It’s time to make a plan for nuclear waste

Today, nuclear energy enjoys a rare moment of support across the political spectrum in the US. Interest from tech companies that are scrambling to meet demand for massive data centers has sparked a resurgence of money and attention in the industry. That newfound interest is exactly why it’s time to talk about an old problem: nuclear waste. 

In the US alone, nuclear reactors produce about 2,000 metric tons of high-level waste each year. And there’s nowhere to put it.

Though newly popular, the nuclear program in the US is nothing new. The US hosts more reactors and production capacity than any other country in the world. And yet nearly seven decades after the first permanent nuclear facility in the US went online, there’s still not a long-term solution for nuclear waste. 

Used fuel is largely stored onsite at operating and shut-down reactors, in pools and casks made of steel and concrete. Experts generally agree that these methods are safe, but they’re not designed to be permanent.

The leading strategy around the world for long-term storage of this high-level radioactive waste is to house it in a deep geological repository—dig a hole, put radioactive material down there, and fill it up with concrete. These holes, hundreds of meters underground, are designed to be a permanent home.

There aren’t any operating geological repositories for spent fuel yet, but some countries are well on their way. Finland is the furthest along; as of 2026, the country is testing its facility. Final approvals are expected soon, and operations could start later this year. Some other countries aren’t far behind.

France is home to over 50 nuclear reactors, and its grid gets more of its power from nuclear than any other. The country also has the world’s most established program for reprocessing spent fuel. The process separates out the plutonium and uranium to create a type of fuel known as mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. But reprocessing isn’t a perfect recycling loop, so the leftovers from this process still need somewhere to go. The country currently stores waste onsite at the La Hague reprocessing plant, but it plans to build a repository. Initial approvals could come later this decade, and pilot operations could start up by 2035.

Technically, the US also has a destination for its spent fuel: Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The site, which is on federal land, was designated by Congress in 1987. However, progress has entirely stalled out because of political opposition. In 2011, the federal government stopped providing funding for the site, and for roughly a decade, there’s been no activity to speak of.

In the meantime, waste continues to pile up.

The nuclear industry is kicking into a new gear around the world. China is home to the world’s fastest–growing nuclear energy program, and countries including Bangladesh and Turkey are building their first reactors.

Even the long-established US program is seeing growth: Interest in and approval for nuclear energy have spiked, and Big Tech is throwing money around to meet rising electricity demand. Companies are proposing (and beginning to receive regulatory approval for) next-generation reactors, which employ different coolants, fuels, and designs.

Given all this new interest, and the impending arrival of new types of nuclear waste, it’s time for nuclear companies, as well as their powerful customers, to push for progress on building geological storage facilities. As the richest country on the planet and home to a large chunk of the activity in next-generation reactors, the US should aim to join the leaders rather than continue to lag behind. 

Directing even a small fraction of the recent surge in funding and attention to progress on waste could make a difference. Some experts are calling for a new organization in the US to manage nuclear waste rather than leaving it to the Department of Energy. This organization would mirror programs in Finland, Canada, and France.

The process of planning, building, and commissioning a permanent solution for nuclear waste is a long one. Finland started planning in the 1980s and selected its site in the early 2000s, and it’s nearly ready to start accepting waste. For countries that don’t have a permanent storage solution sorted, the best time to start was decades ago. But the second-best time is now. 

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Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.

Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap.

Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were in 2013. But historically, different technologies tend to go through this curve at different rates. And the cost of fusion might not sink as quickly as the prices of batteries or solar.

It’s tricky to make any predictions about the cost of a technology that doesn’t exist yet. But when there’s billions of dollars of public and private funding on the line, it’s worth considering what assumptions we’re making about our future energy mix and its cost.

One crucial measure is a metric called experience rate—the percentage by which an energy technology’s cost declines every time capacity doubles. A higher figure means a quicker price drop and better economic gains with scaling.

Historically, the experience rate is 12% for onshore wind power, 20% for lithium-ion batteries, and 23% for solar modules. Other energy technologies haven’t gotten cheap quite as quickly—fission is at just 2%.

In the new study, published in Nature Energy, researchers aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate. The team looked at three key characteristics that can correlate with experience rate: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. The larger and more complex a technology is, and/or the more it needs to be customized for different use cases, the lower the experience rate.

