This startup is getting closer to bringing next-generation nuclear to the grid

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

This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry.

MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch less than two months ago. Since then, awardee Kairos Power has had three big announcements about its progress toward building next-generation nuclear reactors. 

Each of these bits of news represents an interesting aspect of the process. So let’s dig into the announcements and what they mean for where nuclear technology is going.

First, a quick refresher on Kairos Power: While nuclear plants today overwhelmingly use pressurized water to keep reactors cool, Kairos is using molten salt. The idea is that these reactors (which are also smaller than those typically built today) will help generate electricity in a way that’s safer and more efficient than conventional nuclear power.

When it comes to strategy, Kairos is taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of full-size power plants. Construction began earlier this year on Hermes, the company’s first nuclear test reactor. That facility will generate a small amount of heat—about 35 megawatts’ worth—to demonstrate the technology.

Last week, the company announced it received a construction permit for the next iteration of its system, Hermes 2. This plant will share a location with Hermes, and it will include the infrastructure to transform heat to electricity. That makes it the first electricity-producing next-generation nuclear plant to get this approval in the US.

While this news wasn’t a huge surprise (the company has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years), “any day that you’re getting a permit or a license from the NRC is an unusual and special day,” Kairos CEO Mike Laufer told me in an interview.  

The company is developing a plan to work on construction for both Hermes and Hermes 2 at the same time, he added. When I asked if Hermes is still on track to start up in 2027 (as we reported in our profile of the company in October), Laufer said that’s an “aggressive timeline.”

While construction on test reactors is rolling, Kairos is forging ahead with commercial deals—in October, it announced an agreement with Google to build up to 500 megawatts’ worth of power plants by 2035. Under this agreement, Kairos will develop, construct, and operate plants and sell electricity to the tech giant.

Kairos will need to build multiple reactors to deliver 500 MW. The first deployment should happen by 2030, with additional units to follow. One of the benefits of building smaller reactors is learning as you go along and making improvements that can lower costs and make construction more efficient, Laufer says. 

While the construction permit and Google deal are arguably the biggest recent announcements from Kairos, I’m also fascinated by a more niche milestone: In early October, the company broke ground on a salt production facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will make the molten salt used to cool its reactors.

“Salt is one of the key areas where we do have some unique and specialized needs,” Laufer says. And having control over the areas of the supply chain that are specialized will be key to helping the company deliver electricity reliably and at lower cost, he adds. 

The company’s molten salt is called Flibe, and it’s a specific mix of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride. One fun detail I learned from Laufer is that the mixture needs to be enriched in lithium-7 because that isotope absorbs fewer neutrons than lithium-6, allowing the reactor to run more efficiently. The new facility in Albuquerque will produce large quantities of high-purity Flibe enriched in lithium-7.

Progress in the nuclear industry can sometimes feel slow, with milestones few and far between, so it’s really interesting to see Kairos taking so many small steps in quick succession toward delivering on its promise of safe, cheap nuclear power. 

“We’ve had a lot of huge accomplishments. We have a long way to go,” Laufer says. “This is not an easy thing to pull off. We believe we have the right approach and we’re doing it the right way, but it requires a lot of hard work and diligence.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more details on Kairos and its technology, check out our profile of the company in the 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch package from October. 

If you’re dying for more details on molten salt, check out this story I wrote in January about a test system Kairos built to demonstrate the technology. 

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY, ADOBE STOCK

Another thing

Donald Trump pledged to enact tariffs on a wide range of products imported into the US. The plans could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more, threatening to slow progress on climate and potentially stall the economy. Read more about the potential impacts for technology in the latest story from my colleague James Temple. 

Keeping up with climate  

The UN climate talks wrapped up over the weekend. In the resulting agreement, rich nations will provide at least $300 billion in climate finance per year by 2035 to developing nations to help them deal with climate change. (Carbon Brief)
→ This falls well short of the $1 trillion mark that many had hoped to reach. (MIT Technology Review)

Utilities might be spending a lot of money on the wrong transmission equipment on the grid. Dollars are flowing to smaller, local projects, not the interstate projects that are crucial for getting more clean energy online. (Inside Climate News)

Sustainable aviation fuel is one of the only viable options to help clean up the aviation industry in the near term. But what are these fuels, exactly? And how do they help with climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated, and the details matter. (Canary Media)

Automakers want Trump to keep rules in place that will push the US toward adoption of electric vehicles. Companies have already invested billions of dollars into an EV transition. (New York Times)

There’s a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, but all other households have increased their meat purchases. (Vox)

Trump has vowed to halt offshore wind energy, but for some projects, things take so long that a four-year term may not even touch them. (Grist)

China’s complicated role in climate change

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

“Well, what about China?”

This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue. Usually, it comes in response to some statement about how the US and Europe are addressing the issue (or how they need to be).

Sometimes I think people ask this in bad faith. It’s a rhetorical way to throw up your hands, imply that the US and Europe aren’t the real problem, and essentially say: “if they aren’t taking responsibility, why should we?” However, amid the playground-esque finger-pointing there are some undeniable facts: China emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, by far. It’s one of the world’s most populous countries and a climate-tech powerhouse, and its economy is still developing. 

With many complicated factors at play, how should we think about the country’s role in addressing climate change?

China’s emissions are the highest in the world, topping 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency.

There’s context missing if we just look at that one number, as I wrote in my latest story that digs into recent global climate data. Since carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for centuries, we should arguably consider not just a country’s current emissions, but everything it’s produced over time. If we do that, the US still takes the crown for the world’s biggest climate polluter.

However, China is now in second place, according to a new analysis from Carbon Brief released this week. In 2023, the country exceeded the EU’s 27 member states in historical emissions for the first time.

This reflects a wider trend that we’re seeing around the world: Developing nations are starting to account for a larger fraction of emissions than they used to. In 1992, when countries agreed to the UN climate convention, industrialized countries (a category called Annex I) made up about one-fifth of the world’s population but were responsible for a whopping 61% of historical emissions. By the end of 2024, though, those countries’ share of global historical emissions will fall to 52%, and it is expected to keep ticking down.

China, like all nations, will need to slash its emissions for the world to meet global climate goals. One crucial point here is that while its emissions are still huge, there are signs that the nation is making some progress. 

China’s carbon dioxide’s emissions are set to fall in 2024 because of record growth in low-carbon energy sources. That decline is projected to continue under the country’s current policy settings, according to an October report from the IEA. China’s oil demand could soon peak and start to fall, largely because it’s seeing such a huge uptake of electric vehicles. 

One growing question: With all this progress and a quickly growing economy, should we be expecting China to do more than just make progress on its own emissions? 

As I wrote in the newsletter last week, the current talks at COP29 (the UN climate conference) are focused on setting a new, more aggressive global climate finance goal to help developing nations address climate change. China isn’t part of the group of countries that are required to pay into this pot of money, but some are calling for that to change given that it is the world’s biggest polluter. 

