Latest news with #U.S.DepartmentofEnergy
9 hours ago
- Business
Trump administration canceled a $4.9B loan guarantee for a line to deliver green power
TOPEKA, Kan. -- The Trump administration on Wednesday canceled a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee for a new high-voltage transmission line for delivering solar and wind-generated electricity from the Midwest to the eastern U.S. The U.S. Department of Energy declared that it is "not critical for the federal government to have a role' in the first phase of Chicago-based Invenergy's planned Grain Belt Express. The department also questioned whether the $11 billion project could meet the financial conditions required for a loan guarantee. President Donald Trump has repeatedly derided wind and solar energy as 'unreliable' and opposed efforts to combat climate change by moving away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy also said Wednesday that the conditional commitment to Invenergy in November was among billions of dollars' worth of commitments "rushed out the doors" by former President Joe Biden's administration after Biden lost the election. 'To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,' the agency said in a statement. It wasn't immediately clear how much the department's action would delay or stop the start of construction, which was set to begin next year. The company's representatives didn't immediately respond to emails Wednesday seeking comment The company has said its project would create 4,000 jobs and new efficiencies in delivering power, and that it would save consumers $52 billion over 15 years. The line would deliver electricity from Kansas across Missouri and Illinois and into Indiana, connecting there to the power grid for the eastern U.S. It could deliver up to 5,000 megawatts of electricity. "When electricity demand and consumer power bills are soaring, it's hard to imagine a more backward move,' said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan, Washington-based group supporting renewable energy. Keefe called the Grain Belt Express 'one of the country's most important energy projects' and suggested Trump canceled the loan guarantee 'just because it will bring cleaner energy to more people.' But two prominent Missouri Republicans, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, are vocal critics of the project, describing it as a threat to farmland and land owners' property rights. Bailey called the project a 'scam' and a 'boondoggle.' Hawley said on July 10 that he had secured a pledge from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright to cancel the loan guarantee in a conversation with him and Trump. Critics like Hawley object to the company's ability to use lawsuits against individual land owners along the line's route to compel them to sell their property, which Hawley called 'an elitist land grab.' Online court records show that the company filed dozens of such lawsuits in Missouri circuit courts in recent years, and the Missouri Farm Bureau's president posted on the social platform X Wednesday that the project threatened to 'sacrifice rural America in the name of progress.' Democrats on the U.S. Senate's energy committee suggested on X that Trump, Wright and Hawley 'just killed" the project, but Invenergy announced in May that it had awarded $1.7 billion in contracts for work on the project. And Bailey suggested in a statement that the project could still go forward with private funding without the loan guarantee, saying, 'If Invenergy still intends to force this project on unwilling landowners, we will continue to fight every step of the way.'
Scientific American
12 hours ago
- Science
- Scientific American
The U.S. Just Axed Its Boldest Cosmology Experiment in Generations
Amid simmering anxiety about the future of federally funded science, the U.S. government has quietly withdrawn support for cosmology's next premier project, an experiment that would have given us the best read yet of the strangest chapter in our cosmic origin story. Called CMB-S4 —or Cosmic Microwave Background Stage 4—the project would have used a suite of new radio telescopes, constructed in Antarctica and Chile, to search the big bang's faint, ancient afterglow for new clues about the universe's earliest moments. First conceived in 2013 and repeatedly ranked as a top priority by the nation's astronomers and physicists, the project carried an estimated $900-million price tag, which was set to be roughly split between U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Yet in a terse, unsigned statement to project leaders on July 10, the two agencies declared they had 'jointly decided that they can no longer support the CMB-S4 project.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'We knew things weren't looking good,' says John Carlstrom of the University of Chicago, the project's principal investigator. 