ground.”

Original reporting like this doesn’t come easily. I spent hours interviewing sources, writing this newsletter and editing what you read. Please consider supporting this independent journalism by subscribing for just $5 per month: https://kaufman.substack.com/subscribe

PROGRAMING NOTES: On Tuesday, I joined Latitude Media as a contributing reporter, where I’ll be covering all kinds of energy stories but putting a particular focus on the technologies and strategies for averting blackouts and building more climate-resilient infrastructure. Send me pitches: alexander@latitudemedia.com.

It’s a part-time gig. I’ll still be writing at plenty of other places, including – of course – this newsletter. But you can expect to see a lot more of my work over at Latitude, which I have long considered one of the most solid and serious sites covering the energy transition.

I published a story there Tuesday on Blackstone’s $11.5 billion purchase of the Albuquerque-based utility TXNM, yet another big bet on the future growth of electricity demand. On Wednesday, I published a second story examining the mounting political scrutiny tech companies are facing over their data centers' thirst for natural gas.

That same morning, I had a story go up on Canary Media highlighting the startling toll coal-fired steel plants take on the air in the cities where America's last blast furnaces are located.

On Tuesday night – I guess very early Wednesday morning, to be precise – I made my first appearance on CNN International to discuss the findings of a dire new study on the threat melting polar ice poses, even if the world keeps warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial averages.

I posted a few new TikToks on Alaska’s controversial hydroelectric proposal, the effects of China’s rare earths embargo, and Germany’s decision to side with France on nuclear power. If you’re on the platform, follow me there or on YouTube, where I’m reposting most of the videos.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Samba” by Impreshn, a Houston-based beatmaker who apparently shares my fondness for midcentury Brazilian sounds.

Signing off from a rainy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where — as I described in a post on Warpcast — tragedy struck the other night when I accidentally snapped the stem bearing my orchid’s first two new blossoms all year in a mad fury to wipe away the sticky white mites that I just saw infested the planet: A painful reminder that the world is filled with beasts and pests whose bottomless, mindless appetites devour beauty so ravenously that even gentle hands seeking to save become destroyers.

Last month, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung back after four straight days of losses, I called Wilbur Ross.

The billionaire investor, who served as the secretary of the Department of Commerce during President Donald Trump’s first term, wasn’t surprised by his former boss’s ham-fisted attempt to reshape global trade.

“This is vintage Trump,” Wilbur Ross told me over the phone.

It wasn’t how Ross would have done things. Throughout our hour-long phone call on April 22, he said “the chaos, frankly, was pretty much inevitable.” He complained that Trump should have cut taxes before embarking on a worldwide trade war that included tariffs on islands populated only by penguins. He feared the White House was pushing the legal limits of what a president can do without Congress on tariffs.

“People voted for him presumably knowing that he was going to be tough on tariffs in general, and particularly in terms of China — though I don’t think anybody had any idea that he would go quite as far as he has in fact gone,” Ross said.

On Tuesday, the business magazine Sherwood News published a Q&A featuring the bulk of my conversation with Ross about tariffs. But the former secretary and I spoke for an extra 15 minutes exclusively for this newsletter.

In our bonus conversation, we discussed oil prices, what it will take to bring critical mineral production back to the U.S., what Florida shows us about adapting to climate change, and what’s so amusing about nuclear energy skeptics vacationing in Paris.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Independent, original journalism takes time and effort. Please consider supporting this newsletter by upgrading to a paid subscription for just $5 per month.

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Alexander C. Kaufman: This newsletter is about energy. What effects do you see the tariffs having on energy?

Wilbur Ross: Energy, as you know, is a very complicated thing in and of itself. Let's focus for a moment on oil. First, what’s strange to me is that prior presidents, especially Biden, had sanctions on Russian oil and on Iranian oil. But they never really enforced them. They let both Russia and Iran continue to sell oil to China and to India. That, to me, is a great paradox. There’s not too much point to putting sanctions on something if you’re not going to enforce it.

Secondly, you have the wildcard of [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel]. While many of the OPEC countries tend to produce pretty much at capacity, there’s always some spare capacity. They, especially the Saudis, have historically shown a willingness to constrict supply if they don’t like the price.