The researchers interviewed fusion experts, including public-sector researchers and those working at companies in the private sector. They had the experts evaluate fusion power plants on those characteristics and used that info to predict the experience rate. (One note here: The study focused only on magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement, two of the leading fusion approaches, which together receive the vast majority of funding today. Other approaches could come with different cost benefits.)

Fusion plants will likely be relatively large, similar to other types of facilities (like coal and fission power plants) that rely on generating heat. They will probably need less customization than fission plants—largely because regulations and safety considerations should be simpler—but more than technologies like solar panels. And as for complexity, “there was almost unanimous agreement that fusion is incredibly complex,” says Lingxi Tang, a PhD candidate in the energy and technology policy group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study. (Some experts said it was literally off the scale the researchers gave them.)

The final figure the researchers suggest for fusion’s experience rate is between 2% and 8%, meaning it will see a faster price reduction than nuclear power but not as dramatic an improvement as many common energy technologies being deployed today.

That means that it would take a lot of deployment—and likely quite a long time—for the price of building a fusion reactor to drop significantly, so electricity produced by fusion plants could be expensive for a while. And it’s a much slower rate than the 8% to 20% that many modeling studies assume today.

“On the whole, I think questions should be raised about current investment levels in fusion,” Tang says. (The US allocated over $1 billion to fusion in the 2024 fiscal year, and private-sector funding totaled $2.2 billion between July 2024 and July 2025.) “If you’re talking about decarbonization of the energy system, is this really the best use of public money?”

But some experts say that looking to the past to understand the future of energy prices might be misleading.“It’s a good exercise, but we have to be humble about how much we don’t know,” says Egemen Kolemen, a professor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

In 2000, many analysts predicted that solar power would remain expensive—but then production exploded and prices came crashing down, largely because China went all in, he says. “People weren’t exactly wrong then,” he adds. “They were just extrapolating what they saw into the future.”

How fast prices drop depends on regulations, geopolitical dynamics, and labor cost, he says: “We haven’t built the thing yet, so we don’t know.”

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Is carbon removal in trouble?

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell.

The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Microsoft is probably who you’re after.

The company has said that it is not permanently ending its carbon removal purchases (though it didn’t directly answer further questions about this apparent pause). But with this flurry of news, there’s a lot of fear in the industry—so, it’s worth talking about the state of carbon removal, and where Big Tech companies fit in.

Carbon removal aims to reliably pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it. There’s a wide range of technologies in this space, including direct air capture (DAC) plants, which usually use some kind of sorbent or solvent to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Another important method is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which biomass like trees or waste-derived biofuels are burned for energy, and scrubbing equipment captures the greenhouse gases.

There was a huge boom of interest in carbon removal technologies in the first half of this decade. One UN climate report in 2022 found that nations may need to remove up to 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050 to keep warming to 2 °C above preindustrial levels.

One nagging problem is that the economics here have always been tricky. There’s a major potential public good to pulling carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The question is, Who will pay for it?

So far, the answer has been Microsoft. The company is by far the largest buyer of carbon removal contracts, and it’s the only purchaser that has made megatonne-scale purchases, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, ​​a public-benefit corporation that analyzes the carbon removal sector. “Microsoft has had a huge importance, especially for getting large-scale projects off the ground and showing there is demand for large deals,” Höglund said via email.

Microsoft has pledged to become carbon-negative by 2030 and to remove the equivalent of its historic emissions by 2050. Progress on actually cutting emissions has been tough to achieve though—in the company’s latest Environmental Sustainability Report, published in June 2025, it announced emissions had risen by 23.4% since 2020.

On April 10, Heatmap News reported that Microsoft staff had told suppliers and partners that it was pausing future purchases of carbon removal, though it wasn’t clear whether the company would increase support for existing projects, or when purchases might resume. Bloomberg reported a similar story the next day. In one instance, Microsoft employees said that the decision was related to financial considerations, one source told Bloomberg. 

In a statement in response to written questions, Microsoft said that it was not permanently closing its carbon removal program. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals. Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach—not a change in ambition,” Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa said in the statement.

Whatever, exactly, is happening behind the scenes, many in the industry are nervous, says Wil Burns, Co-Director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. People viewed the company as the foundational supporter of carbon removal, he adds.

