Jan 18 2025
Interest in nuclear power is surging. Is it enough to build new reactors?

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Lately, the vibes have been good for nuclear power. Public support is building, and public and private funding have made the technology more economical in key markets. There’s also a swell of interest from major companies looking to power their data centers. 

These shifts have been great for existing nuclear plants. We’re seeing efforts to boost their power output, extend the lifetime of old reactors, and even reopen facilities that have shut down. That’s good news for climate action, because nuclear power plants produce consistent electricity with very low greenhouse-gas emissions.

I covered all these trends in my latest story, which digs into what’s next for nuclear power in 2025 and beyond. But as I spoke with experts, one central question kept coming up for me: Will all of this be enough to actually get new reactors built?

To zoom in on some of these trends, let’s take a look at the US, which has the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world (and the oldest, with an average age of over 42 years).

In recent years we’ve seen a steady improvement in public support for nuclear power in the US. Today, around 56% of Americans support more nuclear power, up from 43% in 2020, according to a Pew Research poll.

The economic landscape has also shifted in favor of the technology. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 includes tax credits specifically for operating nuclear plants, aimed at keeping them online. Qualifying plants can receive up to $15 per megawatt-hour, provided they meet certain labor requirements. (For context, in 2021, its last full year of operation, Palisades in Michigan generated over 7 million megawatt-hours.) 

Big Tech has also provided an economic boost for the industry—tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are all making deals to get in on nuclear.

These developments have made existing (or recently closed) nuclear power plants a hot commodity. Plants that might have been candidates for decommissioning just a few years ago are now candidates for license extension. Plants that have already shut down are seeing a potential second chance at life.

There’s also the potential to milk more power out of existing facilities through changes called uprates, which basically allow existing facilities to produce more energy by tweaking existing instruments and power generation systems. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved uprates totaling six gigawatts over the past two decades. That’s a small but certainly significant fraction of the roughly 97 gigawatts of nuclear on the grid today. 

Any reactors kept online, reopened, or ramped up spell good news for emissions. But expanding the nuclear fleet in the US will require not just making the most of existing assets, but building new reactors. 

We’ll probably also need new reactors just to maintain the current fleet, since so many reactors are scheduled to be retired in the next couple of decades. Will the enthusiasm for keeping old plants running also translate into building new ones? 

In much of the world (China being a notable exception), building new nuclear capacity has historically been expensive and slow. It’s easy to point at Plant Vogtle in the US: The third and fourth reactors at that facility began construction in 2009. They were originally scheduled to start up in 2016 and 2017, at a cost of around $14 billion. They actually came online in 2023 and 2024, and the total cost of the project was north of $30 billion.

Some advanced technology has promised to fix the problems in nuclear power. Small modular reactors could help cut cost and construction times, and next-generation reactors promise safety and efficiency improvements that could translate to cheaper, quicker construction. Realistically, though, getting these first-of-their-kind projects off the ground will still require a lot of money and a sustained commitment to making them happen. “The next four years are make or break for advanced nuclear,” says Jessica Lovering, cofounder at the Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that advocates for the use of nuclear energy.  

There are a few factors that could help the progress we’ve seen recently in nuclear extend to new builds. For one, public support from the US Department of Energy includes not only tax credits but public loans and grants for demonstration projects, which can be a key stepping stone to commercial plants that generate electricity for the grid. 

Changes to the regulatory process could also help. The Advance Act, passed in 2024, aims at sprucing up the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the hopes of making the approval process more efficient (currently, it can take up to five years to complete). 

“If you can see the NRC really start to modernize toward a more efficient, effective, and predictable regulator, it really helps the case for a lot of these commercial projects, because the NRC will no longer be seen as this barrier to innovation,” says Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank. We should start to see changes from that legislation this year, though what happens could depend on the Trump administration.

The next few years are crucial for next-generation nuclear technology, and how the industry fares between now and the end of the decade could be very telling when it comes to how big a role this technology plays in our longer-term efforts to decarbonize energy. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on what’s next for nuclear power, check out my latest story.

One key trend I’m following is efforts to reopen shuttered nuclear plants. Here’s how to do it.  

Kairos Power is working to build molten-salt-cooled reactors, and we named the company to our list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to watch in 2024.  

Another thing 

Devastating wildfires have been ravaging Southern California. Here’s a roundup of some key stories about the blazes. 

→ Strong winds have continued this week, bringing with them the threat of new fires. Here’s a page with live updates on the latest. (Washington Post)

→ Officials are scouring the spot where the deadly Palisades fire started to better understand how it was sparked. (New York Times)

→ Climate change didn’t directly start the fires, but global warming did contribute to how intensely they burned and how quickly they spread. (Axios) 

→The LA fires show that controlled burns aren’t a cure-all when it comes to preventing wildfires. (Heatmap News)

→ Seawater is a last resort when it comes to fighting fires, since it’s corrosive and can harm the environment when dumped on a blaze. (Wall Street Journal)

Keeping up with climate  

US emissions cuts stalled last year, despite strong growth in renewables. The cause: After staying flat or falling for two decades, electricity demand is rising. (New York Times)

With Donald Trump set to take office in the US next week, many are looking to state governments as a potential seat of climate action. Here’s what to look for in states including Texas, California, and Massachusetts. (Inside Climate News)

The US could see as many as 80 new gas-fired power plants built by 2030. The surge comes as demand for power from data centers, including those powering AI, is ballooning. (Financial Times)

Global sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids were up 25% in 2024 from the year before. China, the world’s largest EV market, is a major engine behind the growth. (Reuters)

A massive plant to produce low-emissions steel could be in trouble. Steelmaker SSAB has pulled out of talks on federal funding for a plant in Mississippi. (Canary Media)

Some solar panel companies have turned to door-to-door sales. Things aren’t always so sunny for those involved. (Wired)

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Jan 15 2025
What’s next for nuclear power

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

While nuclear reactors have been generating power around the world for over 70 years, the current moment is one of potentially radical transformation for the technology.

As electricity demand rises around the world for everything from electric vehicles to data centers, there’s renewed interest in building new nuclear capacity, as well as extending the lifetime of existing plants and even reopening facilities that have been shut down. Efforts are also growing to rethink reactor designs, and 2025 marks a major test for so-called advanced reactors as they begin to move from ideas on paper into the construction phase.

That’s significant because nuclear power promises a steady source of electricity as climate change pushes global temperatures to new heights and energy demand surges around the world. Here’s what to expect next for the industry.  

A global patchwork

The past two years have seen a new commitment to nuclear power around the globe, including an agreement at the UN climate talks that 31 countries pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. However, the prospects for the nuclear industry differ depending on where you look.

The US is currently home to the highest number of operational nuclear reactors in the world. If its specific capacity were to triple, that would mean adding a somewhat staggering 200 gigawatts of new nuclear energy capacity to the current total of roughly 100 gigawatts. And that’s in addition to replacing any expected retirements from a relatively old fleet. But the country has come to something of a stall. A new reactor at the Vogtle plant in Georgia came online last year (following significant delays and cost overruns), but there are no major conventional reactors under construction or in review by regulators in the US now.

