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I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can…
Miners backed by Trump admin. sell to Japan, South Korea despite push to develop domestic supply chain.
Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…
In February, city officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming discovered something in their reclaimed water system that shouldn't have been there: Cupriavidus gilardii , a rare metal-resistant bacterium traced to wastewater discharges from Meta's $800 million data center campus. The contamination shut down Cheyenne's reuse water system for months , and on July 2, the city publicly named Meta's construction entity — a shell company called Goat Systems LLC — as the source. 📖 Read the full version with charts and embedded sources on ComputeLeap → "It's a very, very unpleasant surprise," said City Councilman Pete Laybourn. It shouldn't have been a surprise at all. Cheyenne is just the latest community learning what happens when AI's insatiable demand for compute meets the physical world: contaminated water, noise that residents describe as "living in hell," electricity bills that spike 267%, and — in the most surreal twist — a federal government that deleted its own energy conservation pages while a heatwave slammed the eastern seaboard. The AI industry talks endlessly about parameters, benchmarks, and scaling laws. But the story converging across Reddit, Hacker News, X, and YouTube this week isn't about models. It's about watts, gallons, and the communities living next to the machines. The water problem is worse than you think A Brookings Institution analysis puts the numbers in perspective: a typical data center consumes 300,000 gallons of water every day — equivalent to roughly 1,000 households. Large facilities gulp up to 5 million gallons daily, matching the needs of a town of 50,000. And water demand for data center cooling may rise by 870% as the current build-out continues. The scale is hard to overstate. According to a Consumer Reports investigation , Phoenix-area data centers currently use 385 million gallons annually — a figure projected to explode to 3.7 billion gallons once planned facilities come online. About two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 sit in water-st
The companies’ Fourth of July plans include celebrating new reactor designs coming online. But there’s still a long way to go before they deliver energy at a meaningful scale.
Google tries balancing AI data center emissions with clean energy efforts.
Something stinks in California’s climate policies. Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air. It’s become wildly popular because…
Honda wants in on the lucrative energy storage market. This week it began producing batteries destined for data centers, not driveways.
Planning a Fourth of July getaway? Use less gas—and cut your emissions—by easing up on the pedal.
Small-scale solar helped renewables nearly triple coal generation on the US grid.
The Trump administration's moves threaten $121 billion in new solar and wind power, two energy sources that are the biggest contributors to new capacity in the U.S.
Climate activist Will Lawrence cofounded the Sunrise Movement. Now, he has shifted his focus in his attempt to compete for a swing-district seat by calling for a data center moratorium.
Nine major suspected cargo thefts happened at Tesla’s Nevada battery factory in January alone, according to sheriff’s records obtained by WIRED.
Base Power is skipping the PJM's troubled interconnection queue by placing its batteries at people's homes, offering backup services in exchange.
It’s been hard to look away from headlines about the European heat wave this week. Temperatures are breaking records across the continent, and the weather is threatening lives, shutting down schools, and in one particularly ironic case, forcing the cancellation of a London Climate Action Week event about extreme heat. As the summer ramps up…
Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load. On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947.…
India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been some 3,000 human casualties in the…
Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle. Some…
Critical Energy is turning rocket engines into geothermal power plants, and it wants to build 300 GW per year by 2045.
Jackery is jumping on the fridge-battery trend with what it says is the "world's slimmest." FridgeGuard also looks nice; a break from power stations that tend to look more at home at a job site than the kitchen or living room. Measuring just 2.63 inches (67mm) thick, the Jackery FridgeGuard power station is meant to […]