“This pause—whether it’s short term or whatever it is—the way it’s been rolled out is extremely irresponsible,” Burns says. The vast majority of firms looking to get carbon removal contracts are probably seeking Microsoft deals. So, while Microsoft has every right to change its plans, the company needs to be open with the industry now, he adds.

“I don’t think you can hold yourself out as the paragon of fostering carbon removal and then treat a nascent industry that disrespectfully,” Burns says.

Carbon removal companies were already in turmoil in the US, particularly because of recent policy shifts: Funding has been cut back, and recent changes at the Environmental Protection Agency were aimed at the government’s ability to target carbon pollution.

Now, if the largest corporate backer is shifting plans or taking a significant pause, things could get rocky.

Depending on the extent of this pause, the industry may need to survive on smaller purchases and hope for support from governments and philanthropy, Höglund says. But for carbon removal to truly scale, we need policymakers to create mandates so that emitters are responsible for either storing the carbon dioxide they produce or paying for it, Burns says.

“Maybe the upside of this is Microsoft has sent a wake-up call, that you just can’t rely on the kindness of strangers to make carbon removal scale.”

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Desalination technology, by the numbers

When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers.

I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination, and how big a business it is, still surprised me.

For more on how this crucial water infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable during the war in Iran, check out my latest story. Here, though, let’s look at the state of desalination technology, by the numbers.

Desalination produces 77% of all fresh water and 99% of drinking water in Qatar.

Globally, we rely on desalination for just 1% of fresh-water withdrawals. But for some countries in the Middle East, and particularly for the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Oman), it’s crucial.

Qatar, home to over 3 million people, is one of the most staggering examples, with nearly all its drinking water supplies coming from desalination. But many major cities in the region couldn’t exist without the technology. There are no permanent rivers on the Arabian Peninsula, and supplies of fresh water are incredibly limited, so countries rely on facilities that can take in seawater and pull out the salt and other impurities.

The Middle East is home to just 6% of the world’s population and over 27% of its desalination facilities.

The region has historically been water-scarce, and that trend is only continuing as climate change pushes temperatures higher and changes rainfall patterns.

Of the 17,910 desalination facilities that are operational globally, 4,897 are located in the Middle East, according to a 2026 study in npj Clean Water. The technology supplies not only municipal water used by homes and businesses, but also industries including agriculture, manufacturing, and increasingly data centers.

One massive desalination plant in Saudi Arabia produces over 1 million cubic meters of fresh water per day.

The Ras Al-Khair water and power plant in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia, is one of a growing number of gigantic plants that output upwards of a million cubic meters of water each day. That amount of water can meet the needs of millions of people in Riyadh City. Producing it takes a lot of power—the attached power plant has a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts.

While this plant is just one of thousands across the region, it’s an example of a growing trend: The average size of a desalination plant is about 10 times what it was 15 years ago, according to data from the International Energy Agency. Communities are increasingly turning to larger plants, which can produce water more efficiently than smaller ones.

Between 2024 and 2028, the Middle East’s desalination capacity could grow by over 40%.

Desalination is only going to be more crucial for life in the Middle East. The region is expected to spend over $25 billion on capital expenses for desalination facilities between 2024 and 2028, according to the 2026 npj Clean Water study. More massive plants are expected to come online in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt during that time.

All this growth could consume a lot of electricity. Between growth of the technology generally and the move toward plants that use electricity rather than fossil fuels, desalination could add 190 terawatt-hours of electricity demand globally by 2035, according to IEA data. That’s the equivalent of about 60 million households.

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Fuel prices are soaring. Plastic could be next.

As the war in Iran continues to engulf the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices. In particular, you can’t get away from news about the price of gasoline, which just topped an average of $4 a gallon in the US, its highest level since 2022.

But looking ahead, further consequences for the global economy could be looming in plastics. Plastics are made using petrochemicals, and the supply chain impacts of the oil bottleneck near Iran are starting to build up. 

Plastic production accounts for roughly 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions today. And our current moment shows just how embedded oil and gas products are in our lives. It goes far beyond their use for energy. 

As I write this, I’m wearing clothes that contain plastic fibers, typing on a plastic keyboard, and looking through the plastic lenses of my glasses. It’s hard to imagine what our world looks like without plastic. And in some ways, moving away from fossil-derived plastic could prove even more complicated than decarbonizing our energy system. 