That brings us to the U.S. Most shale oil needs a price in the $60s to make any sense to go forward and keep exploiting the resources. Opinions differ. Is it low $60s? The high $60s? But certainly at prices in that range, a little bit above, there’s no question that there’s plenty of oil that can be brought out pretty quickly. Shale oil in particular is very quick to be able to extract, so I’m not too worried about [our supply], depending on how these various variables play out.

Are you concerned about the ability to ramp up domestic supplies of different minerals like the ones China is embargoing?

With critical minerals, the real issue is not the ores themselves, not the raw materials. The critical issue is processing. What China has done is they’re dominating the world’s processing, because they drove prices so low through subsidies that it’s not economical to process.

The U.S., in fact, has lots of reserves of critical materials. But there’s only one fairly major facility that’s been developed and is capable of producing a lot. That’s the so-called Mountain Pass mine. But there’s many others that could be activated fairly quickly. What we would have to do is make up our mind that we, as a country, we’re going to subsidize the processing.

I tried to get that going in Trump 1.0. I just couldn’t get enough support. It was hard enough getting support for the CHIPS Act. But a lot of the Republicans and some of the Democratic members of Congress don’t like the idea of subsidizing private-sector companies.

Ideally, what form should those subsidies take? Defense Production Act spending? Tax credits?

There are a whole lot of forms. The simplest forms would probably be for the Department of Defense simply to enter into long-term purchase contracts at high prices. But there are plenty of forms. The form of doing it is in many ways simpler than the CHIPS Act because it takes a particularly long time to build a chip facility and to train the people to operate it.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company literally took hundreds of Americans from Arizona, hired them and – at the company’s expense – spent six months in Taiwan educating them on how to make cutting-edge semiconductors. That’s a harder challenge in some ways than the refining of these critical materials.

I know you’ve done a lot of investment in insurance, and understand the insurance industry well. What effects do you see climate change currently having on insurance? Between some of what we’ve seen in California and Florida, what do you see as the logical end point?

As you’re probably aware, my main residence is in Florida. So, we are very exposed to hurricanes, and therefore two problems. One is what they charge for insurance. But also just getting the insurance. Finding someone who’s willing to make a quote is somewhat challenging.

In California, in the more hazardous areas, it’s extremely difficult to get insurance coverage. Indeed, some of the houses that were burned down did not have insurance. They apparently hadn’t been able to get it, or didn’t want to pay the premium. So, insurance is a big problem.

Interestingly, insurance is also an issue in the sanctions. One of the ways to make it harder for people to export goods that you sanction is to lean on the insurance companies and get them not to insure the cargos. People are very afraid in today’s world to be shipping big, valuable, multi-billion-dollar cargos without insurance cover. So insurance is important in a lot of ways to the economy. And it’s a problem.

It’s partly a problem because interest rates are lower than they had been. The reason that’s a problem is that where the insurance companies make a lot of their profit is by the rate of return they earn on the premiums before they have to pay out claims. So, insurance earnings are fairly sensitive both to natural disasters and to interest rates.

So, what do you do as natural disasters get worse? Is it a game of modifying the assets that are insured such that they can better withstand increased fires or storms? Or is there something fundamental that has to change about insurance?

In Florida, for example, the building code standards have been tightened a lot over the years. By and large, it's mostly the buildings from before 1972, when I think they put in the first really strict code, that are vulnerable. Some of those were properly built. My house in Palm Beach was built in 1930. It has withstood all these storms. That doesn't mean it will succeed in withstanding the next one. But at least it gives you good hope.

Whereas on the west coast of Florida, which has been particularly badly hit, a very high percent of those are pretty modest structures that predated the stricter building codes. A lot has to do with that. A lot also has to do with what is the elevation of the property above the high-tide level. The worst thing is, if a hurricane hits in high tide and you get flooding to compound the wind, you've got a real double whammy.

Do you think that the state needs to further increase the strictness of the building codes in order to account for the changes to weather?

I can't speak for California, but I think the recent code increases in Florida probably are very close to being adequate, except for the properties that are located too close to sea level and are right on the water. Those there's not much you can do about.

After the disaster with the big, old condominium project in Miami, Florida put a rule that the condos – many of which were built in the ‘50s, and a lot of which have been under maintained

– had to retain a third-party consultant to tell them how much money they would need for maintenance over the next 10 years, and then to get that appropriated. It's caused a bit of turmoil in the market for those properties. But it's a pretty good way of helping solve the problem by being properly maintained.