This year also brings an uncertain atmosphere for nuclear power in the US as the incoming Trump administration takes office. While the technology tends to have wide political support, it’s possible that policies like tariffs could affect the industry by increasing the cost of building materials like steel, says Jessica Lovering, cofounder at the Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that advocates for the use of nuclear energy.

Globally, most reactors under construction or in planning phases are in Asia, and growth in China is particularly impressive. The country’s first nuclear power plant connected to the grid in 1991, and in just a few decades it has built the third-largest fleet in the world, after only France and the US. China has four large reactors likely to come online this year, and another handful are scheduled for commissioning in 2026.

This year will see both Bangladesh and Turkey start up their first nuclear reactors. Egypt also has its first nuclear plant under construction, though it’s not expected to undergo commissioning for several years.  

Advancing along

Commercial nuclear reactors on the grid today, and most of those currently under construction, generally follow a similar blueprint: The fuel that powers the reactor is low-enriched uranium, and water is used as a coolant to control the temperature inside.

But newer, advanced reactors are inching closer to commercial use. A wide range of these so-called Generation IV reactors are in development around the world, all deviating from the current blueprint in one way or another in an attempt to improve safety, efficiency, or both. Some use molten salt or a metal like lead as a coolant, while others use a more enriched version of uranium as a fuel. Often, there’s a mix-and-match approach with variations on the fuel type and cooling methods.

The next couple of years will be crucial for advanced nuclear technology as proposals and designs move toward the building process. “We’re watching paper reactors turn into real reactors,” says Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank.

Much of the funding and industrial activity in advanced reactors is centered in the US, where several companies are close to demonstrating their technology.

Kairos Power is building reactors cooled by molten salt, specifically a fluorine-containing material called Flibe. The company received a construction permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its first demonstration reactor in late 2023, and a second permit for another plant in late 2024. Construction will take place on both facilities over the next few years, and the plan is to complete the first demonstration facility in 2027.

TerraPower is another US-based company working on Gen IV reactors, though the design for its Natrium reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant. The company is taking a slightly different approach to construction, too: by separating the nuclear and non-nuclear portions of the facility, it was able to break ground on part of its site in June of 2024. It’s still waiting for construction approval from the NRC to begin work on the nuclear side, which the company expects to do by 2026.

A US Department of Defense project could be the first in-progress Gen IV reactor to generate electricity, though it’ll be at a very small scale. Project Pele is a transportable microreactor being manufactured by BWXT Advanced Technologies. Assembly is set to begin early this year, with transportation to the final site at Idaho National Lab expected in 2026.

Advanced reactors certainly aren’t limited to the US. Even as China is quickly building conventional reactors, the country is starting to make waves in a range of advanced technologies as well. Much of the focus is on high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, says Lorenzo Vergari, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. These reactors use helium gas as a coolant and reach temperatures over 1,500 °C, much higher than other designs.

China’s first commercial demonstration reactor of this type came online in late 2023, and a handful of larger reactors that employ the technology are currently in planning phases or under construction.

Squeezing capacity

It will take years, or even decades, for even the farthest-along advanced reactor projects to truly pay off with large amounts of electricity on the grid. So amid growing global electricity demand around the world, there’s renewed interest in getting as much power out of existing nuclear plants as possible.

One trend that’s taken off in countries with relatively old nuclear fleets is license extension. While many plants built in the 20th century were originally licensed to run for 40 years, there’s no reason many of them can’t run for longer if they’re properly maintained and some equipment is replaced.

Regulators in the US have granted 20-year extensions to much of the fleet, bringing the expected lifetime of many to 60 years. A handful of reactors have seen their licenses extended even beyond that, to 80 years. Countries including France and Spain have also recently extended licenses of operating reactors beyond their 40-year initial lifetimes. Such extensions are likely to continue, and the next few years could see more reactors in the US relicensed for up to 80-year lifetimes.

In addition, there’s interest in reopening shuttered plants, particularly those that have shut down recently for economic reasons. Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is the target of one such effort, and the project secured a $1.52 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to help with the costs of reviving it. Holtec, the plant’s owner and operator, is aiming to have the facility back online in 2025. 

However, the NRC has reported possible damage to some of the equipment at the plant, specifically the steam generators. Depending on the extent of the repairs needed, the additional cost could potentially make reopening uneconomical, White says.

A reactor at the former Three Mile Island Nuclear Facility is another target. The site’s owner says the reactor could be running again by 2028, though battles over connecting the plant to the grid could play out in the coming year or so. Finally, the owners of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa are reportedly considering reopening the nuclear plant, which shut down in 2020.

Big Tech’s big appetite

One of the factors driving the rising appetite for nuclear power is the stunning growth of AI, which relies on data centers requiring a huge amount of energy. Last year brought new interest from tech giants looking to nuclear as a potential solution to the AI power crunch.

Microsoft had a major hand in plans to reopen the reactor at Three Mile Island—the company signed a deal in 2024 to purchase power from the facility if it’s able to reopen. And that’s just the beginning.

Google signed a deal with Kairos Power in October 2024 that would see the startup build up to 500 megawatts’ worth of power plants by 2035, with Google purchasing the energy. Amazon went one step further than these deals, investing directly in X-energy, a company building small modular reactors. The money will directly fund the development, licensing, and construction of a project in Washington.

Funding from big tech companies could be a major help in keeping existing reactors running and getting advanced projects off the ground, but many of these commitments so far are vague, says Good Energy Collective’s Lovering. Major milestones to watch for include big financial commitments, contracts signed, and applications submitted to regulators, she says.

“Nuclear had an incredible 2024, probably the most exciting year for nuclear in many decades,” says Staffan Qvist, a nuclear engineer and CEO of Quantified Carbon, an international consultancy focused on decarbonizing energy and industry. Deploying it at the scale required will be a big challenge, but interest is ratcheting up. As he puts it, “There’s a big world out there hungry for power.”

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Jan 12 2025
2025 is a critical year for climate tech

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

I love the fresh start that comes with a new year. And one thing adding a boost to my January is our newest list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

In case you haven’t browsed this year’s list or a previous version, it features tech that’s either breaking into prominence or changing society. We typically recognize a range of items running from early-stage research to consumer technologies that folks are getting their hands on now.

As I was looking over the finished list this week, I was struck by something: While there are some entries from other fields that are three or even five years away, all the climate items are either newly commercially available or just about to be. It’s certainly apt, because this year in particular seems to be bringing a new urgency to the fight against climate change. We’re facing global political shifts and entering the second half of the decade. It’s time for these climate technologies to grow up and get out there.

Green steel

Steel is a crucial material for buildings and vehicles, and making it accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. New manufacturing methods could be a huge part of cleaning up heavy industry, and they’re just on the cusp of breaking into the commercial market.

One company, called Stegra, is close to starting up the world’s first commercial green steel plant, which will make the metal using hydrogen from renewable sources. (You might know this company by its former name, H2 Green Steel, as we included it on our 2023 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch.)

When I first started following Stegra a few years ago, its plans for a massive green steel plant felt incredibly far away. Now the company says it’s on track to produce steel at the factory by next year.

The biggest challenge in this space is money. Building new steel plants is expensive—Stegra has raised almost $7 billion. And the company’s product will be more expensive than conventional material, so it’ll need to find customers willing to pay up (so far, it has).