Crude oil prices have been on a roller-coaster in recent weeks, and prices have recently topped $100 a barrel.

Crude oil contains a huge range of hydrocarbons, and it’s typically refined by putting it through a distillation unit that separates the raw material into different fractions according to their boiling point. Those fractions then go on to be further processed into everything from jet fuel to asphalt binder. We’ve already seen the price spikes for some materials pulled out of crude oil, like gasoline and jet fuel.

Let’s zoom in on another component, naphtha. It can be added to gasoline and jet fuel to improve performance. It can also be used as a solvent or as a raw material to make plastics.

The Middle East currently accounts for about 20% of global naphtha production­ and supplies about 40% of the market in Asia, where prices are already up by 50% over the last month.

We’re starting to see these effects trickle down already. The price of polypropylene (which is made from naphtha and used for food containers, bottle caps, and even automotive parts) is climbing, especially in Asia.  

Typically, manufacturers have a bit of stock built up, but that’ll be exhausted soon, likely in the coming weeks. The largest supplier of water bottles in India recently announced that it would raise prices by 11% after its packaging costs went up by over 70%, according to reporting from Reuters. Toys could be more expensive this holiday season as manufacturers grapple with supply chain concerns.

Americans will likely feel these ripples especially hard if disruptions continue. The average US resident used over 250 kilograms of new plastics in 2019, according to a 2022 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s an absolutely massive number—the global average is just 60 kilograms.

The effects of higher prices for both fuels and feedstocks could compound and multiply, and alternatives aren’t widely available. Bio-based plastics made with materials like plant sugars exist, but they still make up a vanishingly tiny portion of the market. As of 2025, global plastics production totaled over 431 million metric tons per year. Bio-based and bio-degradable plastics made up about 0.5% of that, a share that could reach 1% by 2030.

Bio-based plastics are much more expensive than their fossil-derived counterparts. And many are made using agricultural raw materials, so scaling them up too much could be harmful for the environment and might compete with other industries like food production.

Recycling isn’t the easy answer either. Mechanical recycling is the current standard method used for materials like the plastics that make up water bottles and disposable coffee cups. But that degrades the materials over time, so they can’t be used infinitely. Chemical recycling has its own host of issues—the facilities that do it can be highly polluting, and today plastics that go into advanced recycling plants largely don’t actually go into new plastics.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how this energy crisis is going to push the world more toward renewable energy. Solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries could suddenly become more attractive as we face the drastic consequences of a disruption in the global fossil-fuel supply.

But when it comes to plastic, the future looks far more complicated. Even though the plastics industry is facing much the same disruptions as the energy sector, there aren’t the same obvious alternatives available for a transition. Our lives are tied up in plastic, with uses ranging from the essential (like medical equipment) to the mundane (my to-go coffee cup). Soon, our economy could feel the effects of just how much we rely on fossil-derived plastics, and how hard it’s going to be to replace them. 

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Are high gas prices good news for EVs? It’s complicated.

I live in a dense city with plentiful public transportation options and limited parking, so I don’t own a car. I’m often utterly clueless about the current price of gasoline.

But as the conflict in Iran has escalated, fossil-fuel prices have been on a roller-coaster, and I’ve started paying attention. In the US, average gas prices are $3.98 a gallon as of March 25, up from under $3 before the war started.

Online there’s been what almost looks like cheerleading about this volatility from some folks, including EV owners—some of the social media posts and op-eds have read as nearly gleeful. The subtext (or even the text) is “I told you so.” 

Don’t get me wrong—this could be an opportunity for EVs to make headway around the world. But there are plenty of reasons that even the carless among us should be concerned about a sustained rise in fossil-fuel prices.

Historically, this is exactly the sort of moment that’s pushed people to reevaluate how they get around. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Americans switched to smaller, more efficient cars in droves. It was a major opportunity for Japanese automakers, whose vehicles tended to fit this mold better than those produced by their US counterparts.

We’re already seeing early signs that people are interested in going electric. One US-based online car marketplace said that search traffic for EVs was up 20% following the initial attack on Iran. For more popular models like the Tesla Model Y, traffic nearly doubled.