'They had warned us that it was not the time to start any big projects, given all the budget areas and all the uncertainty. But whether they would continue to drag us out or have a clean break or try to do something—that was unknown.' Without federal support, Carlstrom says, the project is essentially canceled. Although abrupt, the decision follows years of concern about the decay of U.S. Antarctic scientific infrastructure, exacerbated by hesitations from both agencies about starting big new projects in the face of ongoing federal budget uncertainty. Still, the decision 'is a tremendous loss for science and also for the U.S. as the leader in science. It's a big blow to the community,' says Hitoshi Murayama, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and chair of the once-a-decade Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, which in 2023 ranked CMB-S4 as the highest priority for construction. The project also received a high ranking in 2021 from the U.S. astronomy and astrophysics community via a similar but separate process, the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020) . 'If the agencies are really saying it's over, scientifically, that's awful,' says Joel Parriott, the American Astronomical Society's director of external affairs and public policy. 'And for the people involved, that's devastating.' Ripples in the Dark The universe burst into existence some 13.8 billion years ago, and the unfolding sweep of cosmic evolution eventually led to us. 'What kind of universe created intelligent beings that can go and look at the first instants and understand how everything evolved?' Carlstrom says. Perhaps the most curious aspect of that beginning is the wealth of circumstantial evidence suggesting that in the first minuscule moments after the big bang, the universe underwent an almost inconceivably exponential expansion—a ballooning so violent it shook the fabric of the newborn cosmos. This 'cosmic inflation' would have left indelible ripples in spacetime called primordial gravitational waves. Today they would be visible as subtle, swirly fingerprints in the big bang's relict radiation. Known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, that radiation is a diffuse light that permeates all of space. CMB-S4's flagship objective was to detect those signature swirls in the CMB and clinch the case for cosmic inflation. 'There are a few different signatures that would be consistent with inflation, and some of them we've already seen,' says Jo Dunkley, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. 'But the tensor fluctuation—these gravitational waves—they would be much stronger evidence than we currently have.' First observed in 1965, the CMB has become a treasure trove for cosmologists, who use it to look back in time and study the characteristics of the very early universe. But even after 60 years of observations, we've only scratched the surface of what's possible to see in this faint light. With CMB-S4 and other next-generation observatories, scientists have aimed for multiple breakthroughs, ranging from precisely measuring the energies at play in the first instants of creation to constraining the properties of dark energy, the still-mysterious force that drives the universe's accelerating expansion. Along the way, almost as a bonus, advanced CMB studies could also reveal new particles, clarify the nature of known ones (such as neutrinos) and identify the earliest seeds of sprawling galaxy clusters and other large-scale cosmic structures. 'The CMB is a way that we might learn about physics at scales that are completely inaccessible in any other way,' says David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation. To definitively detect—or rule out—those inflation-scrawled swirls, scientists need to make very deep and detailed observations of the CMB. That's something best done from space, above Earth's turbulent, troublesome atmosphere, following in the footsteps of a few earlier CMB-focused satellites from NASA and the European Space Agency. Today such a mission would cost billions of dollars, however, and wouldn't be amenable to upgrades or enduring operations. Seeking the swirls is feasible (and cheaper) from Earth—presuming you're able to stare for a long time at the same patch of sky through an exceptionally stable and dry column of air. Antarctica, despite its logistical challenges, is one of the very few places on the planet where that's possible. 'The South Pole is particularly outstanding in that regard,' says Rachel Mandelbaum, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, who served on multiple high-profile expert panels that recommended prioritizing CMB-S4. 