One interesting point here—China already contributes billions of dollars in climate financing each year to developing countries, according to research published earlier this month by the World Resources Institute. The country’s leadership has said it will only make voluntary contributions, and that developed nations should still be the ones responsible for mandatory payments under the new finance goals.

Talks at COP29 aren’t going very well. The COP29 president called for faster action, but progress toward a finance deal has stalled amid infighting over how much money should be on the table and who should pay up.

China’s complex role in emissions and climate action is far from the only holdup at the talks. Leaders from major nations including Germany and France canceled plans to attend, and the looming threat that the US could pull out of the Paris climate agreement is coloring the negotiations. 

But disagreement over how to think about China’s role in all this is a good example of how difficult it is to assign responsibility when it comes to climate change, and how much is at play in global climate negotiations. One thing I do know for sure is that pointing fingers doesn’t cut emissions. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Dig into the data with me in my latest story, which includes three visualizations to help capture the complexity of global emissions. 

Read more about why global climate finance is at the center of this year’s UN climate talks in last week’s edition of the newsletter. 

Keeping up with climate  

Fusion energy has been a dream for decades, and a handful of startups say we’re closer than ever to making it a reality. This deep dive looks at a few of the companies looking to be the first to deploy fusion power. (New York Times)
→ I recently visited one of the startups, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. (MIT Technology Review)

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Wright is head of the fracking company Liberty Energy. (Washington Post)

In the wake of Trump’s election, it might be time for climate tech to get a rebrand. Companies and investors might increasingly avoid using the term, opting instead for phrases like “energy independence” or “frontier tech,” to name a few. (Heatmap)

Rooftop solar has saved customers in California about $2.3 billion on utility bills this year, according to a new analysis. This result is counter to a report from a state agency, which found that rooftop panels impose over $8 billion in extra costs on consumers of the state’s three major utilities. (Canary Media)

Low-carbon energy needs much less material than it used to. Rising efficiency in making technology like solar panels bodes well for hopes of cutting mining needs. (Sustainability by Numbers)

New York governor Kathy Hochul has revived a plan to implement congestion pricing, which would charge drivers to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan. It would be the first such program in the US. (The City)

Enhanced geothermal technology could be close to breaking through into commercial success. Companies that aim to harness Earth’s heat for power are making progress toward deploying facilities. (Nature)
→ Fervo Energy found that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

What’s on the table at this year’s UN climate conference

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

It’s time for a party—the Conference of the Parties, that is. Talks kicked off this week at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Running for a couple of weeks each year, the global summit is the largest annual meeting on climate change.

The issue on the table this time around: Countries need to agree to set a new goal on how much money should go to developing countries to help them finance the fight against climate change. Complicating things? A US president-elect whose approach to climate is very different from that of the current administration (understatement of the century).

This is a big moment that could set the tone for what the next few years of the international climate world looks like. Here’s what you need to know about COP29 and how Donald Trump’s election is coloring things.

The UN COP meetings are an annual chance for nearly 200 nations to get together to discuss (and hopefully act on) climate change. Greatest hits from the talks include the Paris Agreement, a 2015 global accord that set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels.

This year, the talks are in Azerbaijan, a petrostate if there ever was one. Oil and gas production makes up over 90% of the country’s export revenue and nearly half its GDP as of 2022. A perfectly ironic spot for a global climate summit!

The biggest discussion this year centers on global climate finance—specifically, how much of it is needed to help developing countries address climate change and adapt to changing conditions. The current goal, set in 2009, is for industrialized countries to provide $100 billion each year to developing nations. The deadline was 2020, and that target was actually met for the first time in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which keeps track of total finance via reports from contributing countries. Currently, most of that funding is in the form of public loans and grants.

The thing is, that $100 billion number was somewhat arbitrary—in Paris in 2015, countries agreed that a new, larger target should be set in 2025 to take into account how much countries actually need.

It’s looking as if the magic number is somewhere around $1 trillion each year. However, it remains to be seen how this goal will end up shaking out, because there are disagreements about basically every part of this. What should the final number be? What kind of money should count—just public funds, or private investments as well? Which nations should pay? How long will this target stand? What, exactly, would this money be going toward?

Working out all those details is why nations are gathering right now. But one shadow looming over these negotiations is the impending return of Donald Trump.

As I covered last week, Trump’s election will almost certainly result in less progress on cutting emissions than we might have seen under a more climate-focused administration. But arguably an even bigger deal than domestic progress (or lack thereof) will be how Trump shifts the country’s climate position on the international stage.

The US has emitted more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country, it currently leads the world in per capita emissions, and it’s the world’s richest economy. If anybody should be a leader at the table in talks about climate finance, it’s the US. And yet, Trump is coming into power soon, and we’ve all seen this film before. 

Last time Trump was in office, he pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement. He’s made promises to do it again—and could go one step further by backing out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) altogether. If leaving the Paris Agreement is walking away from the table, withdrawing from the UNFCCC is like hopping on a rocket and blasting in a different direction. It’s a more drastic action and could be tougher to reverse in the future, though experts also aren’t sure if Trump could technically do this on his own.

The uncertainty of what happens next in the US is a cloud hanging over these negotiations. “This is going to be harder because we don’t have a dynamic and pushy and confident US helping us on climate action,” said Camilla Born, an independent climate advisor and former UK senior official at COP26, during an online event last week hosted by Carbon Brief.

Some experts are confident that others will step up to fill the gap. “There are many drivers of climate action beyond the White House,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, at the CarbonBrief event.

If I could characterize the current vibe in the climate world, it’s uncertainty. But the negotiations over the next couple of weeks could provide clues to what we can expect for the next few years. Just how much will a Trump presidency slow global climate action? Will the European Union step up? Could this cement the rise of China as a climate leader? We’ll be watching it all.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

In case you want some additional context from the last few years of these meetings, here’s my coverage of last year’s fight at COP28 over a transition away from fossil fuels, and a newsletter about negotiations over the “loss and damages” fund at COP27.

For the nitty-gritty details about what’s on the table at COP29, check out this very thorough explainer from Carbon Brief.

DAN THORNBERG/ADOBE STOCK

Another thing

Trump’s election will have significant ripple effects across the economy and our lives. His victory is a tragic loss for climate progress, as my colleague James Temple wrote in an op-ed last week. Give it a read, if you haven’t already, to dig into some of the potential impacts we might see over the next four years and beyond. 