And the interest is global. One car dealership outside London said it’s struggling to keep up with demand and is sending staff to buy more EVs at auction, according to Reuters. Another in Manila told Bloomberg that it got a month’s worth of orders in two weeks.

The timing here is really interesting in the US in particular, because we’re about to see a wave of more affordable used EVs hit the market. Three years ago, a leasing boom started with the Inflation Reduction Act, which included incentives for EVs, including leases. About 300,000 such leases are set to expire this year, and many of those vehicles could come up for sale, increasing the available supply of affordable used EVs.

The interest is there, but what would it really take for more drivers to make the switch?

Nice, round numbers do tend to get people’s attention. Some point to $4 per gallon (which the national average is quite close to right now). At that price, the total cost of ownership for an EV is comfortably lower than the cost for a gas-powered car, even with higher electricity prices, according to data from the energy consultancy BloombergNEF.

Then again, maybe that won’t quite do the trick: One survey from Cox Automotive found that most US consumers would consider switching to an EV or hybrid if gas prices hit $6 per gallon.

But this is also the second big incident of fossil-fuel volatility in the last five years, which could make consumers more ready to make the switch, as Elaine Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard, told Bloomberg. (The first was in the summer of 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.)

I’m a climate and energy reporter, and I care about addressing climate change. So I’m always happy to hear about people shifting to EVs or any other option that helps cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions.

But one aspect that I think is getting lost here is that sustained high fossil-fuel prices will be bad for even those of us who are untethered from the burdens of vehicle ownership. Fuel cost makes up between 50% and 60% of the cost of shipping goods overseas. Fertilizer production today requires natural gas, which has gotten significantly more expensive since the war began, particularly in Europe.

Jet fuel prices have basically doubled in the last month, according to the International Air Transport Association. Since those prices account for something like a quarter of an airline’s operating cost, that could soon make air travel—and anything that’s shipped by plane—more expensive.

And if all this adds up to an economic downturn, it’s bad for big projects that need financing (even wind and solar farms) and for people who want to borrow money to buy a home or a car (including an EV).

If you’re in the market for a car, maybe this uncertainty is what you needed to consider electric. But until we’re able to truly decarbonize not only our transportation but the rest of our economy, even this carless reporter is going to be worried about high gas prices.

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Why the world doesn’t recycle more nuclear waste

The prospect of making trash useful is always fascinating to me. Whether it’s used batteries, solar panels, or spent nuclear fuel, getting use out of something destined for disposal sounds like a win all around.

In nuclear energy, figuring out what to do with waste has always been a challenge, since the material needs to be dealt with carefully. In a new story, I dug into the question of what advanced nuclear reactors will mean for spent fuel waste. New coolants, fuels, and logistics popping up in companies’ designs could require some adjustments.

My reporting also helped answer another question that was lingering in my brain: Why doesn’t the world recycle more nuclear waste?

There’s still a lot of usable uranium in spent nuclear fuel when it’s pulled out of reactors. Getting more use out of the spent fuel could cut down on both waste and the need to mine new material, but the process is costly, complicated, and not 100% effective.

France has the largest and most established reprocessing program in the world today. The La Hague plant in northern France has the capacity to reprocess about 1,700 tons of spent fuel each year.

The plant uses a process called PUREX—spent fuel is dissolved in acid and goes through chemical processing to pull out the uranium and plutonium, which are then separated. The plutonium is used to make mixed oxide (or MOX) fuel, which can be used in a mixture to fuel conventional nuclear reactors or alone as fuel in some specialized designs. And the uranium can go on to be re-enriched and used in standard low-enriched uranium fuel.

Reprocessing can cut down on the total volume of high-level nuclear waste that needs special handling, says Allison Macfarlane, director of the school of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia and a former chair of the NRC.

But there’s a bit of a catch. Today, the gold standard for permanent nuclear waste storage is a geological repository, a deep underground storage facility. Heat, not volume, is often the key limiting factor for how much material can be socked away in those facilities, depending on the specific repository. And spent MOX fuel gives off much more heat than conventional spent fuel, Macfarlane says. So even if there’s a smaller volume, the material might take up as much, or even more, space in a repository. 

