Latest news with #Semafor
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
New Era of Nuclear Power Hinges on Seawater Uranium Extraction
This year, the world will generate more nuclear energy than ever before. 'The market, technology and policy foundations are in place for a new era of growth in nuclear energy over the coming decades,' the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote in a report published last month. 'It's clear today that the strong comeback for nuclear energy that the IEA predicted several years ago is well underway, with nuclear set to generate a record level of electricity in 2025,' stated IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. 'In addition to this, more than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally, one of the highest levels in the last 30 years, and more than 40 countries around the world have plans to expand nuclear's role in their energy systems.' All that extra nuclear power generation is going to require a huge expansion of nuclear fuel production. So much, in fact, that the expansion of nuclear energy production capacity is expected to outpace the expansion of uranium production capacity on a global scale, and by a wide margin. This is expected to create a tight market and heightened competition to establish new uranium supplies. As a response, scientists are trying to get creative about new ways to create or circumvent the need for uranium. And so far, China is winning the race. Chinese scientists are making great progress of developing nuclear energy reactors that are powered by thorium instead of uranium, and another team of researchers also just made a major breakthrough in a new way to source uranium from seawater. This last development may mark a major breakthrough, as the world's oceans are home to vast untapped reserves of the 92nd element. According to reporting from Semafor, 'oceans are estimated to hold 5 billion tons of uranium, 1,000 times more than can be mined.' However, 'the dissolved minerals are dilute and difficult to gather.' But a team of researchers from across China, in addition to a colleague from Taiwan, may have just cracked the code. The scientists 'developed an upgraded electrochemical method that requires less money and energy than any other seawater-extraction technique,' according to MSN News. The exact figures are nothing short of staggering. The method was able to extract 100 percent of the uranium present in waters from the East China Sea and 85 percent from the South China Sea. However, when using larger electrodes, the scientists were reportedly able to achieve 100 percent extraction from the South China Sea waters as well. 'The experiments also showed the energy required was more than 1000-fold less than other electrochemical methods,' writes New Scientist. 'The whole process cost about $83 per kilogram of extracted uranium. That is twice as cheap as physical adsorption methods, which cost about $205 per kilogram, and four times as cheap as previous electrochemical methods, which cost $360 per kilogram.' This breakthrough stands to solidify China's place at the helm of the global nuclear energy industry. Currently, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia are the largest global producers of uranium, accounting for nearly 70 percent of global production thanks to their naturally rich reserves. These new findings could allow China to join those ranks. But the ability to extract uranium from sweater could also provide a critical point of entry for other countries that are not naturally rich in mineable uranium. 'We need nuclear power as a bridge toward a post-fossil-fuel future,' Professor Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, told the Stanford Report way back in 2017, when this technology was a distant theoretical possibility. 'Seawater extraction gives countries that don't have land-based uranium the security that comes from knowing they'll have the raw material to meet their energy needs.' By Haley Zaremba for More Top Reads From this article on
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
California senate probing Paramount over 2024 $15M offer to Trump's campaign
-- The California State Senate has initiated an investigation into Paramount, following allegations that the network may have breached state laws pertaining to bribery and unfair competition. The probe was reported by Semafor on Friday. The investigation was triggered by reports of Paramount's offer of $15 million to President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. This was purportedly to settle a lawsuit that was brought against CBS over an edited interview with Kamala Harris, Trump's Democratic rival. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported on this matter. In the latest development, the Senate's communications committee and judiciary committee have issued invitations to two former CBS News officials, requesting their testimony. The officials' identities and the specific details of their expected contributions to the investigation have not been disclosed. Related articles California senate probing Paramount over 2024 $15M offer to Trump's campaign S&P 500 falls amid new US-China tech sanctions Saudi Arabia reportedly planning massive Airbus order
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Last-minute change to GOP tax bill targets trans care
A last-minute change to the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would ban Medicaid funding for 'gender transition procedures,' after an amendment expanded language affecting minors to include adults. That was a coup for social conservative groups like the American Principles Project, which urged House Republicans to make the change, sharing a poll that found 66% support for it. But it has not been a major focus of Democratic opposition during the recess, as they made a broader case against changes like work requirements that would remove people from state-run Medicaid coverage entirely. 'Government should never insert itself between patients and providers. Insurers, whether public or private, should cover all medically necessary care, including for transgender Americans,' Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., the first transgender member of Congress, said in a statement to Semafor. 'Just as I have done my entire life, I will continue to fight against discriminatory bans on coverage of gender affirming care, which every major medical association calls medically necessary.' There's no official estimate of transgender Americans who use Medicaid; studies from UCLA have pegged the number at a little more than 200,000. Coverage for gender medicine, including hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, was first implemented under the Obama administration, and Trump ran in 2020 on rolling it back. And the new provisions worried even some Democrats who had been advocating for their party to find a compromise on some trans rights issues. Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Third Way think tank, argued for those compromises this week, but told Semafor that the coverage ban was simply cruel. 'What's next — a federal health care registry in which you have to get the Trump Administration's approval for any and all of your family's medical treatments?' Cowan said. 'It's not thoughtful or nuanced but extreme and Democrats should be criticizing Republicans for trying to take away parental choice and for denying basic health care rights to trans adults.' Democratic politics right now is about opposition to the OBBBA and its Medicaid cuts. The uniform Republican response is that they are not cutting Medicaid for 'vulnerable' people; that they're actually strengthening it for those people by pulling able-bodied adults off the rolls with work requirements. The gender medicine ban, dropped into the bill at the 11th hour, does not comport with that. It's a social conservative project, designed to roll back coverage of transgender healthcare, which they believe was foisted on the country by unethical doctors and a rapacious pharmaceutical industry. 'With the international medical consensus turning against gender ideology, and voters firmly on our side, now is the perfect time for Congress to ensure our government no longer subsidizes these controversial practices,' conservative leaders from APP, the Family Research Council, and the Family Policy Alliance, wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson. How are Democrats responding? Somewhat tentatively. They are not rushing out with press releases to denounce this part of the bill. As she told me before getting elected last year, McBride thinks that transgender people are better off when Democrats defend their rights as fellow citizens, not as a special interest group. 'They're on Social Security, they're on Medicare, and we know that Donald Trump and JD Vance would seek to gut those programs,' she said, before it was clear who would win the presidency. The Democratic position, right now, is that the bill can still be defeated. But if Republicans do wrangle the votes in the Senate — they can lose three GOP senators and pass it — will the language be removed? Would four Republicans agree to do that? Social conservatives, who once struggled to get their party to care about this, believe that they wouldn't. And hundreds of thousands of lives would change. A new Gallup found Republican support for same-sex marriage, and Republican acceptance of 'gay or lesbian relations,' falling to the lowest levels this decade. That change isn't due to Donald Trump, who supported legal same-sex marriage in all of his campaigns. But it has tracked with Republican campaigning against transgender rights and 'gender ideology,' which the party embraced in 2021 after years of wondering about its political impact.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Ron Johnson takes on Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill'
Senators are making noises about changing President Donald Trump's sweeping tax and spending bill. Then there's Ron Johnson. The hard-charging Wisconsin Republican is leading a full-on assault on the House-passed bill's deficit-expanding impacts, armed with charts, presentations to his colleagues and a myriad of media appearances knocking the legislation. And if Johnson can't support the legislation, it further hamstrings Republican leaders who have already lost one senator's vote in their 53-seat majority. In several recent interviews, Johnson made clear he wants big changes but is trying to be reasonable. He accepts Republicans' contention that expiring tax cut extensions do not need to be paid for and concedes it's unlikely he'll prevail in splitting the bill up into two pieces at this point. But the man who nearly took a pass on running for a third term in 2022 has little to lose politically as he makes his push: He's already served longer than he planned. And it's clear he sees the fight in front of him as a legacy maker for his career, which began with a shocking victory against a longtime Democratic senator. 'I ran in 2010 because I was panicked for this nation. I'm more panicked now,' Johnson told Semafor. 'There's a lot that I love about what President Trump's doing. I'm a big supporter. I want to see him succeed. But right now, the 'big, beautiful bill'? That's just rhetoric. It's completely false advertising. It's literally divorced from reality.' Summing up the growing deficit, he said: 'We're currently projecting $2.2 trillion … Obama is under a trillion. Trump had increased it, Biden increased dramatically. Trump's not doing anything to fix that.' Johnson alone can't sink the bill. But the situation echoes a similar problem Speaker Mike Johnson faced in the House: Fiscal conservatives balking. Speaker Johnson won out by tweaking some of the bill's dials; Sen. Johnson says he needs more than that. Johnson isn't alone in his criticism: Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rick Scott, R-Fla., oppose the House legislation and want bigger deficit reductions. There's no question that Johnson's seen as the bill's lead critic. 'Nobody should underestimate it. I mean, it's not like Ron's been shy about his position on this. And he's been the conservative conscience of the chamber, certainly of the [Republican] conference,' said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. 'He's serious. And we ought to take him seriously.' GOP leaders say they are doing just that amid a careful balancing act. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his team pursue harsher austerity to win over conservatives, they risk alienating centrists. Two GOP leadership aides expressed confidence they can get it done. One said Republicans are currently 'drafting legislation that delivers on the Republican agenda and delivers 51 votes.' 'The Senate is going to work through its own processes and make changes along the way. Tax permanency and maximum savings are among the Senate's top priorities,' said a second leadership aide. 'Failure isn't an option.' GOP leaders want to see action before the July 4 recess, and the pressure to support the legislation will start to build Monday and peak right before the holidays. Many Republicans concede the real deadline is later. Some think August is more realistic; Cramer suggested the end of the fiscal year — Sept. 30. The legislation currently includes a lift to the debt ceiling, which could come up as soon as late summer. Johnson knows what the argument is going to be. 'They package everything into one big bill and: 'you're gonna allow us to default? You're gonna allow a massive tax increase?'' Johnson said. 