'If you're at the pole, as the Earth is rotating, you're still looking at the same patch of sky.' That would make the U.S.'s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station a natural hosting site for CMB-S4. And in fact, it is already home to a couple of other CMB projects: the South Pole Telescope and the BICEP Array. (Incidentally, the BICEP Array predecessor BICEP2 made its own claim of detecting smoking-gun swirls in the CMB in 2014, although those putative features were soon shown to instead be the work of contaminating dust in our own Milky Way.) At the South Pole, with a new five-meter aperture microwave telescope plus an array of nine smaller telescopes and state-of-the-art detectors, CMB-S4 would take an ultradeep look at roughly 3 percent of the sky. It would be much more sensitive than all of its predecessors and more easily able to cut through any contaminating dust. To add to CMB-S4's utility and allure, the project also planned to include two new six-meter telescopes on the summit of Cerro Toco in Chile's Atacama Desert. High, dry and with a stable atmosphere above, that site is already home to the Simons Observatory, a newly operational set of telescopes that are conducting similar cosmological observations. The additional CMB-S4 telescopes would make nightly observations of huge swaths of galaxy-studded sky in an effort to map visible matter, better understand the dark universe and catch astrophysical transient events in action. Altogether, there would have been 550,000 detectors spread between CMB-S4's two sites, giving the project an unprecedented chance to hunt for clues of cosmic inflation in the universe's oldest light. 'I'm kind of mesmerized by how much science there still is to get from the CMB,' says Suzanne Staggs, a physicist at Princeton University and co-director of the Simons Observatory. 'It provides a unique opportunity to understand the early universe.' With such a compelling science case—and such strong support from multiple authoritative panels planning the near future of U.S. research—CMB-S4 seemed almost inevitable for a time. 'This project has scientifically been through about every appraisal that it could be, with glowing reviews,' Parriott says. Optimistically, the team hoped it might be able to start construction at the two sites in the near future. Then delays started piling up, and a series of rude awakenings began. The Big Chill Despite its status as a scientific priority, CMB-S4's not-so-glowing fate may have been foretold years ago. Chief among its challenges was that prized South Pole location because, while the pole might be ideal for astronomy, it's not the easiest place on Earth to build and operate sophisticated science facilities. Antarctica is the coldest, driest, windiest, most remote continent on Earth; it demolishes infrastructure without even trying. And NSF, which manages the U.S. Antarctic program on behalf of the government, has known for more than a decade that the existing facilities are in desperate need of maintenance. 'If someone hasn't been following this for a while, they might assume that this is the government pulling back from all kinds of projects,' says Mitch Ambrose, director of science policy news at the American Institute of Physics. 'But in the case of CMB-S4, I think there's a longer history in terms of the challenges with the infrastructure in Antarctica that have been brewing.' In 2011 the White House and NSF convened a panel to evaluate the logistical challenges associated with maintaining U.S. scientific leadership in Antarctica. The panel's report, released after visits to three Antarctic research stations, noted that activities there 'are very well managed but suffer from an aging infrastructure' and are hamstrung by 'the lack of a capital budget,' which it described as 'a situation that no successful corporation would ever permit to persist.' 'The status quo is simply not an option,' the report continued, after noting such deficiencies as a warehouse where forklifts fall through the floor, buildings with gaps so large that snow blows inside and the repeated forced choice between repairing a roof or conducting a science experiment. A report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences followed and also identified the need to shore up crucial Antarctic infrastructure. NSF, correspondingly and with a limited budget, began planning some upgrades. Then 2020 and the COVID pandemic came along, with disruptions to site access and supply chain issues that sent price tags through those crumbling roofs. 'A lot of that planning really went off the rails during the pandemic in a major way,' Parriott says. 'As somebody who's spent a lot of time thinking about the U.S. Antarctic program, it's kind of heartbreaking to see what's become of it.' Since then NSF has struggled to make the required upgrades—a situation that became an ominous portent for projects like CMB-S4. In 2023 the agency paused new projects at the South Pole. In May 2024 NSF definitively told CMB-S4 that the South Pole was off-limits; buildings were sinking into the snow, electrical power was insufficient, and there wasn't enough room to house essential personnel. As a result, NSF officially declined to move the project toward its next design milestone. 