There are other efforts to clean up steel that will all face similar challenges around money, including another play in Sweden called Hybrit and startups like Boston Metal and Electra, which use different processes. Read more about green steel, and the potential obstacles it faces as we enter a new phase of commercialization, in this short blurb and in this longer feature about Stegra.

Cow burp remedies

Humans love burgers and steaks and milk and cheese, so we raise a whole bunch of cows. The problem is, these animals are among a group with a funky digestion process that produces a whole lot of methane (a powerful greenhouse gas). A growing number of companies are trying to develop remedies that help cut down on their methane emissions.

This is one of my favorite items on the list this year (and definitely my favorite illustration—at the very least, check out this blurb to enjoy the art).

There’s already a commercially available option right now: a feed additive called Bovaer from DSM-Firmenich that the company says can cut methane emissions by 30% in dairy cattle, and more in beef cattle. Startups are right behind with their own products, some of which could prove even better.

A key challenge all these companies face moving forward is acceptance: from regulatory agencies, farmers, and consumers. Some companies still need to go through lengthy and often expensive tests to show that their products are safe and effective. They’ll also need to persuade farmers to get on board. Some might also face misinformation that’s causing some consumers to protest these new additives.

Cleaner jet fuel

While planes crisscrossing the world are largely powered by fossil fuels, some alternatives are starting to make their appearance in aircraft.

New fuels, today mostly made from waste products like used cooking oil, can cut down emissions from air travel. In 2024, they made up about 0.5% of the fuel supply. But new policies could help these fuels break into new prominence, and new options are helping to widen their supply.

The key challenge here is scale. Global demand for jet fuel was about 100 billion gallons last year, so we’ll need a whole lot of volume from new producers to make a dent in aviation’s emissions.

To illustrate the scope, take LanzaJet’s new plant, opened in 2024. It’s the first commercial-scale facility that can make jet fuel with ethanol, and it has a capacity of about 9 million gallons annually. So we would need about 10,000 of those plants to meet global demand—a somewhat intimidating prospect. Read more in my write-up here.

From cow burps to jet fuel to green steel, there’s a huge range of tech that’s entering a new stage of deployment and will need to face new challenges in the next few years. We’ll be watching it all—thanks for coming along.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Check out our full list of 2025’s Breakthrough Technologies here. There’s also a poll where you can vote for what you think the 11th item should be. I’m not trying to influence anyone’s vote, but I think methane-detecting satellites are pretty interesting—just saying … 

This package is part of our January/February print issue, which also includes stories on: 

A Polestar electric car prepares to park at an EV charging station on July 28, 2023 in Corte Madera, California.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY

Another thing 

EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth in 2025, as my colleague James Temple covers in his newest story. Check it out for more about what’s next for electric vehicles, including what we might expect from a new administration in the US and how China is blowing everyone else out of the water. 

Keeping up with climate  

Winter used to be the one time of year that California didn’t have to worry about wildfires. A rapidly spreading fire in the southern part of the state is showing that’s not the case anymore. (Bloomberg)

Tesla’s annual sales decline for the first time in over a decade. Deliveries were lower than expected for the final quarter of the year. (Associated Press)

Meanwhile, in China, EVs are set to overtake traditional cars in sales years ahead of schedule. Forecasts suggest that EVs could account for 50% of car sales this year. (Financial Times)

KoBold metals raised $537 million in funding to use AI to mine copper. The funding pushes the startup’s valuation to $2.96 billion. (TechCrunch)
→ Read this profile of the company from 2021 for more. (MIT Technology Review)

We finally have the final rules for a tax credit designed to boost hydrogen in the US. The details matter here. (Heatmap)

China just approved the world’s most expensive infrastructure project. The hydroelectric dam could produce enough power for 300 million people, triple the capacity of the current biggest dam. (Economist)

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the White House’s roof. Although they came down just a few years later, the panels lived multiple lives afterward. I really enjoyed reading about this small piece of Carter’s legacy in the wake of his passing. (New York Times)

An open pit mine in California is the only one in the US mining and extracting rare earth metals including neodymium and praseodymium. This is a fascinating look at the site. (IEEE Spectrum) 
→ I wrote about efforts to recycle rare earth metals, and what it means for the long-term future of metal supply, in a feature story last year. (MIT Technology Review)

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Jan 4 2025
Cattle burping remedies: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

WHO

Blue Ocean Barns, DSM-Firmenich, Rumin8, Symbrosia

WHEN

Now

Companies are finally making real progress on one of the trickiest problems for climate change: cow burps. 

The world’s herds of cattle belch out methane as a by-product of digestion, as do sheep and goats. That powerful greenhouse gas makes up the single biggest source of livestock emissions, which together contribute 11% to 20% of the world’s total climate pollution, depending on the analysis.

It’s hard to meaningfully cut those emissions by reducing demand, simply because hamburgers, steaks, butter, and milk taste good—and a global population that’s growing larger and wealthier is only set to consume more of these foods. 

Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Enter the cattle burping supplement. DSM-Firmenich, a Netherlands-based conglomerate that produces fragrances, pharmaceuticals, and other products, has developed a feed supplement, Bovaer, that it says can cut methane emissions by 30% in dairy cattle and even more in beef cattle. It works by inhibiting an enzyme in the animals’ guts, which ordinarily helps convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide produced during digestion into the methane that they burp up. 

In May 2024, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for its use in the US. DSM says the additive is now available in more than 55 countries, including Australia, Brazil, and members of the European Union.

Meanwhile, startups like Blue Ocean Barns, Rumin8, and Symbrosia are developing, testing, or seeking approval for products derived from a type of red seaweed, which could reduce methane levels even further. Still other organizations are trying to tackle the problem in longer-lasting ways, by developing vaccines or altering the microbes in the guts of cattle.

It remains to be seen how many cattle farmers will pay for such products. But in the case of Bovaer, farmers who use it can earn greenhouse-gas credits that some companies will buy on voluntary carbon markets as a way to reduce their corporate climate footprints, according to Elanco, which is marketing the additive in the US. Meanwhile, Rumin8 says cattle taking its supplements could deliver more meat and milk.

The additives certainly don’t solve the whole problem. The cattle industry needs to take other major steps to cut its climate emissions, including halting its encroachment into carbon-absorbing forests. And to make any real dent in demand, food companies will have to develop better, cheaper, cleaner alternative products, like plant-based burgers and dairy substitutes.

But methane-cutting supplements increasingly look like a promising way to solve a big chunk of a very big problem.

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Jan 4 2025
Cleaner jet fuel: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

WHO

Gevo, LanzaJet, Montana Renewables, Neste, World Energy

WHEN

Now

All the world’s planes consumed roughly 100 billion gallons of jet fuel as they crisscrossed the planet in 2024. Only about 0.5% of it was something other than fossil fuel. That could soon change.

Alternative jet fuels could slash aviation emissions—which have caused about 4% of global warming to date. These new fuels can be made with materials like used cooking oils, crop residue, industrial waste, and carbon dioxide captured from the air. Depending on the source, they can reduce emissions by half or nearly eliminate them. And they can generally be used in existing planes, which could enable quick climate progress.

Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

More governments are now setting targets or passing legislation requiring airlines to begin using these alternative fuels (sometimes called sustainable aviation fuels, or SAFs). Starting this year, alternative fuels must make up at least 2% of the fuel used at airports in the European Union and UK. That mandate will ramp up in the coming decades, reaching 70% in the EU by 2050.

Today, nearly all commercially available alternative fuel is made with waste fats, oils, and greases. Montana Renewables recently got a $1.44 billion loan commitment from the US Department of Energy to expand one facility for such production. Still, these materials remain in limited supply.

Companies using other technologies and inputs are making progress scaling up. LanzaJet opened the first commercial-scale facility to make jet fuel from ethanol in early 2024, with a capacity of 9 million gallons annually. Synthetic fuels made with carbon dioxide could further expand options for airlines, though those fuels aren’t being produced at commercial scale yet.

One crucial factor for alternative jet fuels moving forward will be cost—on average, SAFs on the market today tend to be nearly three times more expensive than conventional jet fuel. Having more companies producing more fuel should help bring down the price, though newer fuels could be even more costly. 

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Jan 3 2025
Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth in 2025

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

It looks as though 2025 will be a solid year for electric vehicles—at least outside the United States, where sales will depend on the incoming administration’s policy choices.

Globally, these cleaner cars and trucks will continue to eat into the market share of gas-guzzlers as costs decline, consumer options expand, and charging stations proliferate.

Despite all the hubbub about an EV slowdown last year, worldwide sales of battery EVs and plug-in hybrids likely hit a record high of nearly 17 million vehicles in 2024 and are expected to rise about 20% this year, according to the market research firm BloombergNEF. 

In addition, numerous automakers are preparing to deliver a variety of cheaper models to auto showrooms around the world. In turn, both the oil demand and the greenhouse-gas emissions stemming from vehicles on the roads are likely to peak over the next few years.

To be sure, the growth rate of EV sales has cooled, as consumers in many regions continue to wait for more affordable options and more convenient charging solutions. 

It also hasn’t helped that a handful of nations, like China, Germany, and New Zealand, have eased back the subsidies that were accelerating the rollout of low-emissions vehicles. And it certainly won’t do the sector any favors if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign pledges to eliminate government support for EVs and erect trade barriers that would raise the cost of producing or purchasing them.

Industry experts and climate scientists argue that the opposite should be happening right now. A critical piece of any realistic strategy to keep climate change in check is to fully supplant internal-combustion vehicles by around 2050. Without stricter mandates or more generous support for EVs, the world will not be on track to meet that goal, BloombergNEF finds and others confirm. 

“We have to push the car companies—and we also have to help them with incentives, R&D, and infrastructure,” says Gil Tal, director of the EV Research Center at the University of California, Davis.

But ultimately, the fate of EV sales will depend on the particular dynamics within specific regions. Here’s a closer look at what’s likely to steer the sector in the world’s three largest markets: the US, the EU, and China.

United States

The US EV market will be a mess of contradictions.

On the one hand, companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to build or expand battery, EV, and charger manufacturing plants across America. Within the next few years, Honda intends to begin running assembly lines retooled to produce EVs in Ohio, Toyota plans to begin producing electric SUVs at its flagship plant in Kentucky, and GM expects to begin cranking out its revived Bolts in Kansas, among dozens of other facilities in planning or under construction.

All that promises to drive down the cost of cleaner vehicles, boost consumer options, create tens of thousands of jobs, and help US auto manufacturers catch up with overseas rivals that are speeding ahead in EV design, production, and innovation.

But it’s not clear that will necessarily translate into lower consumer prices, and thus greater demand, because Trump has pledged to unravel the key policies currently propelling the sector. 

His plans are reported to include rolling back the consumer tax credits of up to $7,500 included in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. He has also threatened to impose stiff tariffs on goods imported from Mexico, China, Canada, and other nations where many vehicles or parts are manufactured. 

Tal says those policy shifts could more than wipe out any cost reductions brought about as companies scale up production of EV components and vehicles domestically. Tighter trade restrictions could also make it that much harder for foreign companies producing cheaper models to break into the US market.

That matters because the single biggest holdup for American consumers is the lofty expense of EVs. The most affordable models still start at around $30,000 in the US, and many electric cars, trucks, and SUVs top $40,000. 

“There’s nothing available in the more affordable options,” says Bhuvan Atluri, associate director of research at the MIT Mobility Initiative. “And models that were promised are nowhere to be seen.” (MIT owns MIT Technology Review.)

Indeed, Elon Musk still has yet to deliver on his 18-year-old “master plan” to produce a mass-market-priced Tesla EV, most recently calling a $25,000 model “pointless.” 

As noted, there is a revamped Chevy Bolt on the way for US consumers, as well as a $25,000 Jeep. But the actual price tags won’t be clear until these vehicles hit dealerships and the Trump administration translates its campaign rhetoric into policies. 

European Union

The EV story across the Europe Union is likely to be considerably more upbeat in the year to come. That’s because carbon dioxide emissions standards for passenger vehicles are set to tighten, requiring automakers in member countries to reduce climate pollution across their fleet by 15% from 2021 levels. Under the EU’s climate plan, these targets become stricter every five years, with the goal of eliminating emissions from cars and trucks by 2035.

Automakers intend to introduce a number of affordable EV models in the coming months, timed deliberately to help the companies meet the new mandates, says Felipe Rodríguez, Europe deputy managing director at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

Those lower-priced models include Volkwagen’s ID.2all hatchback ($26,000) and the Fiat Panda EV ($28,500), among others.

On average, manufacturers will need to boost the share of battery-electric vehicles from 16% of total sales in 2023 to around 28% in order to meet the goal, according to the ICCT. Some European car companies are raising their prices for combustion vehicles and cutting the price tag on existing EVs to help hit the targets. And predictably, some are also arguing for the European Commission to loosen the rules.

Sales trends in any given country will still depend on local conditions and policy decisions. One big question is whether a new set of tax incentives or additional policy changes will help Germany, Europe’s largest auto market, revive the growth of its EV sector. Sales tanked there last year, after the nation cut off subsidies at the end of 2023.

EVs now make up about 25% of new sales across the EU. The ICCT estimates that they’ll surpass combustion vehicles EU-wide around 2030, when the emissions rules are set to significantly tighten again.

China

After decades of strategic investments and targeted policies, China is now the dominant manufacturer of EVs as well as the world’s largest market. That’s not likely to change for the foreseeable future, no matter what trade barriers the US or other countries impose.

In October, the European Commission enacted sharply higher tariffs on China-built EVs, arguing that the country has provided unfair market advantages to its domestic companies. That followed the Biden administration’s decision last May to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles, citing unfair trade practices and intellectual-property theft.

Chinese officials, for their part, argue that their domestic companies have earned market advantages by producing affordable, high-quality electric vehicles. More than 60% of Chinese EVs are already cheaper than their combustion-engine counterparts, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates.

“The reality—and what makes this a difficult challenge—is that there is some truth in both perspectives,” writes Scott Kennedy, trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

These trade barriers have created significant risks for China’s EV makers, particularly coupled with the country’s sluggish economy, its glut of automotive production capacity, and the fact that most companies in the sector aren’t profitable. China also cut back subsidies for EVs at the end of 2022, replacing them with a policy that requires manufacturers to achieve fuel economy targets.