Keeping up with climate  

The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule to fine oil and gas companies for methane emissions. The fee was part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. (Associated Press)
→ This rule faces a cloudy future under the Trump administration; industry groups are already talking about repealing it. (NPR)

Speaking of the EPA, Donald Trump chose Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York, to lead the agency. Zeldin isn’t particularly known for climate or economic policy. (New York Times)

Oil giant BP is scaling back its early-stage hydrogen projects. The company revealed in an earnings report that it’s canceling 18 such projects and currently plans to greenlight between five and 10. (TechCrunch)

Investors betting against renewable energy scored big last week, earning nearly $1.2 billion as stocks in that sector tumbled. (Financial Times)

Lithium iron phosphate batteries are taking over the world, or at least electric vehicles. These lithium-ion batteries are cheaper and longer-lasting than their nickel-containing cousins, though they also tend to be heavier. (Canary Media) 
→ I wrote about this trend last year in a newsletter about batteries and their ingredients. (MIT Technology Review)

The US unveiled plans to triple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. That’s an additional 200 gigawatts’ worth of consistently available power. (Bloomberg)

Five subsea cables that can help power millions of homes just got the green light in Great Britain. The projects will help connect the island to other power grids, as well as to offshore wind farms in Dutch and Belgian waters. (The Guardian)

The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policy

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

Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.

In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change right now. We’re at a critical moment that requires decisive action to rapidly slash greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, transportation, industry, and the rest of the economy if we’re going to achieve our climate goals.

The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, we’re facing a period where things are going to be very different. A Trump presidency will have impacts far beyond climate, but for the sake of this newsletter, we’ll stay focused on what four years means in the climate fight as we start to make sense of this next chapter. 

Joe Biden arguably did more to combat climate change than any other American president. One of his first actions in office was rejoining the Paris climate accord—Trump pulled out of the international agreement to fight climate change during his first term in office. Biden then quickly set a new national goal to cut US carbon emissions in half, relative to their peak, by 2030.

The Environmental Protection Agency rolled out rules for power plants to slash pollution that harms both human health and the climate. The agency also announced new regulations for vehicle emissions to push the country toward EVs.

And the cornerstone of the Biden years has been unprecedented climate investment. A trio of laws—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and research, much of it on climate.

Now, this ship is about to make a quick turn. Donald Trump has regularly dismissed the threat of climate change and promised throughout the campaign to counter some of Biden’s key moves.

We can expect to see a dramatic shift in how the US talks about climate on the international stage. Trump has vowed to once again withdraw from the Paris agreement. Things are going to be weird at the annual global climate talks that kick off next week.

We can also expect to see efforts to undo some of Biden’s key climate actions, most centrally the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague James Temple covered earlier this year.

What, exactly, Trump can do will depend on whether Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. A clean sweep would open up more lanes for targeting legislation passed under Biden. (As of sending this email, Republicans have secured enough seats to control the Senate, but the House is uncertain and could be for days or even weeks.)

I don’t think the rug will be entirely pulled out from under the IRA—portions of the investment from the law are beginning to pay off, and the majority of the money has gone to Republican districts. But there will certainly be challenges to pieces, especially the EV tax credits, which Trump has been laser-focused on during the campaign.

This all adds up to a very different course on climate than what many had hoped we might see for the rest of this decade.

A Trump presidency could add 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 over what was expected from a second Biden term, according to an analysis published in April by the website Carbon Brief (this was before Biden dropped out of the race). That projection sees emissions under Trump dropping by 28% below the peak by the end of the decade—nowhere near the 50% target set by Biden at the beginning of his term.

The US, which is currently the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter and has added more climate pollution to the atmosphere than any other nation, is now very unlikely to hit Biden’s 2030 goal. That’s basically the final nail in the coffin for efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over preindustrial levels.

In the days, weeks, and years ahead we’ll be covering what this change will mean for efforts to combat climate change and to protect the most vulnerable from the dangerous world we’re marching toward—indeed, already living in. Stay tuned for more from us.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Trump wants to unravel Biden’s landmark climate law. Read our coverage from earlier this year to see what’s most at risk. 

It’s been two years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in hundreds of billions of dollars in climate investment. Read more about the key provisions in this newsletter from August. 

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY

Another thing

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the tech could be a major tool to help address climate change and deal with the growing risks of our changing world. 

The hope is that CRISPR’s ability to chop out specific pieces of DNA will make it faster and easier to produce climate-resilient crops and livestock, while avoiding the pitfalls of previous attempts to tweak the genomes of plants and animals. Read the full story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate  

Startup Redoxblox is building a technology that’s not exactly a thermal battery, but it’s not not a thermal battery either. The company raised just over $30 million to build its systems, which store energy in both heat and chemical bonds. (Heatmap)

It’s been a weird fall in the US Northeast—a rare drought has brought a string of wildfires, and New York City is seeing calls to conserve water. (New York Times)

It’s been bumpy skies this week for electric-plane startups. Beta Technologies raised over $300 million in funding, while Lilium may be filing for insolvency soon. (Canary Media)

→ The runway for futuristic electric planes is still a long one. (MIT Technology Review)

Meta’s plan to build a nuclear-powered AI data center has been derailed by a rare species of bee living on land earmarked for the project. (Financial Times)

The atmospheric concentration of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—has been mysteriously climbing since 2007, and that growth nearly doubled in 2020. Now scientists may have finally figured out the culprits: microbes in wetlands that are getting warmer and wetter. (Washington Post)

Greenhouse-gas emissions from the European Union fell by 8% in 2023. The drop is thanks to efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants and generate more electricity from renewables like solar and wind. (The Guardian)

Four electric school buses could help officials figure out how to charge future bus fleets. A project in Brooklyn will aim to use onsite renewables and smart charging to control the costs and grid stress of EV charging depots. (Canary Media)

Inside a fusion energy facility

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

On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding since it spun out of MIT in 2018, all in service of building the first commercial fusion reactor. The company has ambitions to build power plants, but currently the goal is to finish putting together its first demonstration system, the SPARC reactor. The plan is to have it operating by 2026.

I visited the company’s site recently to check in on progress. Things are starting to come together around the hole in the floor where SPARC will eventually be installed. Looking around the site, I found it becoming easier to imagine a future that could actually include fusion energy. But there’s still a lot of work left to do. 

Fusion power has been a dream for decades. The idea is simple: Slam atoms together and use the energy that’s released to power the world. The systems would require small amounts of abundant fuel and wouldn’t produce dangerous waste. The problem is, executing this vision has been much slower than many had hoped.

Commonwealth is one of the leaders in commercial fusion. My colleague James Temple wrote a feature story, published in early 2022, about the company’s attempts to bring the technology to reality. At the time, the Devens location was still a muddy construction site, with the steel and concrete just starting to go into the ground.

Things are much more polished now—when I visited earlier this month, I pulled into one of the designated visitor parking spots and checked in at a reception desk in a bustling office building before beginning my tour. There were two main things to see: the working magnet factory and the cluster of buildings that will house and support the SPARC reactor.