'When the announcement came out a year ago, I was completely shocked,' Staggs says. Afterward NSF and the DOE had a simple question for CMB-S4: Could the project proceed without the South Pole site? What if Chile was the only option? Charting a New Course On June 4 the collaboration submitted a proposal to both agencies that outlined a path forward in Chile at roughly half the cost of the original plan. By constructing one large telescope plus a smaller array of dishes at Cerro Toco and leaning heavily on data-sharing and collaborations with the South Pole Telescope, the Simons Observatory and others, the CMB-S4 collaboration reckoned it could still achieve its scientific objectives, albeit more slowly and less robustly. 'In the June plan, the idea was: 'Okay, we're scaling back; we're working with these other experiments so that allows us to build less.' And the expectation was that we could get telescopes on the air as early as 2032 ... with combined results in 2040, 2041,' Carlstrom says. 'You know, when I started this [in 2013], I thought, 'This is going to be great; we'll get on the air in 2020, and I can retire in 2025.' Staggs, the Simons Observatory's co-director, says both projects' leaders met multiple times over the past year to talk about the revised plan. 'Even prior to that, because there was always a plan for part of the CMB-S4 to be in Chile, we had envisioned that eventually the two projects would be working very closely together, at least operationally, but with no details laid out yet,' Staggs says. 'And we were sort of hoping we would be starting on that right around now—because, with the news that they would need to move to Chile, it seemed it was going to be a good opportunity for us to work together more.' But under intense and mounting budgetary pressures, a balance sheet filled with fixed costs for operating cherished existing facilities and a backlog of other projects awaiting construction, the agencies decided to withdraw anyway. The agencies 'just had really hard choices to make,' Ambrose says. 'This is the biggest tension point here: the community seems to really want this thing, and yet the agencies aren't willing to do it.' Knocked down hard, scientists who had planned on CMB-S4's success are now focused on getting back up—and charting a new path forward. 'It's not that the search for primordial gravitational waves won't happen; it just won't advance as rapidly as we had hoped,' Spergel says. 'I hope this ends up being an opportunity to rethink how we do the science and not a decision to step away from doing what is really exciting and compelling science.' In a statement sent to Scientific American, a DOE spokesperson reiterated that 'the scientific case for CMB exploration is strong and compelling' and said that the agency 'plans to continue supporting CMB research,' which is described as a core component of the DOE's high-energy physics program. That includes investigating opportunities to make near-term upgrades to existing experiments at the South Pole and in Chile. (NSF declined to provide comment.) 'If these existing projects weren't there at all, that would be also a different situation,' Dunkley says. 'We'll have to see how things evolve on that front: How much upgrading or continuation of the projects that are already running can be achieved?' One possible solution, Spergel says, is to build as much as possible in Chile to do as much science as possible from there—and then pivot to the South Pole if needed. Another possibility that most U.S. researchers seem less eager to mention is to effectively cede leadership in CMB studies to other nations. Japan's space agency, for instance, is leading development of LiteBIRD (Light Satellite for the Study of B-mode Polarization and Inflation from Cosmic Background Radiation Detection), a space-based CMB mission, for launch in the early 2030s. And on the Tibetan Plateau, China's Ali Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Telescope (AliCPT) has recently completed the first of two planned construction phases, with scientific observations soon to begin. The U.S. is involved in both efforts, chiefly via hardware contributions from the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology, but only plays a supporting role. Despite continued U.S. support for CMB experiments in Chile, perhaps the long-sought confirmation of the strangest chapter of cosmic history will come from elsewhere. 'We'll get there eventually,' Carlstrom says. 'It's just going to be much harder to do without the South Pole, much harder to do without substantial new instrumentation wherever you are, including Chile.'