But the country has been intentionally diversifying its export markets for years and is well positioned to continue increasing its sales of electric cars and buses in countries across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe, says Hui He, China regional director at the ICCT. There are also some indications that China and the EU could soon reach a compromise in their trade dispute.

Domestically, China is now looking to rural markets to boost growth for the industry. Officials have created purchase subsidies for residents in the countryside and called for the construction of more charging facilities.

By most estimates, China will continue to see solid growth in EV sales, putting nearly 50 million battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the country’s roads by the end of this year.

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Jan 3 2025
How wind tech could help decarbonize cargo shipping

Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands—a chain of coral atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean—rely on sea transportation for almost everything: moving people from one island to another, importing daily necessities from faraway nations, and exporting their local produce. For millennia they sailed largely in canoes, but much of their seafaring movement today involves big, bulky, diesel-fueled cargo ships that are heavy polluters. 

They’re not alone, of course. Cargo shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse-­gas emissions, and at the current rate of growth, the global industry could account for 10% of emissions by 2050. 

Marshallese shipping represents just a drop in the ocean of global greenhouse-gas pollution; larger, more industrially developed countries are responsible for far more. But the islands have been disproportionately experiencing the consequences of human-made climate change: warming waters, more frequent extreme weather, and rising sea levels.

All this has created a sense of urgency for people like Alson Kelen, who lives and works in Majuro, the islands’ capital. He’s the founder of Waan Aelõñ, a Marshallese canoeing organization that is focused on keeping the region’s ancient and more environmentally sustainable maritime traditions alive. In doing so, he hopes to help his nation fully decarbonize its fleets. Efforts include training local youths to build traditional Marshallese canoes (to replace small, motor-powered speedboats) and larger sailboats fitted with solar panels (to replace medium-size cargo ships). He was also an advisor on construction of the Juren Ae, a cargo sailboat (shown at right) inspired by traditional Marshallese vessels, which made its maiden voyage in 2024 and can carry 300 metric tons of cargo. The Marshall Islands Shipping Corporation hopes it offers a blueprint for cleaner cargo transportation across the Pacific; relative to a fuel-powered cargo ship, the vessel could decrease emissions by up to 80%. It’s “a beautiful big sister of our little canoes,” says Kelen.

Though hyperlocal, Kelen’s work is part of a global project from the International Maritime Organization to reduce emissions associated with cargo shipping to net zero by 2050. Beyond these tiny islands, much of the effort to meet the IMO’s goals focuses on replacing gasoline with alternatives such as ammonia, methane, nuclear power, and hydrogen. And there’s also what the Marshallese people have long relied on: wind power. It’s just one option on the table, but the industry cannot decarbonize quickly enough to meet the IMO’s goals without a role for wind propulsion, says Christiaan De Beukelaer, a political anthropologist and author of Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping. “If you take time into consideration, wind is indispensable,” he says. Studies show that deploying wind power on vessels could lower the shipping industry’s carbon dioxide emissions by 20%.     

“What wind does is it effectively cuts out a few uncertainties,” says De Beukelaer—variables such as the fluctuation of fuel prices and the costs from any carbon pricing scheme the industry may adopt. The IMO is technology agnostic, meaning it sets the goals and safety standards but lets the market find the best ways to attain them. A spokesperson from the organization says wind propulsion is one of many avenues being explored.      

Sails can be used either to fully power a vessel or to supplement the motors as a way of reducing fuel consumption for large bulk carriers, oil tankers, and the roll-on/roll-off vessels used to transport airplanes and cars worldwide. Modern cargo sails come in several shapes, sizes, and styles, including wings, rotors, suction sails, and kites.

“If we’ve got five and a half thousand years of experience, isn’t this just a no-brainer?” says Gavin Allwright, secretary-general of the International Windship Association.

Older cargo boats with new sails can use propulsive energy from the wind for up to 30% of their power, while cargo vessels designed specifically for wind could rely on it for up to 80% of their needs, says Allwright, who is still working on standardized measurement criteria to figure out which combination of ship and sail model is most efficient.

“There are so many variables involved,” he says—from the size of the ship to the captain steering it. The 50th large vessel fitted with wind-harnessing tech set sail in October 2024, and he predicts that maritime wind power is set to boom by the beginning of 2026. 

drone view over a ship at sea with vertical metal sails

COURTESY OF OCEANBIRD

Hard wings

One of the more popular designs for cargo ships is a rigid sail—a hard, winglike structure that is placed vertically on top of the vessel. 

“It’s very much like an airplane wing,” says Niclas Dahl, managing director of Oceanbird, a Swedish company that develops these sails. Each one has a main and a flap, which creates a chamber where the wind speed is faster on the outside than the inside. In an aircraft, that discrepancy generates lift force, but in this case, says Dahl, it propels the ship forward. The wings are rigid, but they can be swiveled around and adjusted to capture the wind depending on where it’s coming from, and they can be folded and retracted close to the deck of the ship when it is nearing a dock.

One of Oceanbird’s sails—the 40-meter-high, 14-meter-wide Wing 560, made of high-strength steel, glass fiber, and recycled polyethylene terephthalate—could help cargo ships reduce fuel use by up to 10% per trip, according to the company’s calculations. Oceanbird is installing its first set of wings on a cargo vessel that transports cars, which was scheduled to be ready by the end of 2024.

Oceanbird, though, is just one manufacturer; by late 2024, eight cargo vessels propelled by hard wings were cruising around the world, most of them generalized bulk carriers and oil tankers.

COURTESY OF CARGOKITE

Kites

Other engineers and scientists are working to power cargo vessels with kites like those that propel paragliders. These kites are made from mixtures of UV-resistant polyester, and they are tethered to the ship’s bow and fly up to 200 to 300 meters above the ship, where they can make the best use of the constant winds at that altitude to basically tug the boat forward. To maximize lift, the kites are controlled by computers to operate in the sweet spot where wind is most constant. Studies show that a 400-square-meter kite can produce fuel savings of 9% to 15%.

“The main reason for us believing in kites is high-altitude winds,” says Tim Linnenweber, cofounder of CargoKite, which designs micro cargo ships that can be powered this way. “You basically have an increasing wind speed the higher you go, and so more consistent, more reliable, more steady winds.” 

COURTESY OF BOUND4BLUE

Suction sails

Initially used for airplanes in the 1930s, suction sails were designed and tested on boats in the 1980s by the oceanographer and diving pioneer Jacques Cousteau. 

Suction sails are chubby metal sails that look something like rotors but more oval, with a pointed side. And instead of making the whole sail spin around, the motor turns on a fan on the inside of the sail that sucks in wind from the outside. Cristina Aleixendri, cofounder of Bound4Blue, a Spanish company building suction sails, explains that the vent pulls air in through lots of little holes in the shell of the sail and creates what physicists call a boundary layer—a thin layer of air blanketing the sail and thrusting it forward. Bound4Blue’s modern model generates 20% more thrust per square meter of sail than Cousteau’s original design, says Aleixendri, and up to seven times more thrust than a conventional sail. 

