Earth is about 71 percent water. An overwhelming 97 percent of that water is found in the oceans, leaving us with only 3 percent in the form of freshwater—and much of that is frozen in the form of glaciers. That leaves just 0.3 percent of that freshwater on the surface in lakes, swamps, springs, and our main sources of drinking water, rivers and streams.

Despite our planet’s famously blue appearance from space, thirsty aliens would be disappointed. Drinkable water is actually pretty scarce.

As if that doesn’t already sound unsettling, what little water we have is also threatened by climate change, urbanization, pollution, and a global population that continues to expand. Over 2 billion people live in regions where their only source of drinking water is contaminated. Pathogenic microbes in the water can cause cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, polio, and typhoid, which could be fatal in areas without access to vaccines or medical treatment.

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© Vicki Smith

Seattle-based Avalanche recently operated its desktop fusion machine for hours on end while maintaining 300,000 volts.

Hadrian wants to revolutionize American manufacturing through automation.

With the app Substage, users can type out file management tasks in plain English, then use the commands it generates to convert file types, manage folders, create zip files, and more.

The final bill is largely what emerged from the Senate Finance Committee in mid-June.

TerraPower has been riding a wave of interest from hyperscalers, data center developers, and now chip designers.

When Baiju Bhatt stepped away from his role as Chief Creative Officer at Robinhood last year, only those close to him could have predicted his next move: launching a space company built around tech that the aerospace industry has largely dismissed, and which might be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes. If people aren’t paying much […]

Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies. 

Amazon and Talen revised an existing deal to buy power from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.

TAE Technologies raised $150 million from investors including Google, Chevron, and others.

Meta and Constellation Energy said the deal would help keep the Clinton Clean Energy Center running through 2047 without ratepayer support.

Heron Power is developing solid-state transformers, which promise to be more compact and responsive than the century-old analog models.

Currently, there are no nuclear power plants scheduled for construction in the US. Everybody with plans to build one hasn't had a reactor design approved, while nobody is planning to use any of the approved designs. This follows a period in which only three new reactors have entered service since 1990. Despite its extremely low carbon footprint, nuclear power appears to be dead in the water.

On Friday, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders intended to revive the US nuclear industry. These include plans to streamline the reactor approval process and boost the construction of experimental reactors by the Department of Energy. But they also contain language that's inconsistent with other administration priorities and fundamentally misunderstands the use of nuclear power. Plus, some timelines might be, shall we say, unrealistic: three new experimental reactors reaching criticality in just over a year.

Slow nukes

The heyday of nuclear plant construction in the US was in the 1970s and 80s. But the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant soured public sentiment toward nuclear power. This also came at a time when nuclear plants typically generated only half of their rated capacity, making them an expensive long-term bet. As a result, plans for many plants, including some that were partially constructed, were canceled.

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© Anton Petrus

The funding round arrives as tech companies and utilities are struggling to secure power for data centers.

National grid operators in Spain and Portugal confirm that a massive electrical blackout has hit the Iberian Peninsula today, starting just a couple of minutes after 12:30 pm Central European Summer Time (10:30 am UTC, or about 6:30 am US Eastern Daylight Time). The outage appears to have resulted in near-total loss of electricity in Spain, Portugal, the Principality of Andorra, and at least some portions of southwest France.

The impacts are widespread and pervasive; in major cities like Madrid, trains are not running, airports are unable to operate, and businesses and schools have closed. Citizens are still able to use cellular networks to communicate so far (most cell towers and network operations centers have battery or generator backup systems).

Electrical demand curve from Red Eléctrica site showing the outage. Credit: Red Eléctrica

Bloomberg energy reporter Akshat Rathi posted on Bluesky that Spanish grid operator Red Electrica claims the outage is due to "grid oscillation," a phenomenon that occurs when the system is unable to suppress oscillations that normally happen as sources and load enter and leave the system. Rathi quotes Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Ryan Gallagher, noting that a cyber attack has been ruled out, and the fault is likely technical:

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