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Nuclear Power Startups Are Heating up in Southern California, with Radiant's Ultra-Portable Microreactors a Major Player
What if you could deliver a megawatt of energy anywhere in the world a cargo container could be shipped? For an El Segundo-based company, this sci-fi-sounding dream may be much more 'next Tuesday' than 'next planet.' Radiant, a startup that is repackaging and refining traditional nuclear technology into a portable microreactor, is on the home stretch to development and testing of its prototype reactor following a $165 million Series C funding round (bringing total raised capital to $225 million) and the hiring of key executives, including Dr. Rita Baranwal, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. Baranwal serves as Radiant's chief nuclear officer, and most recently worked at Westinghouse on their modular reactor program. The company also hired Mike Starrett as its first chief revenue officer. In fact, the company recently signed an agreement to build 26 microreactors, including 20 units for an as-yet-undisclosed customer. 'Our focus is on the portability of nuclear power because then you could put a reactor in a place where you would have never imagined possible in the past,' said Doug Bernauer, chief executive and founder of Radiant. 'We have ceramic-coated, poppy-seed-size fuel and helium coolant. That combination means you can't have a leak and you can't damage the environment – you can give people the option of picking a nuclear reactor generator over a diesel generator.' The company is on track to be the first to to develop and test its 1 megawatt (MW) Kaleidos microreactor at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, which is scheduled for next year. The research design and its construction is being conducted by a team that has grown to about 100 employees. Radiant is among five nuclear developers that were announced as recipients of high-assay, low-enriched uranium to fuel reactor demonstrations. These companies, and a handful of others, are racing to be first to market with nuclear microreactors, which offer a clean energy source that can be deployed for a variety of uses that typically rely on diesel generators. They produce about 100 to 1,000 times less electricity than conventional reactors and can operate independent of an electric grid. Use cases include backup generators at infrastructure sites, like hospitals to remote power needs in off-grid areas such as military bases, data centers, ships, desalinization plants and specific industrial facilities. The company expects its nuclear microreactor to be competitive with diesel generators where diesel fuel is priced at $6.50 per gallon. That price is above the average price for diesel in the United States, but it can be well below pricing for fuel in other countries and distant areas that rely on generators for power. Microreactors can provide a steady energy source at a consistent price and will include enough fuel for several years. Nuclear fuel can be replenished in a portable manner. More importantly, the design has a passive cooling system that uses helium gas rather than water to cool the reactor. It is meltdown-proof and leak-safe, ensuring protection of people and the surrounding environment. 'We needed to make sufficient design progress to show the Department of Energy that this small startup in Southern California deserves its portion of this precious material it holds for the industry,' said Tori Shivanandan, Radiant chief operating officer. 'Now we have the funding, we have fuel, and we have the team. We're finalizing the design and getting parts on order. I like to say we have our shot on goal.' That design has been years in the making. The company moved into its current building in El Segundo, a former Hughes Aerospace warehouse, about three years ago, vacating a former dance studio that it used as an office. Leveling up in square footage was essential, as the company was rapidly growing and needed space for hardware to be delivered and the team to expand. The new location was great because it offered access to Southern California's vast talent pool of engineers, but it was in rough shape. Early employees sat in the dark as they worked through building renovations that added heating and air conditioning. Even now, the company temporarily ran out of desks for additional staff and Shivanandan said that she planned to sit in the kitchen for several days until new desks arrived. The genesis of the company was from the desire to explore space and inhabit Mars. Bernauer moved to California in 2007 to work as an engineer at SpaceX. The company was headquartered in El Segundo at the time, and he worked on the Falcon 1 rocket, Falcon 9 rocket and other projects promoted by Elon Musk, such as Hyperloop and the Boring Company, before pivoting to Mars colonization plans. He investigated ways to power development on our neighbor planet, and nuclear power generation compared favorably to other power sources, like solar. However, there were no companies that provided an off-the-shelf solution to launch a small nuclear reactor into space. He originally tried to develop a nuclear program within SpaceX but eventually decided to create Radiant in 2019. 'I started researching nuclear on nights and weekends, looking at Wikipedia, and my curiosity lead down the path of who can do nuclear now, how quickly can they do it and what does it cost?' said Bernauer, who provided some of the initial company funding himself. 'I was fully committed to making this thing happen.' Radiant is on target to construct its nuclear reactor and test it in 2026. With its recent round of funding, it anticipates that it has raised enough to carry it through construction of a prototype and testing in 2026 as well as the establishment of a larger scale manufacturing facility to ramp up production. At full capacity, the company expects to build about 50 microreactors per year. 