We started in the magnet factory. SPARC is a tokamak, a device relying on powerful magnets to contain the plasma where fusion reactions take place. There will be three different types of magnets in SPARC, all arranged to keep the plasma in position and moving around in the right way.

The company is making its own magnets powered with tape made from a high-temperature superconductor, which generates a magnetic field when an electric current runs through it. SPARC will contain thousands of miles’ worth of this tape in its magnets. In the factory, specialized equipment winds up the tape and tucks it into metal cases, which are then stacked together and welded into protective shells.  

After our quick loop around the magnet factory, I donned a helmet, neon vest, and safety glasses and got a short safety talk that included a stern warning to not stare directly at any welding. Then we walked across a patio and down a gravel driveway to the main complex of buildings that will house the SPARC reactor.

Except for some remaining plywood stairs and dust, the complex appeared to be nearly completed. There’s a huge wall of glass on the front of the building—a feature intended to show that the company is open with the community about the goings-on inside, as my tour guide, chief marketing officer Joe Paluska, put it.  

Four main buildings surround the central tokamak hall. These house support equipment needed to cool down the magnets, heat up the plasma, and measure conditions in the reactor. Most of these big, industrial systems that support SPARC are close to being ready to turn on or are actively being installed, explained Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations, in a call after my tour.

When it was finally time to see the tokamak hall that will house SPARC, we had to take a winding route to get there. A maze of concrete walls funneled us to the entrance, and I lost track of my left and right turns. Called the labyrinth, this is a safety feature, designed to keep stray neutrons from escaping the hall once the reactor is operating. (Neutrons are a form of radiation, and enough exposure can be dangerous to humans.) 

Finally, we stepped into a cavernous space. From our elevated vantage point on a metal walkway, we peered down into a room with gleaming white floors and equipment scattered around the perimeter. At the center was a hole, covered with a tarp and surrounded by bright-yellow railings. That empty slot is where the star of the show, SPARC, will eventually be installed.

COMMONWEALTH FUSION SYSTEMS

While there’s still very little tokamak in the tokamak hall right now, Commonwealth has an ambitious timeline planned: The goal is to have SPARC running and the first plasma in the reactor by 2026. The company plans to demonstrate that it can produce more energy in the reactor than is needed to power it (a milestone known as Q>1 in the fusion world) by 2027.

When we published our 2022 story on Commonwealth, the plan was to flip on the reactor and reach the Q>1 milestone by 2025, so the timeline has slipped. It’s not uncommon for big projects in virtually every industry to take longer than expected. But there’s an especially long and fraught history of promises and missed milestones in fusion. 

Commonwealth has certainly made progress over the past few years, and it’s getting easier to imagine the company actually turning on a reactor and meeting the milestones the field has been working toward for decades. But there’s still a tokamak-shaped hole in suburban Massachusetts waiting to be filled. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read our 2022 feature on Commonwealth Fusion Systems and its path to commercializing fusion energy here. 

In late 2022, a reactor at a national lab in the US generated more energy than was put in, a first for the industry. Here’s what meeting that milestone actually means for clean energy. 

There’s still a lot of research to be done in fusion—here’s what’s coming next. 

Another company called Helion says its first fusion power plant is five years away. Experts are skeptical, to say the least.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH ROGERS/MITTR | PHOTOS GETTY

Another thing

Generative AI will add to our growing e-waste problem. A new study estimates that AI could add up to 5 million tons of e-waste by 2030. 

It’s a small fraction of the total, but there’s still good reason to think carefully about how we handle discarded servers and high-performance computing equipment, according to experts. Read more in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

New York City will buy 10,000 induction stoves from a startup called Copper. The stoves will be installed in public housing in the city. (Heatmap)

Demand is growing for electric cabs in India, but experts say there’s not nearly enough supply to meet it. (Rest of World)

Pivot Bio aims to tweak the DNA of bacteria so they can help deliver nutrients to plants. The company is trying to break into an industry dominated by massive agriculture and chemical companies. (New York Times)

→ Check out our profile of Pivot Bio, which was one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch this year. (MIT Technology Review)

At least 62 people are dead and many more are missing in dangerous flooding across Spain. (Washington Post) 

A massive offshore wind lease sale this week offered up eight patches of ocean off the coast of Maine in the US. Four sold, opening the door for up to 6.8 gigawatts of additional offshore wind power. (Canary Media)

Climate change contributed to the deaths of 38,000 people across Europe in the summer of 2022, according to a new study. (The Guardian)

→ The legacy of Europe’s heat waves will be more air-conditioning, and that could be its own problem. (MIT Technology Review)

There are nearly 9,000 public fast-charging sites in the US, and a surprising wave of installations in the Midwest and Southeast. (Bloomberg)

Some proposed legislation aims to ban factory farming, but determining what that category includes is way more complicated than you might think. (Ambrook Research)

Why agriculture is a tough climate problem to solve

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

As a climate reporter, I’m all too aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from food production. And yet, I’m not a vegan, and I do enjoy a good cheeseburger (at least on occasion). 

It’s a real problem, from a climate perspective at least, that burgers taste good, and so do chicken sandwiches and cheese and just about anything that has butter in it. It can be hard to persuade people to change their eating habits, especially since food is tied up in our social lives and our cultures. 

We could all stand to make some choices that could reduce the emissions associated with the food on our plates. But the longer I write about agriculture and climate, the more I think we’re also going to need to innovate around people’s love for burgers—and fix our food system not just in the kitchen, but on the farm. 

If we lump in everything it takes to get food grown, processed, and transported to us, agriculture accounts for between 20% and 35% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions. (The range is huge because estimates can vary in what they include and how they account for things like land use, the impact of which is tricky to measure.) 

So when it came time to put together our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, which we released earlier this month, we knew we wanted to represent the massive challenge that is our food system. 

We ended up choosing two companies in agriculture for this year’s list, Pivot Bio and Rumin8. My colleague James Temple and I spoke with leaders from both these businesses at our recent Roundtables online event, and it was fascinating to hear from them about the problems they’re trying to solve and how they’re doing it. 

Pivot Bio is using microbes to help disrupt the fertilizer industry. Today, applying nitrogen-based fertilizers to fields is basically like putting gas into a leaky gas tank, as Pivot cofounder Karsten Temme put it at the event. 

Plants rely on nitrogen to grow, but they fail to take up a lot of the nitrogen in fertilizers applied in the field. Since fertilizer requires a ton of energy to produce and can wind up emitting powerful greenhouse gases if plants don’t use it, that’s a real problem.

Pivot Bio uses microbes to help get nitrogen from the air into plants, and the company’s current generation of products can help farmers cut fertilizer use by 25%. 

Rumin8 has its sights set on cattle, making supplements that help them emit less methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Cows have a complicated digestive system that involves multiple stomachs and a whole lot of microbes that help them digest food. Those microbes produce methane that the cows then burp up. “It’s really rude of them,” quipped Matt Callahan, Rumin8’s cofounder and counsel, at the event. 