It’s also tricky to make this a true loop: The uranium that’s produced from reprocessing is contaminated with isotopes that can be difficult to separate, Macfarlane says. Today, France essentially saves the uranium for possible future enrichment as a sort of strategic stockpile. (Historically, it’s also exported some to Russia for enrichment.) And while MOX fuel can be used in some reactors, once it is spent, it is technically challenging to reprocess. So today, the best case is that fuel could be used twice, not infinitely.

“Every responsible analyst understands that no matter what, no matter how good your recycling process is, you’re still going to need a geological repository in the end,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Reprocessing also has its downsides, Lyman adds. One risk comes from the plutonium made in the process, which can be used in nuclear weapons. France handles that risk with high security, and by quickly turning that plutonium into the MOX fuel product.

Reprocessing is also quite expensive, and uranium supply isn’t meaningfully limited. “There’s no economic benefit to reprocessing at this time,” says Paul Dickman, a former Department of Energy and NRC official.

France bears the higher cost that comes with reprocessing largely for political reasons, he says. The country doesn’t have uranium resources, importing its supply today. Reprocessing helps ensure its energy independence: “They’re willing to pay a national security premium.”

Japan is currently constructing a spent-fuel reprocessing facility, though delays have plagued the project, which started construction in 1993 and was originally supposed to start up by 1997. Now the facility is expected to open by 2027.

It’s possible that new technologies could make reprocessing more appealing, and agencies like the Department of Energy should do longer-term research on advanced separation technologies, Dickman says. Some companies working on advanced reactors say they plan to use alternative reprocessing methods in their fuel cycle.

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Brutal times for the US battery industry

Just a few years ago, the battery industry was hot, hot, hot. There was a seemingly infinite number of companies popping up, with shiny new chemistries and massive fundraising rounds. My biggest problem was sifting through the pile to pick the most exciting news to cover.

That tide has turned, and in 2026, what seems to be in unlimited supply isn’t battery success stories but stumbles or straight-up implosions. Companies are failing, investors are pulling back, and batteries, especially for EVs, aren’t looking so hot anymore. On Monday, Steve Levine at The Information (paywalled link) reported that 24M Technologies, a battery company founded in 2010, was shutting down and would auction off its property.

The company itself has been silent, but this is the latest in a string of bad signs, and it’s a big one—at one point 24M was worth over $1 billion, and the company’s innovations could have worked with existing technology. So where does that leave the battery industry?

Many buzzy battery startups in recent years have been trying to sell some new, innovative chemistry to compete with lithium-ion batteries, the status quo that powers phones, laptops, electric vehicles, and even grid storage arrays today. Think sodium-ion batteries and solid-state cells.

24M wasn’t trying to sell a departure from lithium-ion but improvements that could work with the tech. One of the company’s major innovations was its manufacturing process, which involved essentially smearing materials onto sheets of metal to form the electrodes, a simpler and potentially cheaper technique than the standard one. 

The layers in the company’s batteries were thicker, which cut down on some of the inactive materials in cells and improved the energy density. That allows more energy to be stored in a smaller package, boosting the range of EVs—the company famously had a goal of a 1,000-mile battery (about 1,600 kilometers).

We’re still thin on details of what exactly went down at 24M and what comes next for its tech. The company didn’t get back to my questions sent to the official press email, and nobody picked up the phone when I called. 24M cofounder and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang declined to speak on the record.

For those who have been closely following the battery industry, more bad news isn’t too surprising. It feels as if everyone is short on money these days, and as purse strings tighten, there’s less interest in novel ideas. “It just feels like there’s not a lot of appetite for innovation,” says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm that focuses on the energy storage industry.

Natron Energy, one of the leading sodium-ion startups in the US, shut down operations in September last year. Ample, an EV battery-swapping company, filed for bankruptcy in December 2025.  

There were always going to be failures from the recent battery boom. Money was flowing to all sorts of companies, some pitching truly wild ideas. But what recent months have made clear is that the battery market is turning brutal, even for the relatively safe bets.

Because 24M’s technology was designed to work into existing lithium-ion chemistry, it could have been an attractive candidate for existing battery companies to license or even acquire. “It’s a great example of something that should have been easier,” Rodby says.  

The gutting of major components of the Inflation Reduction Act, key legislation in the US that provided funding and incentives for batteries and EVs, certainly hasn’t helped. The EV market in the US is cooling off, with automakers canceling EV models and slashing factory plans.