'I was blown away by their capability and vision. The nuclear industry needed people from other sectors to come into nuclear because nuclear hadn't built anything new for a long time,' said Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh, partner at DCVC, the Palo Alto-based venture capital firm that led the Series C round. Slaybaugh is a trained nuclear scientist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley and previously served as an independent board member. 'Radiant has gone very fast with not very many resources.' There is a flurry of activity from established companies and startups looking to repackage nuclear energy at a variety of reactor sizes. At the smallest level, both startups and established nuclear companies are developing microreactors, which can be packaged and transported in a shipping container on a truck or even in an aircraft and deployed in a relatively short amount of time. Many of these companies are working with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, which is where they will demonstrate and test microreactor designs. They are designed to use low-enriched uranium with higher concentrations of uranium-235 than the fuel used in conventional reactors. Companies developing microreactors include Torrance-based Antares, which opened a new 128,000-square-foot factory this year for research and development, component manufacturing, and assembly of its first microreactors. The company is targeting testing by 2027. It raised $30 million in Series A financing last year, co-led by Alt Cap and existing lead seed investor Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Rogue, Uncommon Capital, Shrug, Banter Capital, Box Group and Shine Capital. On a larger scale, small modular reactors are typically designed to be connected to an electric grid while providing 50 to 300 MW. TerraPower, a small modular reactor company that was founded by Bill Gates, is developing Natrium, a next-generation nuclear power plant. The Natrium reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant rather than a traditional water-cooled reactor. Its first plant is a 345 MW facility that is currently under construction in Kemmerer, Wy., and includes a storage system that can boost output to 500 MW. It is being developed as part of a public-private partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. In June, TerraPower announced that it raised an additional $650 million in funding from both new investors, including NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, and current investors, including founder Bill Gates and HD Hyundai, an industry leader in shipbuilding. Gates has invested $1 billion in the company. Not to be outdone, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon have also signed agreements to explore advanced nuclear technology. While this technology is expanding and the next-generation plants are exploring safer ways to cool reactors, conventional reactors have been phased out in California, and there have been very few new reactors built nationwide, primarily due to the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics. In California, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was permanently closed in 2013 due to issues with its steam generators. Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which is operated by PG&E, is the only conventional nuclear power plant in California and was in the process of being decommissioned, but a state decision to extend operations through at least 2030 is in place with the possibility of further extensions. Public perception is changing due to increased power demands and the fragile electric grid in the United States. In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the state's public electric utility to develop and construct an advanced nuclear power plant in Upstate New York with a capacity of one gigawatt of electricity. Furthermore, the nuclear industry has received boosts from the Trump administration, which signed several executive orders to advance nuclear power. Some Army installations could be powered by nuclear microreactors under a May 2025 executive order calling for deploying advanced nuclear reactor technologies. The order, citing national security concerns, directs the Army to establish a program utilizing the technology and requires operation of a nuclear reactor at a domestic military base or installation by Sept. 30, 2028. It is one of a series of orders that seeks to increase the amount of nuclear energy produced in the United States, which is estimated to produce only about 20% of its energy usage currently from nuclear sources. Those orders build on earlier projects. In 2022, the Defense Department awarded a $300-million contract to Lynchburg, Virginia-based BWX Technologies to develop a microreactor that could be transported by a C-17 cargo plane and set up to power a military base for several years before refueling. The U.S. military is a strong customer base for many aerospace and defense startups – and Radiant was selected as a finalist by the Defense Innovation Unit for a potential contract to have its reactor on a U.S. military base – Bernauer still has his eye towards the sky. 'What we have to do is get reactors operating for about five years and then take the thing apart and inspect it to see what's breaking and what's working well. From there, we can make extremely reliable reactors that can operate anywhere,' said Bernauer. 'I want to be able to eventually make the space reactor for Elon (Musk), but to do that, you need something highly reliable and transportable.'