In part because of the powerful warming effects of methane, beef is among the worst foods for the climate. Beef can account for up to 10 times more greenhouse-gas emissions than poultry, for example. 

Rumin8 makes an additive that can go into the food or water supply of dairy and beef cattle that can help reduce the methane they burp up. The chemical basically helps the cows use that gas as energy instead, so it can boost their growth—a big benefit to farmers. The company has seen methane reductions as high as 90%, depending on how the cow is getting the supplement (effects aren’t as strong for beef cattle, which often don’t have as close contact with farmers and may not get as strong a dose of the supplement over time as dairy cattle do). 

My big takeaway from our discussion, and from researching and picking the companies on our list this year, is that there’s a huge range of work being done to cut emissions from agriculture on the product side. That’s crucial, because I’m personally skeptical that a significant chunk of the world is going to quickly and voluntarily give up all the tasty but emissions-intensive foods that they’re used to. 

That’s not to say individual choices can’t make a difference. I love beans and lentils as much as the next girl, and we could all stand to make choices that cut down our individual climate impact. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Anyone can choose to eat a little bit less beef specifically, and fewer meat and animal products in general (which tend to be more emissions-intensive than plant-based options). Another great strategy is to focus on cutting down your food waste, which not only reduces emissions but also saves you money. 

But with appetites and budgets for beef and other emissions-intensive foods continuing to grow worldwide, I think we’re also going to need to see a whole lot of innovation that helps lower the emissions of existing food products that we all know and love, including beef. 

There’s no one magic solution that’s going to solve our climate problem in agriculture. The key is going to be both shifting diets through individual and community action and adopting new, lower-emissions options that companies bring to the table. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

If you missed our Rountables event “Producing Climate-Friendly Food,” you can check out the recording here. And for more details on the businesses we mentioned, read our profiles on Pivot Bio and Rumin8 from our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 

There are also some fascinating climate stories from the new, food-focused issue of our print magazine: 

• Some companies want to make food out of thin air, with the help of microbes.
• Food demand in Africa is on the rise—indigenous crops could help feed people while also being more climate resilient. 
• The world is seeing record-breaking temperatures, and farmworkers are especially vulnerable to the worsening conditions. Researchers are developing a sensor to help protect them.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | ASPEN AEROGEL (PYROTHIN,) AUDI (EV)

Another thing

As more EVs hit the roads, there’s a growing concern about battery fires, which are a relatively rare but dangerous occurrence. 

Aspen Aerogels is making super-light materials that can help suppress battery fires, and the company just got a huge boost from the US Department of Energy. Read more about the $670.6 million loan and the details of the technology in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

Hurricane Milton disrupted the supply of fresh drinking water, so a Florida hospital deployed a machine to harvest it out of the air. (Wired) 

There may be a huge supply of lithium in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. Using this source of the crucial battery metal will require companies to scale up new ways of extracting it. (New York Times)

There’s been a flurry of new deals between Big Tech and the nuclear industry, but Amazon is going one step further with its latest announcement. The company is supporting development of a new project rather than just agreeing to step in once electricity is ready. (Heatmap)
→ Here’s why Microsoft is getting involved in a plan to revive a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. (MIT Technology Review)

Japan’s most popular rice is in danger because of rising temperatures. Koshihikari rice has a low tolerance for heat, and scientists are racing to breed new varieties that can handle a changing climate. (New York Times)

There are some pretty straightforward solutions that could slash methane emissions from landfills, including requiring more sites to install gas-capture systems. Landfills are the third-largest source of the powerful greenhouse gas. (Canary Media)

Heat pump sales have slowed in the US and stalled in Europe. The technology is struggling in part because of high interest rates, increasing costs, and misinformation about the appliances. (Washington Post)
→ Here’s everything you need to know about how heat pumps work. (MIT Technology Review)

Everything comes back to climate tech. Here’s what to watch for next.

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

We get to celebrate a very special birthday today—The Spark just turned two! 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been bringing you all the news you need to know in climate tech and digging into some of the most fascinating and thorny topics from energy and transportation to agriculture and policy. 

In light of this milestone, I’ve been looking back at some of the most popular editions of this newsletter, as well as some of my personal favorites—and it’s all got me thinking about where climate tech will go next. So let’s look back together, and I’ll also share what I’m going to be watching out for as we go forward.

It’s prime time for batteries

It will probably be a surprise to absolutely nobody that the past two years have been filled with battery news. (In case you’re new and need a quick intro to my feelings on the topic, you can read the love letter to batteries I wrote this year for Valentine’s Day.) 

We’ve covered how abundant materials could help unlock cheaper, better batteries, and how new designs could help boost charging speeds. I’ve dug into the data to share how quickly batteries are taking over the world, and how much faster we’ll need to go to hit our climate goals.

The next few years are going to be make-or-break for a lot of the alternative batteries we’ve covered here, from sodium-ion to iron-air and even solid-state. We could see companies either fold or make it to the next stage of commercialization. I’m watching to see which technologies will win—there are many different options that could break out and succeed. 

A nuclear renaissance 

One topic I’ve been covering closely, especially in the past year, is nuclear energy. We need zero-emissions options that are able to generate electricity 24-7. Nuclear fits that bill. 

Over the past two years, we’ve seen some major ups and downs in the industry. Two new reactors have come online in the US, though they were years late and billions over budget. Germany completed its move away from nuclear energy, opting instead to go all in on intermittent renewables like solar and wind (and keep its coal plants open). 

Looking ahead, though, there are signs that we could see a nuclear energy resurgence. I’ve written about interest in keeping older reactors online for longer and opening up plants that have previously shut down. And companies are aiming to deploy new advanced reactor designs, too. 

I’m watching to see how creative the industry can get with squeezing everything it can out of existing assets. But I’m especially interested to see whether new technologies keep making progress on getting regulatory approval, and whether the new designs can actually get built. 

Material world forever

I’ll never stop talking about materials—from what we need to build all the technologies that are crucial for addressing climate change to how we can more smartly use the waste after those products reach the end of their lifetime. 

Recently, I wrote a feature story (and, of course, a related newsletter bringing you behind the scenes of my reporting) about how one rare earth metal gives us a look at some of the challenges we’ll face with sourcing and recycling materials over the next century and beyond. 

It’s fitting that the very first edition of The Spark was about my trip inside a battery recycling factory. Over the past two years, the world of climate tech has become much more tuned in to topics like mining, recycling, and critical minerals. I’m interested to see how companies continue finding new, creative ways to get what they need to build everything they’re trying to deploy. 

Milestones … and deadlines

Overall, the last couple of years have been some of the most exciting and crucial in the race to address climate change, and it’s only going to ramp up from here. 