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, has been pushing for a carbon border adjustment mechanism – essentially a tariff on imports made with higher carbon emissions, akin to what the European Union has put in place. Are you bullish on its potential to pass?

The place that is easiest to adopt something like that is Europe, because Europe fundamentally doesn't produce very much hydrocarbons. It’s all imports. It’s tricker to do it in the U.S., because so much of our consumption of hydrocarbons is domestically produced. The carbon adjustment mechanism varies a lot by country. Personally, I think that Europe has been more or less trying to use it as a protectionist measure as much as anything else

Then what do you think? Is it something the U.S. may adopt?

It’s complicated here. Under Trump, we were becoming a net exporter [of fossil fuels]. The arithmetic for a net exporter is quite different from the arithmetic for a net importer like Europe.

I see.

It seems to me that those measures really only work if they’re universal. One of the problems that nobody seems to want to talk about, relating to China, is that China is adding to pollution every year, even though they build a lot of hydro and a lot of nuclear. They’re resorting to coal.

In Germany, because the wind apparently hasn’t been very effective, they’re also using a lot of coal. It’s complicated. You really have to drill down.

Since you brought up nuclear, what is your general view on the so-called nuclear renaissance?

Well, I'm pro nuclear. I’m very surprised that the people who are concerned about carbon also tend to be anti-nuclear. When you go back over history, Chernobyl was a very strange one-off circumstance. So was Fukushima in Japan. But other than those two, nuclear has been relatively trouble free throughout its life. It amuses me that people who are anti-nuke are very happy to spend their vacation in France, when France is basically [run] all on nuclear power.

Do the tariffs risk any of the nuclear resurgence that we have been seeing in the US?

I don't think tariffs are the issue. I think public acceptance is the issue for nuclear.

I know I've gone over time, so any closing thoughts before I let you go?

No, I think you've done a very good job X-raying me. Thank you.

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PROGRAMING NOTES: This newsletter will be launching a new weekly feature – a roundup of stories I’m reading – starting soon. Stay tuned.

Since I last wrote to you, I had another story published in The Atlantic, this time on the paradox of the Trump administration’s policy on critical minerals.

My first piece with Sherwood News covered a similar topic; it was a feature on the magnet manufacturer USA Rare Earth’s stock market debut, in which the company’s chief executive talked about what kind of federal policy is required to bring production of rare earth elements and the magnets made from them back to the U.S.

I also started writing for the excellent energy publication, Latitude Media. My first two stories were an analysis piece on the slate of legislation in California seeking to make the state the top destination for geothermal energy developments, and a scoop on nuclear developer Holtec International’s plans to establish its small modular reactor hub in Utah.

Over at Canary Media, I had a news story about solar panel recycler OnePlanet’s plans to build a first-of-a-kind plant outside Jacksonville, Florida.

Last Thursday, I was back on my regular slot on the BBC World Service program “Business Matters,” talking about Trump's mineral deal in Ukraine, why Japan could beat tariffs by working with the U.S. on nuclear and geothermal, and the surprising dark side to the otherwise healthy trend of young people drinking less.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Barcode” by the Norwegian DJ and producer Bård Berg. It’s a smooth, jazzy house track with a crisp, driving beat and a crooning, reverby trumpet. Listening to the song brought me back to a vacation my wife and I took to Oslo, Berg’s home city, back in 2022.

Signing off from a dewy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the linden trees, Bradford pears and gingkoes that line our streets are bursting with fragrant pollen and fresh leaves that flail in the wind and entertain my daughter Eve’s curious, clearing eyes like natural mobiles dancing above her stroller on our daily walk.

Spent fuel from nuclear reactors sits in storage at roughly 80 locations across the United States, awaiting a final solution. One option is to entomb radioactive waste underground for millennia, as Finland is doing. But permanent burial proved politically impossible in America after Nevadans – whose swing-state votes presidential candidates from both parties covet – successfully blocked the underground facility at Yucca Mountain from ever opening. Another option is to recycle the spent fuel, as the French and Russians do.