USA Today
7 days ago
- General
- USA Today
Which way should your ceiling fan spin? Do this to beat the summer heat
With temperatures soaring, it's safe to say we're in the thick of a serious summer scorcher. Cranking up the air conditioner has become essential, but staying cool can result in higher energy bills. To keep costs in check, the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Star program suggests setting your thermostat to 78 degrees during warm weather. Another tip? Follow the 20-degree rule: don't set your thermostat more than 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature. Still sweating it out indoors? Before you reach for that thermostat, here are a few other ways to chill out without breaking the bank. Using ceiling fans are effective at keeping you cool and lowering energy costs Using fans is one way to cool down your home without consuming as much energy as you would using an air conditioner. Fans work by creating a wind chill effect. They blow air across your skin, helping sweat evaporate, and that evaporation is what cools your body down. Unlike air conditioners, fans don't cool the entire room, they cool the person using them. The more moisture that evaporates, the cooler you feel. What way should your fan blades spin in the summer? Set your fan blades to rotate counterclockwise. That direction creates a downdraft, pushing cooler air down from the ceiling and creating a breeze that makes you feel more comfortable, even if the actual room temperature doesn't change. It's a simple switch that can make a big difference on hot days. Using a ceiling fan lets you bump your thermostat up by 4 degrees without sacrificing comfort, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More ways to beat the heat: Should your window fan blow in or out? Here's how to cut cooling costs Using a window fan? The U.S. Department of Energy says to do this Using a window fan to beat the heat? The U.S. Department of Energy has some smart tips: If that's not an option, try using separate fans on each level to keep the air moving. Extreme heat kills more than 700 people a year. Here's who's most at risk When temperatures climb, high humidity makes things feel even worse. Moisture in the air makes it harder for sweat to evaporate, which means your body can't cool down as easily. For some groups, the heat is more than just uncomfortable. It can be dangerous. Each year, more than 700 people in the U.S. die from extreme heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most vulnerable include young children, people with pre-existing health conditions, the elderly and outdoor workers. The CDC also warns that certain medications can increase the risk of dehydration or make you more sensitive to the sun. If you're on a prescription, it's important to talk with your doctor about heat safety. Essential tips to beat the heat Although it's still early in the season, here are some tips and tricks to help you beat the heat this weekend and beyond as temperatures climb. Jennifer Lindahl is a Breaking and Trending Reporter for the Deep South Connect Team for Gannett/USA Today. Connect with her on X @jenn_lindahl and email at jlindahl@
USA Today
16-07-2025
- Health
- USA Today
80 years later, victims of ‘first atom bomb' will soon be eligible for reparations
More Americans are now eligible for compensation for health problems linked to radiation exposure from the atomic weapons program. A bright, blinding light flashed above New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto desert at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945. The thunderous roar that followed jolted 14-year-old Jess Gililland awake on the porch of his family's ranch 27 miles away. Gililland didn't know it yet, but the U.S. Army had just detonated the world's first-ever nuclear weapon. In the hours and days after the blast, radioactive dust would begin to coat roofs, clotheslines, crops, animals and the ground near Gililland's family home. As the years passed, almost all his family members and neighbors became sick, often with rare forms of cancer. The federal government never warned them about the bomb test, never evacuated them after the blast, or advised them about the potential health consequences of nuclear fallout. Those who lived downwind of the atom bomb say they've never received much recognition – until now. Eight decades after the Manhattan Project's Trinity Test, generations of New Mexicans' who've suffered health problems from the nuclear fallout will soon be eligible to receive compensation. A measure in the recently enacted Republican tax bill expands the pool of Americans eligible for a program that compensates people who have health problems linked to radiation exposure from the atomic weapons program, including uranium miners and downwinders. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, first passed in 1990, previously only applied to people in certain parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, but didn't include those who were potentially impacted by the Trinity Test in New Mexico, or living on Navajo lands in Arizona, among other areas. For people in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, the money will make a world of difference, Gililland's 71-year-old daughter, Edna Kay Hinkle, said. 'The people around here, a lot of them are really poor. They couldn't afford gas to go to Las Cruces or Albuquerque (to get treatment),' said Hinkle, who has also battled multiple types of cancer. 