There are bright spots. China’s battery industry is thriving, and its battery and EV giants are looking ever more dominant. The market for stationary energy storage is also still seeing positive signs of growth, even in the US. 

But overall, it’s not looking great. 

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How much wildfire prevention is too much?

The race to prevent the worst wildfires has been an increasingly high-tech one. Companies are proposing AI fire detection systems and drones that can stamp out early blazes. And now, one Canadian startup says it’s going after lightning.

Lightning-sparked fires can be a big deal: The Canadian wildfires of 2023 generated nearly 500 million metric tons of carbon emissions, and lightning-started fires burned 93% of the area affected. Skyward Wildfire claims that it can stop wildfires before they even start by preventing lightning strikes.

It’s a wild promise, and one that my colleague James Temple dug into for his most recent story. (You should read the whole thing; there’s a ton of fascinating history and quirky science.) As James points out in his story, there’s plenty of uncertainty about just how well this would work and under what conditions. But I was left with another lingering question: If we can prevent lightning-sparked fires, should we?

I can’t help myself, so let’s take just a moment to talk about how this lightning prevention method supposedly works. Basically, lightning is static discharge—virtually the same thing as when you rub your socks on a carpet and then touch a doorknob, as James puts it.

When you shuffle across a rug, the friction causes electrons to jump around, so ions build up and an electric field forms. In the case of lightning, it’s snowflakes and tiny ice pellets called graupel rubbing together. They get separated by updrafts, building up a charge difference, and eventually cause an electrostatic discharge—lightning.

Starting in about the 1950s, researchers started to wonder if they might be able to prevent lightning strikes. Some came up with the idea of using metallic chaff, fiberglass strands coated with aluminum. (The military was already using the material to disrupt radar signals.) The idea is that the chaff can act as a conductor, reducing the buildup of static electricity that would otherwise result in a lightning strike.

The theory is sound enough, but results to date have been mixed. Some research suggests you might need high concentrations of chaff to prevent lightning effectively. Some of the early studies that tested the technique were small. And there’s not much information available from Skyward Wildfire about its efforts, as the company hasn’t released data from field trials or published any peer-reviewed papers that we could find. 

Even if this method really can work to stop lightning, should we use it?

Lightning-caused fires could be a growing problem with climate change. Some research has shown that they have substantially increased in the Arctic boreal region, where the planet is warming fastest.

But fire isn’t an inherently bad thing—many ecosystems evolved to burn. Some of the worst wildfires we see today result from a combination of climate-fueled conditions with policies that have allowed fuel to build up so that when fires do start, they burn out of control.

Some experts agree that techniques like Skyward’s would need to be used judiciously. “So even if we have all of the technical skills to prevent lightning-ignited wildfires, there really still needs to be work on when/where to prevent fires so we don’t exacerbate the fuel accumulation problem,” said Phillip Stepanian, a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s air traffic control and weather systems group, in an email to James.

We also know that practices like prescribed burns can do a lot to reduce the risk of extreme fires—if we allow them and pay for them.

The company says it wouldn’t aim to stop all lightning or all wildfires. “We do not intend to eliminate all wildfires and support prescribed and cultural burning, natural fire regimes, and proactive forest management,” said Nicholas Harterre, who oversees government partnerships at Skyward, in an email to James. Rather, the company aims to reduce the likelihood of ignition on a limited number of extreme-risk days, Harterre said.

Some early responses to this story say that technological fixes for fires are missing the point entirely. Many such solutions “fundamentally misunderstand the problem,” as Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, put it in a comment about the story on LinkedIn. That problem isn’t the existence of fire, Swain continues, but its increasing intensity, and its intersection with society because of human-caused factors. “Preventing ignitions doesn’t actually address any of the causes of increasingly destructive wildfires,” he adds.

It’s hard to imagine that exploring more firefighting tools is a bad idea. But to me it seems both essential and quite difficult to suss out which techniques are worth deploying, and how they could be used without putting us in even more potential danger. 

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This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it.

When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions.

Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can charge super-fast and have a high energy density that would translate to ultra-long-range EVs. What’s more, it claimed the cells can operate safely in the extreme heat and cold, contain “green and abundant materials,” and would cost less than lithium-ion batteries do today.

