Trump pumps federal funds into coal plants in the name of energy security

The Trump Administration is using Cold War-era rules to authorize up to $500 million in funding to keep 13 coal-fired power plants going and build a coal export terminal in California. America's Department of Energy (DoE) says it is securing the funding via the Defense Production Act (DPA), which grants the president authority to use federal financial incentives to stimulate private domestic industry deemed critical to national defense. At the same time, the DoE announced that one of the advanced nuclear reactor projects it has been sponsoring has achieved criticality ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Trump. That DPA funding includes up to $425 million for 12 projects to "expand and reinvigorate" the aging US coal power fleet, plus up to $75 million for the West Gateway Terminal Project in Oakland, California. This will be an export terminal reached by rail, capable of handling more than 10 million tons annually, which the government hopes to export to nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The pretext for authorizing funding via the DPA is that the DoE is ensuring the US maintains the industrial capacity and energy resources it needs to strengthen national security. Those projects chosen are intended to keep domestic coal mining alive and support reliable baseload power generation to boost the resilience of critical energy infrastructure, the DoE said. The coal industry in America has been declining for decades. It delivered 578 million tons in 2023, less than half the amount produced in 2008 when coal production peaked, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration. And according to a report from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), it was largely due to natural gas becoming cheaper, rather than green energy rules or clean air legislation, while solar and wind have also proved a competitive threat to coal. But the recent AI-driven datacenter build boom has pushed electricity demand upwards after years of stagnation, prompting coal-fired plants to stay online rather than retire. A group of environmental nonprofit organizations warned earlier this year that coal plants in America emit pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), both threatening human health, in addition to the greenhouse gases belched out. The DoE is at least pushing ahead with new nuclear reactor technology. One of its advanced reactor designs, the Mark-0 from Antares Nuclear, has successfully completed what the agency calls a zero-power fueled criticality demonstration at the Idaho National Laboratory. This is basically a test running a controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction, but with no electricity generation involved, simply to show that the reactor can operate safely. Perhaps the reason for the announcement is that Energy Secretary Chris Wright promised in an interview with Bloomberg last year that at least one small nuclear reactor project would be online by July 2026. Sustaining a test chain reaction doesn’t really count as online in our book, but we’ll let that pass. The DoE said the Mark-0 is the first of multiple advanced reactors anticipated to go critical by July 4, the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. “It is fitting that on the eve of our nation’s 250th anniversary, we are witnessing a historic moment for American energy,” Secretary Wright commented. “For the first time in more than four decades, a new privately developed non-light-water reactor has reached criticality in the United States.” The DoE announced the Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program last June, and in August disclosed a list of ten companies it has accepted to take part, including Antares Nuclear. In other news, the department also trumpeted that Japan is officially joining the Trump Administration’s Genesis Mission, billed as a national effort to use AI to drive scientific discoveries. Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu began working with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build the compute infrastructure for Genesis back in January, but now the DoE says that Japan and the US are both contributing $500 million each to the project. The move makes Japan the first, and so far only, international partner on Genesis. ®