Next year marks 10 years since the Paris Agreement, a landmark climate treaty that’s guided most of the world’s ambitions to limit warming to less than 2 °C (3.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. In the US, 2027 will mark five years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in a new era of climate spending for the world’s largest economy. 

The last two years have been a whirlwind of new ideas, research, and technologies, all aimed at limiting the most damaging effects of our changing climate. I’m looking forward to following all the progress of the years to come with you as well. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet that you probably eat food. So you should join us for the latest edition of our subscriber-only Roundtables virtual event series, where I’ll be speaking with my colleague James Temple about creating climate-friendly food. 

Joining us are experts from Pivot Bio and Rumin8, two of our 2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. It’s going to be a fascinating discussion—subscribers, register to join us here! 

And one more 

The growing energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a challenge for the grid. But the technology also offers an opportunity for energy tech, according to the authors of a new op-ed out this week. Check it out for more on why they say that AI and clean energy need each other. 

Keeping up with climate  

Hurricane Milton reached wind speeds of over 160 miles per hour, making it a Category 5 storm. It’s hitting the gulf coast of Florida in the coming days. See its projected path and the rainfall forecast. (Washington Post) 
→ Tampa Bay has seen destructive hurricanes, but there hasn’t been a direct hit in decades. The metro area is home to over 3 million people. (Axios)

Other regions are still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which dumped rainfall in western North Carolina in particular. The storm upends ideas of what a climate haven is. (Scientific American)
→ Two studies suggest that climate change significantly boosted rainfall from the storm. (NBC News)

If you have an EV, it’s best to keep it out of flood zones during hurricanes when possible. Batteries submerged in salt water can catch fire, though experts say it’s relatively rare. (New York Times)

The risk of winter blackouts in Great Britain is at the lowest in years, even though the country has shut down its last coal plant. The grid is expected to have plenty of energy, in part because of investment in renewables. (The Guardian)

Voters in Kazakhstan have approved a plan to build the country’s first nuclear power plant. The country has a complicated relationship with nuclear technology, since it was a testing ground for Soviet nuclear weapons. (Power) 

Revoy wants to bring battery swapping to heavy-duty trucks. The company’s batteries can reduce the amount of diesel fuel a conventional truck needs to drive a route. (Heatmap)
→ I wrote earlier this year about another company building batteries into trailers in an effort to clean up distance trucking. (MIT Technology Review)

These 15 companies are innovating in 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.

It’s finally here! We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of time and thought into, and I’m thrilled to finally share it with you. 

Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few reflections on this year’s list as a whole. Because this slate of companies exemplifies a few key themes that I see a lot in my reporting on climate technology. 

1. Addressing climate change requires building a lot of stuff, on a massive scale, and fast. 

A handful of the companies we included on this list stand out because of the sheer scale at which they’re building and deploying technology. And we need scale, because addressing climate change requires going from tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year to net zero.

BYD, for example, featured on our 2023 list, and it was a clear choice for our team to feature the company again. 

For a while, the title of the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) producer has depended on how you define an EV. If you include plug-in hybrids, BYD takes the crown. If you take the purist point of view and only count fully battery-powered vehicles, Tesla wins.

But now, BYD is knocking on Tesla’s door for even that purist title, outselling the company in the last quarter of 2023. The company’s dominant speed and scale at getting EVs onto the roads makes it one I’m keeping my eyes on. 

Other companies are still growing but making significant progress. LanzaJet just opened a factory in Georgia that can produce nine million gallons of alternative jet fuel each year. That’s only a tiny fraction of the billions of gallons of fuel used every year, but it’s a major step forward for alternative fuels. And First Solar, a US solar manufacturer, just opened a $1.1 billion factory in Alabama, and plans to open another in Louisiana in 2025. 

2. With climate impacts embedded in longstanding systems, we need creative new ways to tackle old problems. 

There are parts of the race to address climate change that most people are probably familiar with. Fossil fuels and their associated emissions are clearly visible in power plants, for example, or in gas-powered vehicles. 

But hidden climate challenges exist within familiar objects. Producing items from shampoo bottles to sidewalks can emit huge amounts of planet-warming pollution. We featured a few companies tackling these less visible problems. 

Sublime Systems is on the list again this year. The company is making progress scaling up its electrochemical process to make cement with significantly lower emissions than the conventional method. We also highlight a company working in the chemical industry: Solugen runs a factory in Houston, and is about to open another in Minnesota, making chemicals with biological starting ingredients rather than fossil fuels.  

3. Climate change is a vast problem that touches virtually every industry, so there’s a lot of work to do. 

As we discussed potential companies for this list over the last few months, I was struck by how tricky it was going to be to represent all the industries we wanted to. I could have personally picked 15 companies just working on batteries, for example.

We wanted some energy companies on the list, of course, as well as some in transportation. But then there’s also agriculture, chemicals, fuels, and what about climate adaptation? I think our final list shows just how massive an umbrella term “climate tech” has become. 

For example, there’s Rumin8, an Australian company making supplements for cows that can cut down on how much methane they belch out. And then we have Pano AI, which is installing camera stations that pair up with AI to better detect wildfires, which are worsening as the planet heats up. 

The world has a lot of work to do to make the progress needed on climate change. I’ll be watching to see what difference these companies are able to make this year, and beyond.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Check out the full list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch to get an in-depth look at all the companies we featured. 

We’re hosting a virtual event on producing climate-friendly food, coming up on Thursday, October 10 at noon eastern time. My colleague James Temple and I will be speaking with folks from Rumin8 and Pivot Bio, the two food companies on this year’s list. This event is exclusive to subscribers, so do subscribe if you haven’t already, then register here!

GETTY IMAGES

Another thing

The UK just shut down its final coal-fired power plant. It’s a major milestone for the country, which has historically relied heavily on the notoriously polluting fossil fuel. 

I dug into the data to see how the nation replaced coal on its grid, and how the rest of the world is faring on the journey to phase out coal. Check out the full story here.

And one more

James Temple wrote a smart essay that pushes back against the idea that AI is going to be our climate savior. There are certainly promising applications of AI across climate, but the technology is also power-hungry. And it would be a mistake to expect AI to deliver us from all of our problems. You should definitely give it a read. 