Twelve ships fitted with a total of 26 suction sails are currently operating, ranging from fishing boats and oil tankers to roll-on/roll-off vessels. Bound4Blue is working on fitting six ships and has fitted four already—including one with the largest suction sail ever installed, at 22 meters tall.

COURTESY OF NORSEPOWER

Rotor sails

In the 1920s, the German engineer Anton Flettner had a vision for a wind-powered ship that used vertical, revolving metal cylinders in place of traditional sails. In 1926, a vessel using his novel design, known as the Flettner rotor, crossed the Atlantic for the first time. 

Flettner rotors work thanks to the Magnus effect, a phenomenon that occurs when a spinning object moves through a fluid, causing a lift force that can deflect the object’s path. With Flettner’s design, motors spin the cylinders around, and the pressure difference between the sides of the spinning object generates thrust forward, much like a soccer player bending the trajectory of a ball.

In a modern upgrade of the rotor sail, designed by the Finnish company Norsepower, the cylinders can spin up to 300 times per minute. This produces 10 times more thrust power than a conventional sail. Norsepower has fitted 27 rotor sails on 14 ships out at sea so far, and six more ships equipped with rotor sails from other companies set sail in 2024.

“According to our calculations, the rotor sail is, at the moment, the most efficient wind-assistive power when you look at eurocent per kilowatt-hour,” says Heikki Pöntynen, Norsepower’s CEO. Results from their vessels currently out at sea suggest that fuel savings are “anywhere between 5% to 30% on the whole voyage.” 

Sofia Quaglia is a freelance science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, and New Scientist.

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Dec 28 2024
The world’s first industrial-scale plant for green steel promises a cleaner future

As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of it were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer more than 13 feet thick. 

Making this metal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of the world’s carbon emissions—one of the largest industrial emitters and far more than such sources as aviation. The most common manufacturing process yields about two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel.  

A handful of groups and companies are now making serious progress toward low- or zero-emission steel. Among them, the Swedish company Stegra stands out. (Originally named H2 Green Steel, the company renamed itself Stegra—which means “to elevate” in Swedish—in September.) The startup, formed in 2020, has raised close to $7 billion and is building a plant in Boden, a town in northern Sweden. It will be the first industrial-scale plant in the world to make green steel. Stegra says it is on track to begin production in 2026, initially producing 2.5 million metric tons per year and eventually making 4.5 million metric tons. 

The company uses so-called green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy, to process iron ore into steel. Located in a part of Sweden with abundant hydropower, Stegra’s plant will use hydro and wind power to drive a massive electrolyzer that splits water to make the hydrogen. The hydrogen gas will then be used to pull the oxygen out of iron ore to make metallic iron—a key step in steelmaking.  

This process of using hydrogen to make iron—and subsequently steel—has already been used at pilot plants by Midrex, an American company from which Stegra is purchasing the equipment. But Stegra will have to show that it will work in a far larger plant.

The world produces about 60,000 metric tons of steel every 15 minutes.

“We have multiple steps that haven’t really been proven at scale before,” says Maria Persson Gulda, Stegra’s chief technology officer. These steps include building one of the world’s largest electrolyzers. 

Beyond the unknowns of scaling up a new technology, Stegra also faces serious business challenges. The steel industry is a low-margin, intensely competitive sector in which companies win customers largely on price.

aerial view of construction site
The startup, formed in 2020, has raised close to $7 billion in financing and expects to begin operations in 2026 at its plant in Boden.
STEGRA

Once operations begin, Stegra calculates, it can come close to producing steel at the same cost as the conventional product, largely thanks to its access to cheap electricity. But it plans to charge 20% to 30% more to cover the €4.5 billion it will take to build the plant. Gulda says the company has already sold contracts for 1.2 million metric tons to be produced in the next five to seven years. And its most recent customers—such as car manufacturers seeking to reduce their carbon emissions and market their products as green—have agreed to pay the 30% premium. 

Now the question is: Can Stegra deliver? 

The secret of hydrogen

To make steel—an alloy of iron and carbon, with a few other elements thrown in as needed—you first need to get the oxygen out of the iron ore dug from the ground. That leaves you with the purified metal.

The most common steelmaking process starts in blast furnaces, where the ore is mixed with a carbon-­rich coal derivative called coke and heated. The carbon reacts with the oxygen in the ore to produce carbon dioxide; the metal left behind then enters another type of furnace, where more oxygen is forced into it under high heat and pressure. The gas reacts with remaining impurities to produce various oxides, which are then removed—leaving steel behind.  

The second conventional method, which is used to make a much smaller share of the world’s steel, is a process called direct reduction. This usually employs natural gas, which is separated into hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Both gases react with the oxygen to pull it out of the iron ore, creating carbon dioxide and water as by-products. 

The iron that remains is melted in an electric arc furnace and further processed to remove impurities and create steel. Overall, this method is about 40% lower in emissions than the blast furnace technique, but it still produces over a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel.

But why not just use hydrogen instead of starting with natural gas? The only by-product would be water. And if, as Stegra plans to do, you use green hydrogen made using clean power, the result is a new and promising way of making steel that can theoretically produce close to zero emissions. 

Stegra’s process is very similar to the standard direct reduction technique, except that since it uses only hydrogen, it needs a higher temperature. It’s not the only possible way to make steel with a negligible carbon footprint, but it’s the only method on the verge of being used at an industrial scale. 

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Stegra has laid the foundations for its plant and is putting the roof and walls on its steel mill. The first equipment has been installed in the building where electric arc furnaces will melt the iron and churn out steel, and work is underway on the facility that will house a 700-megawatt electrolyzer, the largest in Europe.

To make hydrogen, purify iron, and produce 2.5 million metric tons of green steel annually, the plant will consume 10 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is a massive amount, on par with the annual usage of a small country such as Estonia. Though the costs of electricity in Stegra’s agreements are confidential, publicly available data suggest rates around €30 ($32) per megawatt-hour or more. (At that rate, 10 terawatt-hours would cost $320 million.) 

STEGRA

Many of the buyers of the premium green steel are in the automotive industry; they include Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW, Volvo Group, and Scania, a Swedish company that makes trucks and buses. Six companies that make furniture, appliances, and construction material—including Ikea—have also signed up, as have five companies that buy steel and distribute it to many different manufacturers.

Some of these automakers—including Volvo, which will buy from Stegra and rival SSAB—are marketing cars made with the green steel as “fossil-free.” And since cars and trucks also have many parts that are much more expensive than the steel they use, steel that costs the automakers a bit more adds only a little to the cost of a vehicle—perhaps a couple of hundred dollars or less, according to some estimates. Many companies have also set internal targets to reduce emissions, and buying green steel can get them closer to those goals.

Stegra’s business model is made possible in part by the unique economic conditions within the European Union. In December 2022, the European Parliament approved a tariff on imported carbon-­intensive products such as steel, known as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). As of 2024, this law requires those who import iron, steel, and other commodities to report the materials’ associated carbon emissions. 

Starting in 2026, companies will have to begin paying fees designed to be proportional to the materials’ carbon footprint. Some companies are already betting that it will be enough to make Stegra’s 30% premium worthwhile. 

crane hoisting an i-beam next to a steel building frame

STEGRA

Though the law could incentivize decarbonization within the EU and for those importing steel into Europe, green steelmakers will probably also need subsidies to defray the costs of scaling up, says Charlotte Unger, a researcher at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. In Stegra’s case, it will receive €265 million from the European Commission to help build its plant; it was also granted €250 million from the European Union’s Innovation Fund.  