'We've got a structural deficit of about 6%, the gap between revenue and spending. That's probably gonna go to 7% with the big, beautiful bill. That is the wrong direction.' Johnson's record is filled with uphill fights. In 2017 he threatened to vote against the GOP's Obamacare repeal bill but ultimately supported it. That same year, he took on the GOP's tax cuts — using his early opposition as leverage to increase pro-business proposals in the bill, which he supported. In 2021, a livid Johnson forced the Senate clerk to read the entire Democratic American Rescue Plan. After winning reelection in 2022, Johnson helped lead the opposition to the reelection of Mitch McConnell as the Senate Republican leader and backed Scott's failed upstart bids. In other words, Republicans are not writing off his words as just rhetoric. 'It's really not that absurd what he's suggesting. It's just something that will take longer than between now and the Fourth of July,' Cramer said. Johnson — or RonJohn — sees a chance to make a mark. After Paul, he appears to be the most likely GOP senator to vote no. He's always been a loose cannon (particularly after winning reelection in 2016 with scant national support) and he's a wealthy businessman who doesn't need the job. But Johnson is a lot more comfortable fighting with congressional leaders than he is with Trump, and there's a decent chance Johnson is using his platform (he's been all over the airwaves during the Memorial Day recess) to help shape the bill and get Trump's attention. Johnson was also one of the loudest critics of Trump's tariffs. But when the Senate voted on cancelling them, he sided with the president — who, to be fair, eventually watered down the levies. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told Semafor that while critics from the right are loudest, there are plenty of senators with more nuanced opinions. 'You have some people who come to the conversation with just a very principled view on spending and what we need to do with reductions in spending, and do it in an aggressive, aggressive way,' Murkowski said. 'But you have others who are looking at it through perhaps a little different lens. And so how are we going to work it out? It'll be much like the sausage making that went over on the House side.' Johnson might run for a fourth term, but not for president, he said this week. The Wisconsin Republican's win in 2016 was actually more than his 2010 win.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Tax credit cuts could spoil an even more important clean energy goal
As budget negotiations grip the US Congress, some lawmakers are already looking ahead to the next big energy fight, one with even higher stakes for clean energy and the AI power race: Permitting reform. Bipartisan discussions 'are being seeded now' on the scope of a bill that could speed up approvals for new grid lines and pipelines, and restrict the use of litigation to block such projects, Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) told Semafor, and could lead to draft legislation 'pretty quickly' once the budget talks conclude. But the appetite for compromise on permitting will depend on the outcome of the budget: Democrats may feel burned by tax credit cuts, and Republicans may be able to score some permitting wins without a separate compromise bill. So far, preliminary hearings on the subject this year have shown 'the consensus around developing bipartisan permitting reform legislation,' Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.), who chairs the upper chamber's Environment and Public Works Committee, told Semafor. 'I continue to work with my colleagues across both chambers to make our permitting and environmental review processes more efficient, predictable, and transparent, so that we can complete projects of all types.' As much as clean energy companies would like to keep their current tax benefits, slow permitting bureaucracy and legal entanglements are still the biggest bottlenecks for the industry and its fossil fuel competitors: The existence of hypothetical tax credits is no use if projects can't get built to tap them. The budget reconciliation bill that passed the House of Representatives last week included provisions for fossil projects to pay a fee to jump ahead of the permitting queue, but stricter rules in the Senate about what exactly can be included in a budget bill mean those provisions are likely to get dropped, analysts say. Budget reconciliation was never going to be an effective forum for permitting reform; a bipartisan bill is still the only way to make the necessary changes, and make them stick. 'Everything the Trump administration can do or has done on permitting is prone to reversal,' said Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. 'After reconciliation, everyone will look around and say, 'We still need permitting reform'.' Conditions are favorable for a deal that builds on the one advanced last year by Sens. Joe Manchin (now retired) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). Key committee leaders, including Reps. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) in the House and Sens. Capito and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) in the Senate, have expressed interest in prioritizing a permitting deal. The center of gravity has shifted from the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources committee, where Manchin sat, to Capito's Environment and Public Works committee, where issues around environmental impact statements and judicial rules can be more readily addressed. While some Republicans are pushing to break off chunks of permitting in smaller bills, such as a 'permit-by-rule' bill passed by the House Oversight committee last week, a spokesperson for Peters said that the goal is still 'a bigger more comprehensive product' that can address the full laundry list of permitting issues. Even if the permitting measures that Democrats oppose are struck from the budget bill, later negotiations could still get dragged down by the tax credit cuts. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told Politico that the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting reform were always meant to be linked, and that it's a 'fantasy' to suppose one could proceed without the other. 'If all the IRA tax credits are gutted,' Fishman said, 'there's a risk Democrats will question why they should work on permitting at all, if this stuff isn't going to get built anyway.' Meanwhile, he said, the fact that components of permitting reform remain spread across the jurisdictions of numerous committees is 'the major structural challenge for a deal.' The fate of IRA tax credits now hangs with a few key senators. Ones to watch, Heatmap reported, include Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and John Curtis (R-Utah).
