With renewables subsidies on the block, nuclear power set to have its day
(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. His climate columns have appeared in USA Today, The Independent, and New Thinking magazine).
It has become increasingly clear in recent weeks that the one of the biggest early strategies of the incoming Donald Trump Administration will be to attack President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and remove as much cost as possible to clear the way for tax cuts later in the year.
GOP leaders are arguing over the extent of the cuts, but most agree they will be largely focused on electric vehicle subsidies to start, as well as offshore wind. One area that is thriving, however, is nuclear research, especially for tech AI data centers.
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Facebook parent Meta this week became the latest tech giant to say it was going all in on nuclear energy to power new data centers, announcing a partnership with Entergy Corp. to power a new center in Louisiana and explore other ways to develop nuclear power.
Meta joins Microsoft, which has done a deal with Constellation Energy to re-open one of the nuclear reactors at the infamous Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania; as well as Google and Amazon, which are investing in the new idea of small modular reactors to power their plants.
Fusion and fission
And then there is the Holy Grail of nuclear energy, fusion, the process of fusing two atomic nuclei vs the traditional fission process of splitting one in two. Fusion, which is what happens on the sun, promises infinite energy if it can be achieved at scale, and has prompted a global race among nuclear scientists to achieve it in the past few years.
The Bulletin for Atomic Scientists published a story this week, which is free for the time being, that said up to 45 different private companies around the world, with some $7.1 billion in collective financing, are currently working on some way to achieve fusion at scale.
No end to hype
For an excellent scientific overview, and I say that shamelessly because I am on the governing board of the Bulletin, check out this story by Robert J. Goldston, former director of the U.S. Energy Dept.’s Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. See: https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-11/an-overview-of-the-fusion-landscape/
For climate investors, the fusion race is somewhat like the carbon storage and removal race happening at the other end of the energy spectrum. It signals that while the focus may shift on different types of clean energy somewhat because of politics, the science, funding, and hype behind these new technologies continues unabated.
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