It sounded amazing—this sort of technology could transform the EV industry. But many quickly wondered if it was all too good to be true. Now, Donut Lab is releasing a series of videos that it says will prove its technology has the secret sauce. Let’s dig into why this company is making news, why many experts are skeptical, and what it all means for the battery industry right now.

Solid-state batteries could deliver the next generation of EVs. In place of a liquid electrolyte (the material that ions move through inside a battery), the cells use a solid material, so they can be more compact. That means a significantly longer range, which could get more people excited to drive EVs.

The problem is, getting these batteries to work and making them at the large scale required for the EV industry hasn’t been a simple task. Some of the world’s most powerful automakers and battery companies have been trying for years to get the technology off the ground. (Toyota at one point said it would have solid-state batteries in cars by 2020. Now it’s shooting for 2027 or 2028.)

While it’s been a long time coming, it does feel as if solid-state batteries are closer than ever. Much of the progress so far has been on semi-solid-state batteries, which use materials like gels for electrolytes. But some companies, including several in China, are getting closer to true solid state. The world’s largest battery company, CATL, plans to manufacture small quantities in 2027. Another major Chinese automaker, Changan, plans to start testing installation of all-solid-state batteries in vehicles this year, with mass production expected to begin next year.

Still, Donut Lab surprised the battery industry when, in a video released in early January ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company claimed it would put the world’s first all-solid-state battery into production vehicles.

One of the splashiest claims in the announcement was that cells would have an energy density of 400 watt-hours per kilogram (the top commercial lithium-ion batteries today sit at about 250 to 300 Wh/kg). It was also claimed that the cells could charge in as little as five minutes, last 100,000 cycles, and retain 99% of capacity at high and low temperatures—while costing less than lithium-ion cells and being made from “100% green and abundant materials with global availability.”

Many experts were immediately skeptical. “In the solid-state field, the technical barriers are very high,” said Shirley Meng, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago, when I spoke with her last month. She’d recently attended CES and visited Donut Lab’s booth. “They had zero demo, so I don’t believe it,” she says. “Call me conservative, but I would rather be careful than be sorry later.”

“It’s one of those things where nobody knows—they’ve never heard of it,” said Eric Wachsman, a professor at the University of Maryland and cofounder of the solid-state battery company Ion Storage Systems, in a January interview. “They came out of nowhere.”

Donut Lab has shared very little about what, exactly, this technology might be. It’s not uncommon for battery companies (or any startup, for that matter) to be quiet about technical details before they can get patents filed to protect their technology. But the combination of claims didn’t seem to line up with any known chemistries, leaving experts speculating and, in many cases, doubting Donut Lab’s claims.

“All the parameters are contradictory,” said Yang Hongxin, chairman and CEO of the Chinese battery giant Svolt Energy, in remarks to news outlets in January. For example, there’s often a trade-off between high energy density, which requires thicker electrodes that can store more energy, and fast charging, which requires ions to move quickly through cells. High-performance batteries are also expected to be costly, but Donut Lab claims its technology will be cheaper than lithium-ion technology. 

In a new video released last week, Donut Lab cofounder and CEO Marko Lehtimäki announced the company would be releasing a video series, called “I Donut Believe,” that would provide evidence for their claims. As a header on the accompanying website reads: “Fair enough. Here you go.”

When the website went up last week, it included a countdown timer to Monday February 23, when the company released results from its first third-party testing: a fast charging test. The test showed that a single cell could charge from 0% to 80% capacity in about four and a half minutes—incredibly quick and quite impressive results. (One potential caveat to note is that the cells heated up quite a bit, so thermal management could be important in designing vehicles that use these batteries.)

Even as we see the first technical test results, I’m still left with a lot of questions. How many cycles could this battery do at this charging speed? Can this same cell meet the company’s other performance claims? (I’ve reached out to Donut Lab several times over the past month, both to the company’s press email and to leadership on LinkedIn, but I haven’t gotten a response yet.)

The company has certainly drummed up a lot of interest and attention with its rollout, and the theatrics aren’t over yet. There’s another countdown timer on Donut Lab’s site, which ends on Monday, March 2.

I’m the first one to get excited about a new battery technology. But there’s a sentiment I’ve seen pop up a lot recently online, and one I can’t get out of my head as I continue to follow this story: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

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