There is enough energy still contained in the nation’s stockpile of nuclear waste to power U.S. electricity needs for a century. But the traditional method for reprocessing nuclear waste into fresh fuel is fairly close to what you’d need to make weapons-grade radioactive materials. That’s why then-President Jimmy Carter banned commercial nuclear waste recycling in 1977, canceling a debut project on which investors had already spent billions of dollars and effectively killing the industry, since no one wanted to take on that kind of risk again even after Ronald Reagan lifted the prohibition just a few years later. India had just become the first country since the signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to get the bomb. Since the U.S. reactor buildout was slowing down anyway, Carter saw America’s first waste recycling plant as a worthy sacrifice at the altar of peace.

With electricity demand surging yet again and climate change putting a premium on atomic energy’s zero carbon output, the U.S. is planning a new reactor-building spree. Now Orano, the French state-owned nuclear fuel company that runs Europe’s leading waste reprocessing plant at La Hague, is getting serious about finally bringing recycling to American shores.

On Wednesday, Orano is set to announce a new partnership with the Washington, D.C.-based waste recycling startup Curio LV to buy reprocessed uranium to make fresh fuel in the U.S. and set up a new industry alliance to bolster the effort, this newsletter can exclusively report.

It’s part of the French behemoth’s push into the U.S.

Orano struck a similar deal last year with SHINE Technologies to help the Wisconsin-based company take apart nuclear waste to extract valuable isotopes.

In January, Orano forged a tentative partnership with Curio. The latest agreement cements that relationship, teeing up Orano and Curio to work on all aspects of recycling nuclear waste in the U.S., including leading a coalition of companies urging federal and state officials to clear a path for building the new industry from scratch.

“Here in the U.S., this conversation about reprocessing and recycling is all of a sudden hitting a higher pitch,” Curtis Roberts II, a U.S. spokesman for Orano, told me by phone.

Curio has connections that can help raise the volume for Orano. The Trump administration has expressed support for nuclear waste recycling. Before joining Curio, chief executive Edward McGinnis capped off more than a decade spent working on atomic power at the Department of Energy by serving as President Donald Trump’s first-term director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“It’s a very good sign that an all-American startup like ours is partnering with a world-leading company such as Orano from France, with all its experience,” McGinnis told me. “It’s an extremely good sign for the United States and the future of our nuclear competitiveness.”

The deal isn’t just about political ties. Curio’s technology is also designed to ease concerns over weapons proliferation. Unlike the PUREX process Orano uses at La Hague, which relies on nitric acid to dissolve waste products and extract valuable materials, Curio uses high-temperature heat and electricity. Rather than separating out plutonium, a key product for warheads, Curio produces a mixed, transuranic fuel.

McGinnis said that allows Curio to get around American “sensitivities” when it comes to recycling nuclear waste. But Roberts said Orano’s traditional approach served a vital role as “a proven process that’s been done for years.”

“It could easily be stood up in the U.S., so there’s quick implementation,” Roberts said. “But the Curio approach… has a lot of modern efficiencies.”

Either way, Orano cautioned that commercial recycling is still in its early days in the U.S., despite support that ranges from progressive New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Trump.

“It’s not even a nascent industry yet,” Roberts said. ‘We’re still looking to figure out the funding for the technology. It all depends on how the federal government develops its approach.”

In the meantime, Curio is looking to the states. McGinnis said he’s spoken at the state capitals in Arkansas, Louisiana, Utah and Washington in recent months

PROGRAMMING NOTES: Since I last wrote to you, I had a few pieces published in Canary Media – one on Hyundai’s big low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana, the other on a bipartisan bill to boost green building materials sailing through Congress.

I had a scoop in Heatmap on geothermal company XGS’s latest round of funding, which doubled as a small feature on why the nuclear industry seems so drawn to this particular startup in the industry. For GZERO Media, I wrote about why Afghanistan's critical minerals could be a major factor in the thawing relations between the U.S. and the Taliban.

I also made my debut in The Atlantic, where I wrote about a feature on the rise of geothermal power.

If you’re looking for a Twitter – er, X – alternative, I wanted to plug Warpcast, the site I have been posting on for the past month. It’s smaller than Bluesky, and much more focused on things like crypto and web3. But it’s a super engaged, thoughtful and politically omnivorous community where I have really had a lot of fun conversations recently. I’m sticking around there to keep growing my following, and I encourage you to consider it.