Keeping up with climate  

See the latest photos of the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene. The storm struck Florida as a Category 4 storm, but the highest death toll has been in mountainous western North Carolina, where devastating floods hit. (Washington Post)

→ Even people who have lived with hurricanes for years are facing tougher decisions, as Jeff VanderMeer discusses in a guest essay. (New York Times)

The immediate devastation from the hurricane is clear, but the long-term effects could ripple across the grid. Key equipment is down in western North Carolina, and there’s a critical shortage of repair supplies. (Latitude Media)

A major policy question in the US right now: where should low-emissions hydrogen go? (Canary Media)

→ Earlier this year, I explained why hydrogen could be used for nearly everything—but probably shouldn’t. (MIT Technology Review)

An oil executive spoke at an NYC climate event put on by the New York Times. Then, protestors shut down the talk. (Inside Climate News)

Charm Industrial is working with the US Forest Service on a carbon removal pilot project. The idea? Convert trees and other material from forest-thinning projects into bio-oil, then inject it deep underground. (Heatmap News) 

→ We covered Charm Industrial’s technology, based on corn stalks, in this 2022 story. (MIT Technology Review)

Rich countries pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for loss and damage from disasters fueled by climate change. It was a tiny fraction of what experts say is needed, and new funding has slowed to a trickle. (Grist)

Why Microsoft made a deal to help restart Three Mile Island

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

Nuclear power is coming back to Three Mile Island.

That nuclear power plant is typically associated with a very specific event. One of its reactors, Unit 2, suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 in what remains the most significant nuclear accident in US history. It has been shuttered ever since.

But the site, in Pennsylvania, is also home to another reactor—Unit 1, which consistently and safely generated electricity for decades until it was shut down in 2019. The site’s owner announced last week that it has plans to reopen the plant and signed a deal with Microsoft. The company will purchase the plant’s entire electric generating capacity over the next 20 years.  

This news is fascinating for so many reasons. Obviously this site holds a certain significance in the history of nuclear power in the US. There’s a possibility this would be one of the first reactors in the country to reopen after shutting down. And Microsoft will be buying all the electricity from the reactor. Let’s dig into what this says about the future of the nuclear industry and Big Tech’s power demand.  

Unit 2 at Three Mile Island operated for just a few months before the accident, in March 1979. At the time, Unit 1 was down for refueling. That reactor started back up, to some controversy, in the mid-1980s and produced enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes in the area for more than 30 years.

Eventually, though, the plant faced economic struggles. Even though it was operating at  relatively high efficiency and with low costs, it was driven out of business by record low prices for natural gas and the introduction of relatively cheap, subsidized renewable energy to the grid, says Patrick White, research director of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank. 

That situation has shifted in just the past few years, White says. There’s more money available now for nuclear, including new technology-agnostic tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. And there’s also rising concern about the increased energy demand on the power grid, in part from tech giants looking to power data centers like those needed to run AI.

In announcing its deal with Microsoft, Constellation Energy, the owner of Three Mile Island Unit 1, also shared that the plant is getting a rebrand—the site will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. (Not sure if that one’s going to stick.)  

The confluence of the particular location of this reactor and the fact that the electricity will go to power data centers (and other infrastructure) makes this whole announcement instantly attention-grabbing. As one headline put it, “Microsoft AI Needs So Much Power It’s Tapping Site of US Nuclear Meltdown.”

For some people in climate circles, this deal makes a lot of sense. Nuclear power remains one of the most expensive forms of electricity today. But experts say it could play a crucial role on the grid, since the plants typically put out a consistent amount of electricity—it’s often referred to as “firm power,” in contrast with renewables like wind and solar that are intermittently available.

Without guaranteed money there’s a chance this reactor would simply have been decommissioned as planned. Reopening plants that shuttered recently could provide an opportunity to get the benefits of nuclear power without having to build an entirely new project. 

In March, the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan got a loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office to the tune of over $1.5 billion to help restart. Palisades shut down in 2022, and the site’s owner says it hopes to get it back online by late 2025. It will be the first shuttered reactor in the US to come back online, if everything goes as planned. (For more details, check out my story from earlier this year.)

Three Mile Island may not be far behind—Constellation says the reactor could be running again by 2028. (Interestingly, the facility will need to separately undergo a relicensing process in just a few years, as it’s currently only licensed to run through 2034. A standard 20-year extension could have it running until 2054.)

If Three Mile Island comes back online, Microsoft will be the one benefiting, as its long-term power purchase agreement would secure it enough energy to power roughly 800,000 homes every year. Except in this case, it’ll be used to help run the company’s data center infrastructure in the region.

This isn’t the first recent sign Big Tech is jumping in on nuclear power: Earlier this year, Amazon purchased a data center site right next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant, also in Pennsylvania.

While Amazon will use only part of the output of the Susquehanna plant, Microsoft will buy all the power that Three Mile Island produces. That raises the question of who’s paying for what in this whole arrangement. Ratepayers won’t be expected to shoulder any of the costs to restart the facility, Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez told the Washington Post. The company also won’t seek any special subsidies from the state, he added.

However, Dominguez also told the Post that federal money is key in allowing this project to go forward. Specifically, there are tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act set aside for existing nuclear plants. 

The company declined to give the Post a value for the potential tax credits and didn’t respond to my request for comment, but I busted out a calculator and did my own math. Assuming an 835-megawatt plant running at 96.3% capacity (the figure Constellation gave for the plant’s final year of operation) and a $15-per-megawatt-hour tax credit, that could add up to about $100 million each year, assuming requirements for wages and price are met.

It’ll be interesting to see how much further this trend of restarting plants might go. The Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa is one potential candidate—it shuttered in 2020 after 45 years, and the site’s owner has made public comments about the potential of reopening. 

Restarting any or all of these three sites could be the latest sign of an approaching nuclear resurgence. Big tech companies need lots of energy, and bringing old nuclear plants onto the grid—or, better yet, keeping aging ones open—seems to me like a great way to meet demand.

But given the relative rarity of opportunities to snag power from recently closed or closing plants, I think the biggest question for the industry is whether this wave of interest will translate into building new reactors as well.  

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read my story from earlier this year for all the details on what it takes to reopen a shuttered nuclear power plant and what we might see at Palisades. 

In the latest in our virtual events series, my colleagues James Temple, Melissa Heikkilä, and David Rotman are having a discussion about AI’s climate impacts. Subscribers can join them for the discussion live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, September 25, or check out the recording later. 

AI is an energy hog, but the effects of the technology on emissions are a bit complicated, as I covered in this newsletter.  

Three more things

It’s been a busy week for the climate team here at MIT Technology Review, so let’s do a rapid-fire round: 

1. Countries including Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand are ending EV subsidies. I wrote about why some experts are worried that the move is coming too soon for some of them. 
2. A proposal to connect two of the US’s largest grids could be crucial to cleaning up our electricity system. The project just got a major boost in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars, and it could represent a long-awaited success for energy entrepreneur Michael Skelly, as my colleague James Temple covered in a new story.  
3. Finally, there’s just one week until we drop our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. Check out this preview story about the list, and keep your eyes peeled next week for the reveal. 