Meanwhile, Stegra is working to reduce costs and beef up revenues. Olof Hernell, the chief digital officer, says the company has invested heavily in digital products to improve efficiency. For example, a semi-automated system will be used to increase or decrease usage of electricity according to its fluctuating price on the grid.

Stegra realized there was no sophisticated software for keeping track of the emissions that the company is producing at every step of the steelmaking process. So it is making its own carbon accounting software, which it will soon sell as part of a new spinoff company. This type of accounting is ultra-important to Stegra, Hernell says, since “we ask for a pretty significant premium, and that premium lives only within the promise of a low carbon footprint.” 

Not for everyone

As long as CBAM stays in place, Stegra believes, there will be more than enough demand for its green steel, especially if other carbon pricing initiatives come into force. The company’s optimism is boosted by the fact that it expects to be the first to market and anticipates costs coming down over time. But for green steel to affect the market more broadly, or stay viable once several companies begin making significant quantities of it, its manufacturing costs will eventually have to be competitive with those of conventional steel.

Stegra has sold contracts for 1.2 million metric tons of steel to be produced in the next five to seven years.

Even if Stegra has a promising outlook in Europe, its hydrogen-based steelmaking scheme is unlikely to make economic sense in many other places in the world—at least in the near future. There are very few regions with such a large amount of clean electricity and easy access to the grid. What’s more, northern Sweden is also rich in high-quality ore that is easy to process using the hydrogen direct reduction method, says Chris Pistorius, a metallurgical engineer and co-director of the Center for Iron and Steelmaking Research at Carnegie Mellon University.

Green steel can be made from lower-grade ore, says Pistorius, “but it does have the negative effects of higher electricity consumption, hence slower processing.”

Given the EU incentives, other hydrogen-based steel plants are in the works in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. Hybrit, a green steel technology developed by SSAB, the mining company LKAB, and the energy producer Vattenfall, uses a process similar to Stegra’s. LKAB hopes to finish a demonstration plant by 2028 in Gällivare, also in northern Sweden. However, progress has been delayed by challenges in getting the necessary environmental permit.

Meanwhile, a company called Boston Metal is working to commercialize a different technique to break the bonds in iron oxide by running a current through a mixture of iron ore and an electrolyte, creating extremely high heat. This electrochemical process yields a purified iron metal that can be turned into steel. The technology hasn’t been proved at scale yet, but Boston Metal hopes to license its green steel process in 2026. 

Understandably, these new technologies will cost more at first, and consumers or governments will have to foot the bill, says Jessica Allen, an expert on green steel production at the University of Newcastle in Australia. 

In Stegra’s case, both seem willing to do so. But it will be more difficult outside the EU. What’s more, producing enough green steel to make a large dent in the sector’s emissions will likely require a portfolio of different techniques to succeed. 

Still, as the first to market, Stegra is playing a vital role, Allen says, and its performance will color perceptions of green steel for years to come. “Being willing to take a risk and actually build … that’s exactly what we need,” she adds. “We need more companies like this.”

For now, Stegra’s plant—rising from the boreal forests of northern Sweden—represents the industry’s leading effort. When it begins operations in 2026, that plant will be the first demonstration that steel can be made at an industrial scale without releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide—and, just as important, that customers are willing to pay for it. 

Douglas Main is a journalist and former senior editor and writer at National Geographic.

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Dec 27 2024
This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country’s wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. “The fields were completely yellow. You’d walk through them and your clothes were just bright yellow,” he says.

Hodson, who was then at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, had flown down to Ethiopia with colleagues to investigate the epidemic. But there was little that could be done: Though the authorities had some fungicides, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. Ethiopia, the biggest wheat-producing nation in sub-Saharan Africa, lost between 15% and 20% of its harvest that year. “Talking with farmers—they were just losing everything,” Hodson told MIT Technology Review. “And it’s just like, ‘Well, we should have been able to do more to help you.’”

Hodson, now aprincipal scientist at the international nonprofit CIMMYT, has since been working with colleagues on a plan to stop such losses in the future. Together with Maricelis Acevedo at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, he co-leads the Wheat Disease Early Warning Advisory System, known as Wheat DEWAS, an international initiative that brings together scientists from 23 organizations around the world.

The idea is to scale up a system to track wheat diseases and forecast potential outbreaks to governments and farmers in close to real time. In doing so, they hope to protect a crop that supplies about one-fifth of the world’s calories.

The effort could not be more timely. For as long as there’s been domesticated wheat (about 8,000 years), there has been harvest-devastating rust. Breeding efforts in the mid-20th century led to rust-resistant wheat strains that boosted crop yields, and rust epidemics receded in much of the world. But now, after decades, rusts are considered a reemerging disease in Europe. That’s due partly to climate change, because warmer conditions are more conducive to infection. Vulnerable regions including South Asia and Africa are also under threat.

Wheat DEWAS officially launched in 2023 with $7.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now called the Gates Foundation) and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. But an earlier incarnation of the system averted disaster in 2021, when another epidemic threatened Ethiopia’s wheat fields. Early field surveys by a local agricultural research team had picked up a new strain of yellow rust. The weather conditions were “super optimal” for the development of rust in the field, Hodson says, but the team’s early warning system meant that action was taken in good time—the government deployed fungicides quickly, and the farmers had a bumper wheat harvest. 

Wheat DEWAS works by scaling up and coordinating efforts and technologies across continents. At the ground level is surveillance—teams of local pathologistswho survey wheat fields, inputting data on smartphones. They gather information on which wheat varieties are growing and take photos and samples. The project is now developing a couple of apps, one of which will use AI to help identify diseases by analyzing photos.

Another arm of the system, based at the John Innes Centre in the UK, focuses on diagnostics. The group there, working with researchers at CIMMYT and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, developed MARPLE (a loose acronym for “mobile and real-time plant disease”), which Hodson describes as a mini gene sequencer about the size of a cell phone. It can test wheat samples for the rust fungus locally and provide a result within two to three days, whereas conventional diagnostics need months.

 “The beauty of it is you could pick up something new very quickly,” says Hodson. “And it’s often the new things that give the biggest problems.”

The data from the field is sent directly to a team at the Global Rust Reference Center at Aarhus University in Denmark, which combines everything into one huge database. Enabling nations and globally scattered groups to share an infrastructure is key, says Aarhus’s Jens Grønbech Hansen, who leads the data management package for Wheat DEWAS. Without collaborating and harmonizing data, he says, “technology won’t solve these problems all on its own.”

“We build up trust so that by combining the data, we can benefit from a bigger picture and see patterns we couldn’t see when it was all fragmented,” Hansen says.

Their automated system sends data to Chris Gilligan, who leads the modeling arm of Wheat DEWAS at the University of Cambridge. With his team, he works with the UK’s Met Office, using their supercomputer to model how the fungal spores at a given site might spread under specific weather conditions and what the risk is of their landing, germinating, and infecting other areas. The team drew on previous models, including work on the ash plume from the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which caused havoc in Europe in 2010.