Finally, here’s the biggest news of all – perhaps the biggest news of my entire life. On Friday, right at the start of Shabbat, my wife Amanda gave birth to our first child, a healthy and beautiful baby girl named Eve Basha Kaufman. As I wrote this newsletter to you today, I was nodding off from exhaustion. (Please forgive any typos!) But she is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I used to think it was some hyperbolic cliche for parents to say stuff like that. But the moment I first held her at the hospital in Manhattan, I understood. I would love to share a photo with you, but we are not posting public images of her online. I’m too disturbed by the trajectory of facial recognition technology, AI and algorithms, and I want to help her make an informed choice of her own about how to share her own data. If you know me in real life, however, feel free to reach out for a cute one. I’m eager to brag.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Take A Ride” by T. Markakis, a producer from Greece who has – in my opinion – created a song with all the ingredients for a perfect house track: the driving beat, the plunking glassy percussion, the airy chords, the soulful reverby vocal sample, the light orchestral strings at the end, the bass-slapping crescendo.

For now, yawning off from a brisk Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I’m lucky to have an extremely generous and loving mother-in-law to help swaddle my little Eve.

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely-watched parliamentary elections in modern history – possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump returned to power vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: Bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the U.S. but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.

More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.

The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect. But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.

That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island.

“With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me in an interview for this newsletter.

That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party – whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise – appealing to voters.

In its manifesto, the center-right party – known as the Democrats – said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”

“The sad truth is that the new fisheries law will harm the earnings of individual fishermen overall, while the economy will also deteriorate,” the document reads. “This means that there will be less money to improve the healthcare system. Less money to raise the level of primary schools. Less money to ensure better daycare institutions. Less money for the elderly. Less money for sports. In short; less money to run the country in the best possible way.”

The Democrats gained seven seats in Greenland’s single-chamber legislature, the Inatsisartut, seizing roughly one-third of the 31-seat parliament.

Keldsen said the party won a clear mandate to reform the fisheries law.

What the new government does besides that depends largely on which party the Democrats form a coalition with.

The centrist party Naleraq, which is more pro-American and advocates the fastest-possible pathway to independence from Denmark, doubled its share of the parliament to eight seats, vaulting the party into second place.

“If you look at the Democrats, they focused on things that are important to people – housing, health care, education and growing the economy,” said Mads Qvist Frederiksen, the executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, a regional business group that includes Greenlandic industry.

“Independence from Denmark and Donald Trump did not take up a lot of the campaign,” he told me by phone. “But for Naleraq, it did.”

The party managed to secure most of the votes in the less populous northern reaches of Greenland, where its populist message played better than in the more populous, cosmopolitan and industrialized south. Given its strength in the new parliament, it’s a natural opposition party.

That makes an alliance between the Democrats and the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which controlled the outgoing government, more likely. Another potential coalition partner may be the pro-Denmark Atassut party, which came in fifth place.

But Keldsen warned that the Democrats are “fairly open” to “all scenarios.”

“If you take the Naleraq situation, they’re more aligned on business, but they stand far from each other on sovereignty,” he said. “With the IA, they’re very close on sovereignty, but very far apart on business.”

Siumut – a center-left party that held the junior role in the outgoing governing coalition – fell from second to fourth place this time, likely because once-loyal voters affected by the fisheries law jumped ship to the Democrats this time. That could make a tie-up with the Democrats harder.

The one thing uniting all parties: Opposition to becoming part of the U.S.

In a joint statement issued on March 13, two days after the election, the heads of all five parties condemned Trump’s “repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland.”

“As party chairmen, we find this behavior unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance,” they wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. Survey data on public opinion in Greenland was scarce ahead of the election. But 85% of Greenlanders opposed joining the U.S. in a poll taken in January, while just 56% backed independence.

The soundtrack to this edition of the newsletter is “Astéroïde,” a 2023 deep-house remix of Parisian composer Joël Fajerman’s 1978 jazz hit by the producers Matoux and Teuteu. It’s smooth and warm and builds in that satisfying way deep house does, layering on so many different sounds then peeling back the track to accentuate just one little lick. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Signing off from sunny Washington, D.C., where I spoke this morning about my journalism career at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s latest communications forum.