Keeping up with climate  

The US Department of Energy just announced $3 billion in funding to boost the battery and EV supply chain. (E&E News)

→ A single Minnesota mine could unlock billions of tax credits in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

Cheap solar panels are making that energy source abundantly available in Pakistan. But the boom also threatens making power pulled from the grid unaffordable. (Financial Times)

Individual action alone won’t solve the climate crisis, but there are some things people can do. Check out this package on how to decarbonize your life through choices about everything from food to transportation. (Heatmap News)

A group of major steel buyers wants a million tons of low-emissions steel in North America by 2028. These kinds of commitments from customers could help clean up heavy industry. (Canary Media)

This startup wants to use ground-up rocks and the ocean to soak up carbon dioxide. The result could transform the oceans. (New York Times)

North America’s largest food companies are struggling to cut emissions. The biggest culprit is their supply chains—the ingredients they use and the transportation needed to move them around. (Inside Climate News)
California is suing ExxonMobil, claiming the company misled consumers by perpetuating the myth that recycling could solve the plastic waste crisis. Only a small fraction of plastic waste is ever recycled. (The Verge)

How AI can help spot wildfires

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

In February 2024, a broken utility pole brought down power lines near the small town of Stinnett, Texas. In the following weeks, the fire reportedly sparked by that equipment grew to burn over 1 million acres, the biggest wildfire in the state’s history.

Anything from stray fireworks to lightning strikes can start a wildfire. While it’s natural for many ecosystems to see some level of fire activity, the hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change are fueling longer fire seasons with larger fires that burn more land.

This means that the need to spot wildfires earlier is becoming ever more crucial, and some groups are turning to technology to help. My colleague James Temple just wrote about a new effort from Google to fund an AI-powered wildfire-spotting satellite constellation. Read his full story for the details, and in the meantime, let’s dig into how this project fits into the world of fire-detection tech and some of the challenges that lie ahead.

The earliest moments in the progression of a fire can be crucial. Today, many fires are reported to authorities by bystanders who happen to spot them and call emergency services. Technologies could help officials by detecting fires earlier, well before they grow into monster blazes.

One such effort is called FireSat. It’s a project from the Earth Fire Alliance, a collaboration between Google’s nonprofit and research arms, the Environmental Defense Fund, Muon Space (a satellite company), and others. This planned system of 52 satellites should be able to spot fires as small as five by five meters (about 16 feet by 16 feet), and images will refresh every 20 minutes.

These wouldn’t be the first satellites to help with wildfire detection, but many existing efforts can either deliver high-resolution images or refresh often—not both, as the new project is aiming to do.

A startup based in Germany, called OroraTech, is also working to launch new satellites that specialize in wildfire detection. The small satellites (around the size of a shoebox) will orbit close to Earth and use sensors that detect heat. The company’s long-term goal is to launch 100 of the satellites into space and deliver images every 30 minutes.

Other companies are staying on Earth, deploying camera stations that can help officials identify, confirm, and monitor fires. Pano AI is using high-tech camera stations to try to spot fires earlier. The company mounts cameras on high vantage points, like the tops of mountains, and spins them around to get a full 360-degree view of the surrounding area. It says the tech can spot wildfire activity within a 15-mile radius. The cameras pair up with algorithms to automatically send an alert to human analysts when a potential fire is detected.

Having more tools to help detect wildfires is great. But whenever I hear about such efforts, I’m struck by a couple of major challenges for this field. 

First, prevention of any sort can often be undervalued, since a problem that never happens feels much less urgent than one that needs to be solved.

Pano AI, which has a few camera stations deployed, points to examples in which its technology detected fires earlier than bystander reports. In one case in Oregon, the company’s system issued a warning 14 minutes before the first emergency call came in, according to a report given to TechCrunch.

Intuitively, it makes sense that catching a blaze early is a good thing. And modeling can show what might have happened if a fire hadn’t been caught early. But it’s really difficult to determine the impact of something that didn’t happen. These systems will need to be deployed for a long time, and researchers will need to undertake large-scale, systematic studies, before we’ll be able to say for sure how effective they are at preventing damaging fires. 

The prospect of cost is also a tricky piece of this for me to wrap my head around. It’s in the public interest to prevent wildfires that will end up producing greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention endangering human lives. But who’s going to pay for that?

Each of PanoAI’s stations costs something like $50,000 per year. The company’s customers include utilities, which have a vested interest in making sure their equipment doesn’t start fires and watching out for blazes that could damage its infrastructure.

The electric utility Xcel, whose equipment allegedly sparked that fire in Texas earlier this year, is facing lawsuits over its role. And utilities can face huge costs after fires. Last year’s deadly blazes in Hawaii caused billions of dollars in damages, and Hawaiian Electric recently agreed to pay roughly $2 billion for its role in those fires. 

The proposed satellite system from the Earth Fire Alliance will cost more than $400 million all told. The group has secured about two-thirds of what it needs for the first phase of the program, which includes the first four launches, but it’ll need to raise a lot more money to make its AI-powered wildfire-detecting satellite constellation a reality.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about how an AI-powered satellite constellation can help spot wildfires faster here. 

Other companies are aiming to use balloons that will surf on wind currents to track fires. Urban Sky is deploying balloons in Colorado this year. 

Satellite images can also be used to tally up the damage and emissions caused by fires. Earlier this year I wrote about last year’s Canadian wildfires, which produced more emissions than the fossil fuels in most countries in 2023. 

Another thing

We’re just two weeks away from EmTech MIT, our signature event on emerging technologies. I’ll be on stage speaking with tech leaders on topics like net-zero buildings and emissions from Big Tech. We’ll also be revealing our 2024 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 

For a preview of the event, check out this conversation I had with MIT Technology Review executive editor Amy Nordrum and editor in chief Mat Honan. You can register to join us on September 30 and October 1 at the MIT campus or online—hope to see you there!

Keeping up with climate  

The US Postal Service is finally getting its long-awaited electric vehicles. They’re funny-looking, and the drivers seem to love them already. (Associated Press)

→ Check out this timeline I made in December 2022 of the multi-year saga it took for the agency to go all in on EVs. (MIT Technology Review)

Microsoft is billing itself as a leader in AI for climate innovation. At the same time, the tech giant is selling its technology to oil and gas companies. Check out this fascinating investigation from my former colleague Karen Hao. (The Atlantic)

Imagine solar panels that aren’t affected by a cloudy day … because they’re in space. Space-based solar power sounds like a dream, but advances in solar tech and falling launch costs have proponents arguing that it’s a dream closer than ever to becoming reality. Many are still skeptical. (Cipher)

Norway is the first country with more EVs on the road than gas-powered cars. Diesel vehicles are still the most common, though. (Washington Post) 

The emissions cost of delivering Amazon packages keeps ticking up. A new report from Stand.earth estimates that delivery emissions have increased by 75% since just 2019. (Wired)

BYD has been dominant in China’s EV market. The company is working to expand, but to compete in the UK and Europe, it will need to win over wary drivers. (Bloomberg)

Some companies want to make air-conditioning systems in big buildings smarter to help cut emissions. Grid-interactive efficient buildings can cut energy costs and demand at peak hours. (Canary Media)