Each day, a downloadable bulletin is posted online with a seven-day forecast. Additional alerts or advisories are also sent out. Information is then disseminated from governments or national authorities to farmers. For example, in Ethiopia, immediate risks are conveyed to farmers by SMS text messaging. Crucially, if there’s likely to be a problem, the alerts offer time to respond. “You’ve got, in effect, three weeks’ grace,” says Gilligan. That is, growers may know of the risk up to a week ahead of time, enabling them to take action as the spores are landing and causing infections.

The project is currently focused on eight countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia in Africa and Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Bhutan in Asia. But the researchers hope they will get additional funding to carry the project on beyond 2026 and, ideally, to extend it in a variety of ways, including the addition of more countries. 

Gilligan says the technology may be potentially transferable to other wheat diseases, and other crops—like rice—that are also affected by weather-­dispersed pathogens.

Dagmar Hanold, a plant pathologist at the University of Adelaide who is not involved in the project, describes it as “vital work for global agriculture.”

“Cereals, including wheat, are vital staples for people and animals worldwide,” Hanold says. Although programs have been set up to breed more pathogen-­resistant crops, new pathogen strains emerge frequently. And if these combine and swap genes, she warns, they could become “even more ­aggressive.”

Shaoni Bhattacharya is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

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Dec 13 2024
China banned exports of a few rare minerals to the US. Things could get messier.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

I’ve thought more about gallium and germanium over the last week than I ever have before (and probably more than anyone ever should).

As you may already know, China banned the export of those materials to the US last week and placed restrictions on others. The move is just the latest drama in escalating trade tensions between the two countries.

While the new export bans could have significant economic consequences, this might be only the beginning. China is a powerhouse, and not just in those niche materials—it’s also a juggernaut in clean energy, and particularly in battery supply chains. So what comes next could have significant consequences for EVs and climate action more broadly.

A super-quick catch-up on the news here: The Biden administration recently restricted exports of chips and other technology that could help China develop advanced semiconductors. Also, president-elect Donald Trump has floated all sorts of tariffs on Chinese goods.

Apparently in response to some or all of this, China banned the export of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials used in manufacturing, and said it may further restrict graphite sales. The materials are all used for both military and civilian technologies, and significantly, gallium and germanium are used in semiconductors.

It’s a ramp-up from last July, when China placed restrictions on gallium and germanium exports after enduring years of restrictions by the US and its Western allies on cutting-edge technology. (For more on the details of China’s most recent move, including potential economic impacts, check out the full coverage from my colleague James Temple.)

What struck me about this news is that this could be only the beginning, because China is central to many of the supply chains snaking around the globe.

This is no accident—take gallium as an example. The metal is a by-product of aluminum production from bauxite ore. China, as the world’s largest aluminum producer, certainly has a leg up to be a major player in the niche material. But other countries could produce gallium, and I’m sure more will. China has a head start because it invested in gallium separation and refining technologies.

A similar situation exists in the battery world. China is a dominant player all over the supply chain for lithium-ion batteries—not because it happens to have the right metals on its shores (it doesn’t), but because it’s invested in extraction and processing technologies.

Take lithium, a crucial component in those batteries. China has around 8% of the world’s lithium reserves but processes about 58% percent of the world’s lithium supply. The situation is similar for other key battery metals. Nickel that’s mined in Indonesia goes to China for processing, and the same goes for cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Over the past two decades, China has thrown money, resources, and policy behind electric vehicles. Now China leads the world in EV registrations, many of the largest EV makers are Chinese companies, and the country is home to a huge chunk of the supply chain for the vehicles and their batteries.

As the world begins a shift toward technologies like EVs, it’s becoming clear just how dominant China’s position is in many of the materials crucial to building that tech.

Lithium prices have dropped by 80% over the past year, and while part of the reason is a slowdown in EV demand, another part is that China is oversupplying lithium, according to US officials. By flooding the market and causing prices to drop, China could make it tougher for other lithium processors to justify sticking around in the business.

The new graphite controls from China could wind up affecting battery markets, too. Graphite is crucial for lithium-ion batteries, which use the material in their anodes. It’s still not clear whether the new bans will affect battery materials or just higher-purity material that’s used in military applications, according to reporting from Carbon Brief.

To this point, China hasn’t specifically banned exports of key battery materials, and it’s not clear exactly how far the country would go. Global trade politics are delicate and complicated, and any move that China makes in battery supply chains could wind up coming back to hurt the country’s economy. 

But we could be entering into a new era of material politics. Further restrictions on graphite, or moves that affect lithium, nickel, or copper, could have major ripple effects around the world for climate technology, because batteries are key not only for electric vehicles, but increasingly for our power grids. 

While it’s clear that tensions are escalating, it’s still unclear what’s going to happen next. The vibes, at best, are uncertain, and this sort of uncertainty is exactly why so many folks in technology are so focused on how to diversify global supply chains. Otherwise, we may find out just how tangled those supply chains really are, and what happens when you yank on threads that run through the center of them. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Check out James Temple’s breakdown of what China’s ban on some rare minerals could mean for the US.

Last July, China placed restrictions on some of these materials—read this story from Zeyi Yang, who explains what the moves and future ones might mean for semiconductor technology.

As technology shifts, so too do the materials we need to build it. The result: a never-ending effort to build out mining, processing, and recycling infrastructure, as I covered in a feature story earlier this year.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY, ENVATO

Another thing 

Each year we release a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, and it’s nearly time for the 2025 edition. But before we announce the picks, here are a few things that didn’t make the cut. 

A couple of interesting ones on the cutting-room floor here, including eVTOLs, electric aircraft that can take off and land like helicopters. For more on why the runway is looking pretty long for electric planes (especially ones with funky ways to move through the skies), check out this story from last year. 

Keeping up with climate  

Denmark received no bids in its latest offshore wind auction. It’s a disappointing result for the birthplace of offshore wind power. (Reuters)

Surging methane emissions could be the sign of a concerning shift for the climate. A feedback loop of emissions from the Arctic and a slowdown in how the powerful greenhouse gas breaks down could spell trouble. (Inside Climate News)

Battery prices are dropping faster than expected. Costs for  lithium-ion packs just saw their steepest drop since 2017. (Electrek)

This fusion startup is rethinking how to configure its reactors by floating powerful magnets in the middle of the chamber. This sounds even more like science fiction than most other approaches to fusion. (IEEE Spectrum)

The US plans to put monarch butterflies on a list of threatened species. Temperature shifts brought on by climate change could wreak havoc with the insects’ migration. (Associated Press)

Sources close to Elon Musk say he’s undergone quite a shift on climate change, morphing from “environmental crusader to critic of dire climate predictions.” (Washington Post)

Google has a $20 billion plan to build data centers and clean power together. “Bring your own power” is an interesting idea, but not a tested prospect just yet. (Canary Media)

The Franklin Fire in Los Angeles County sparked Monday evening and quickly grew into a major blaze. At the heart of the fire’s rapid spread: dry weather and Santa Ana winds. (Scientific American)

Places in the US that are most at risk for climate disasters are also most at risk for insurance hikes. Check out these great data visualizations on insurance and climate change. (The Guardian)

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