Above, the superb PBS “Weathered” series looks at recently released maps of Antarctica beneath the ice sheet, incorporating decades of new data and observation.
One key takeaway: West Antarctica sits astride part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” volcanic and tectonic chain. Hundreds of volcanoes sit beneath the ice, and paleo records indicate that increased ice loss could have a feedback effect on these mountains. Result could possibly mean greater sensitivity to deglaciation than was previously thought. This is consistent with the results of research across a multitude of fields from geology to biology.
Meanwhile, a new Hulu series has an Antarctic Super-Eruption as its takeoff point. Looks cool.
The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbardissued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.
The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.
The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.
A collection-emphasis message helps set intelligence-agency priorities, directing resources and attention to high-interest targets. The Greenland order, which went to agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, underscores the administration’s apparent commitment to seeking control of the self-governing island. It forms part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and a decades long ally.
AUSTIN, Texas — Coal ash — the chalky remnants of coal that has been burned for fuel — has been piling up across the United States for decades. But new research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found that the national coal ash supply contains enough rare earth elements to significantly bolster the national supply without any new mining.
“This really exemplifies the ‘trash to treasure’ mantra,” said co-lead author Bridget Scanlon, a research professor at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology at the Jackson School of Geosciences. “We’re basically trying to close the cycle and use waste and recover resources in the waste, while at the same time reducing environmental impacts.”
Rare earth elements are a group of 17 elements that are essential for modern technology. They are also necessary for the energy transition to lower carbon fuels, with these elements being put to use in solar panels, batteries, magnets and other energy technologies.
Agrivoltaics is the practice of using the same land for both farming and solar power generation. As the need for sustainable energy increases, so does the interest in efficient land use. Traditionally, one might think you need to choose between food or energy. But agrivoltaics offers a win-win solution, allowing farmers to raise crops or livestock beneath solar panels.
In this case, sheep are the stars of the story—acting like eco-friendly lawnmowers, trimming grass and reducing the need for costly maintenance around solar panels. But that’s just the beginning.
At the Wellington Solar Farm in New South Wales, researchers partnered with Lightsourcebp, EMM Consulting, and Elders Rural Services to observe 1,700 merino sheep over a period of three years. The animals were split into two groups: one grazed on traditional pastures, while the other roamed between rows of solar installations.
The aim was to assess whether this unique environment had any impact on the sheep’s health and wool quality. The results, published in early 2025, caught everyone off guard: sheep grazing beneath solar panels produced wool that showed stronger fibers and, in some cases, increased growth.
Obviously, we are watching the developments surrounding NOAA and the National Weather Service and budget issues very closely. Here’s an update on where we stand and some apolitical thoughts on what’s going on.
One of the major issues we’ve discussed recently has been regarding staffing cuts leading to fewer weather balloon launches each day. That continues to be a problem. There has been some minor progress, however. Representative Mike Flood, a Nebraska Republican congressman has been one of a handful of political leaders that has been fairly vocal on the risks of this. In short, he gets it. The good news is that balloon launches are scheduled to return to Omaha, and improvements in launch frequency are slated for some other High Plains and Northern Plains locations. The bad news is that staffing is coming from other offices. In other words, the risk is that we may be creating more problems by solving one problem.
CenterPoint Energy plans to install a network of 100 weather stations across its 12-county service territory in the Greater Houston area before hurricane season kicks off on June 1, the company announced Monday.
The weather stations are expected to help the Houston-area electric utility better forecast severe weather and more precisely distribute resources, among other improvements, according to CenterPoint’s statement.
“Our weather network will provide invaluable situational awareness, in real-time, to help us act quickly, proactively and precisely before weather threatens to impact the electrical system and our customers,” Matt Lanza, CenterPoint’s meteorology manager, said in the statement.
The weather stations work by taking measurements on metrics such as humidity levels, wind speed, temperature and rainfall every two to five minutes, according to CenterPoint’s announcement.
CenterPoint’s plan to build its own weather network is part of its continued efforts to prepare for the 2025 hurricane season, so that the utility improves upon its widely-criticized response to last year’s Hurricane Beryl.
But on Saturday, eight countries that belong to the oil cartel known as OPEC Plus said they would add about 411,000 barrels of oil a day in June. The move, which follows a similar step by the group to increase oil production at their April meeting, is a major shift in policy that will ripple through the wider energy industry, hitting profits of oil companies and forcing cutbacks.
The group said in a statement that the market was “healthy” and noted that oil inventories remained low.
Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC Plus, is signaling that it is reluctant to hold back millions of barrels a day of oil that it could produce, especially when other members of the group, like Kazakhstan and Iraq, are not observing their agreed-upon production ceilings.
Above, Kelly Trice, President of Holtec International, is directing the restart of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in South Haven, Michigan, as well as the hoped for construction of 2 small modular reactors on the site. Above, Trice discusses the progress of the restart, including some of the funding sources. Further below, Trice summarize the case for the SMRs. In the meantime, the tariff policies of the current administration are emerging as a significant barrier to timely and economic completion of both projects.
President Donald Trump’s trade policies have disrupted every sector of the economy, including energy. A nuclear power plant project in Michigan could be the latest victim of the president’s tariffs.
In 2024, the Palisades Nuclear Plant, which was closed in 2022, received a loan guarantee of $1.52 billion from the Energy Department. With an additional $300 million grant from the state of Michigan, Holtec Palisades (which owns the power plant) will restart the plant with two 300 megawatt small modular reactors developed by Hyundai Engineering and Construction.* If brought back online, it would be the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. to restart after being scheduled for decommissioning. Even though it was a favored Biden administration project, the restart has received support from Trump’s Energy Department, which approved a $57 million loan disbursement in March.
Still, the government’s subsidies aren’t shielding the Palisades plant from the impacts of Trump’s protectionist agenda. Bloomberg recently reported that the project’s South Korean construction partner is reconsidering its procurement plans to account for tariffs.
All of the programs that the current administration claims to love are being knee-capped by contradictory and confused trade policy. Nuclear no exception. The always well informed Joe Romm, now at the University of Pennsylvania, gave an excellent zoom session a few weeks ago, the full version I have posted at bottom. Covered a lot of ground, but for this post I’ll focus on Small Nuclear v Tariffs, excerpted above.
Any success the U.S. might have with SMRs depends on foreign sales, foreign uranium, and foreign components. So, Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs—as well as his alienation of major U.S. trading partners like Canada and Europe—make SMRs an even riskier bet than they already are. Also, if the economy shrinks due to Trump’s policies, so does demand for new electric power plants, particularly the most expensive and risky experimental plants, like SMRs. And the twin threats of inflation and higher interest rates both increase the risk of even bigger construction cost overruns.
The nuclear supply chain is heavily dependent on foreign countries like China. The DOE’s September 2024 “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear” report, for instance, warns that we do not have “significant domestic suppliers” for key materials used to build nuclear reactors, and “Of particular concern are Hafnium, Niobium, Yttrium, Chromium, and Nickel.” Significantly, export controls on yttrium were one of the retaliatory measures that China put in place in early April in response to Trump’s tariffs.
Canada and Europe have not only been top tariff targets—but also they are currently some of the first customers for U.S. SMRs, as noted in the March analysis, “Trump’s Tariffs on Canada Could Kill the U.S. Nuclear Energy Revival.” The authors warn, “U.S.-based companies marketing small modular reactors, from NuScale to GE-Hitachi, have received their first crucial orders from European and Canadian customers. Without these demonstration projects, their reactor designs will remain confined to paper.”
The analysis also notes that “the leading U.S.-based vendor of reactor technology, Westinghouse Electric Company, is now Canadian-owned.” Indeed, as Westinghouse itself explained in 2025, it is “owned by Canadian energy powerhouses Brookfield and Cameco” and is “the only nuclear vendor with an advanced, proven and fully operational advanced Generation III+ reactor technology”—the AP1000, used for the recent Vogtle reactors—that can be built “and generate electricity by as early as 2035.”
Spain and Portugal were still in the dark Monday when U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on television to blame a widespread power outage on renewable energy.
“It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor,” Wright told CNBC.
The remark represented a thinly veiled swipe at wind and solar, which were powering almost three-quarters of the Spanish grid at the time it went dark. The comments stood in contrast to those made by the CEO of the Spanish grid operator, who said no “definitive conclusions” for the outage had been reached. Grid disasters have become political fodder in recent years, fueling debates over the role of intermittent resources such as wind and solar.
In 2021, when a winter storm slammed into Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was quick to blame wind and solar for rolling blackouts that left 4.5 million without power. An investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission later concluded the state’s power system was insufficiently winterized to survive such a storm. It pinned much of the blame on the state’s natural gas system, which reported widespread freezes during the event.