'There's people that it means millions, multi-millions, to them.' The Trinity Test's secret fallout Scientists chose to conduct the Trinity Test at the Alamogordo Bombing Range for the area's relative seclusion and predictable winds, which they believed would limit the spread of radiation over populated areas, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage. Army officers pinpointed where thousands of people lived within the 40-mile radius of the test site and prepared emergency evacuation plans. But they never used them. After the test, the military described the giant blast people saw as an accident involving ammunition and pyrotechnics. The federal government didn't reveal the real cause, even to those in the area who had watched the mushroom cloud, until a month later, when the nation dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By then, those living near the test site had already ingested the radiated material. In a 2015 letter, a man named Henry Herrera, who was 11 years old at the time of Trinity, recounted watching a cloud of black ash fall across his town, including on the clothing his mother had hung outside to dry in the hours after the explosion. 'This filth landed all over our town (and) covered our village with radiation,' wrote Herrera, who passed away in 2022 at age 87. 'Our water was contaminated because all we had was rainwater from the cistern and ditch water. … Everything we consumed was filled with radiation.' The government publicly downplayed the potential consequences of the nuclear bomb test for people living in the Tularosa Basin, despite internal concerns. Five days after Trinity, physicist Stafford Warren wrote a letter to Army Gen. Leslie Groves explaining that high levels of radiation were found 'near a lot of houses.' Warren suggested future tests be conducted 150 miles away from any populated area. Hundreds of thousands of people lived within the 150-mile radius of Trinity. Years later, a health care provider named Kathryn Behnke wrote to Warren from Roswell, New Mexico, explaining that there were 'about 35 infant deaths' in the city in the month after the atomic test. Warren's medical assistant denied that there might be a connection to the testing in his response back to Behnke. But unpublished data from the New Mexico Health Department showed that infant deaths increased by 38% in 1945, compared with 1946, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Radioactive fallout from the test had landed in high densities across New Mexico and Nevada. Fallout from the more than 100 other nuclear tests the government conducted in the years after reached 46 of the 48 contiguous states, along with Mexico and Canada, according to a 2023 study published by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Colorado Boulder. Thousands eligible for compensation The exact number of people eligible for nuclear-weapons-related radiation compensation across the nation remains unknown. But Tina Cordova, who cofounded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said she estimates upward of 10,000 people have had health impacts related to the Trinity Test. The village of Tularosa alone could generate 'thousands of claims out of a town that has consistently had a population of around 3,000,' Cordova said, noting that generations of people who've moved away still have lingering health problems. Thousands more across other states could be eligible, too. Between 1951 and 1958, the United States conducted 188 nuclear tests out West. At the military's Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, dozens of nuclear tests were conducted underground each year between 1963 and 1992, according to the Department of Defense. During roughly the same time frame, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo Nation lands to build nuclear weapons. An estimated 4,000 Navajo labored in more than 1,000 mines, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said. Others lived in close proximity. Today, hundreds of abandoned uranium mines remain on the tribe's land and may still be polluting water sources and exposing residents to harmful radiation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Nygren called the expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act a 'victory' for the Navajo. Much like Trinity downwinders, those living on tribe lands were for decades not eligible for compensation. The original act only included people in specific counties across Arizona, Nevada, and Utah who were present when the atomic testing took place and who developed specific types of cancer. The expansion passed in the Republican tax bill extends benefits to include all downwinders in Utah, New Mexico and Idaho, and more living in Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alaska. Uranium miners in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, Washington, Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon and Texas will also be covered. Bernice Gutierrez, a downwinder who was born in Carrizozo, New Mexico, eight days before the Trinity Test, believes money from the program could be an 'economic boom' for communities that have long suffered from radiation-related health impacts. But she and other downwinders have said there is still more work to be done. The RECA reauthorization leaves out people in some parts of Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Guam, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state. The extension is also set to expire in two years, leaving concern that some won't be able to apply in time, Gutierrez said. 'Can you imagine 80 years worth of illness and death in New Mexico?' And we have a two-year time frame in which to gather all these applications?' said Gutierrez, who has more than 40 family members who've experienced what they believe to be radiation-related sicknesses. 'It just doesn't end for us' Downwinders are only eligible for compensation if they lived in one of the affected areas when tests were being conducted between 1945 and 1962. Otherwise, if an eligible person has already passed away, their families may be able to file a claim to receive up to $25,000. The National Cancer Institute in 2020 said it found no evidence transgenerational health effects occurred as a result of the test. The study also said there remain 'great uncertainty in the estimates of radiation doses and number of cancer cases possibly attributable to the test.' But Cordova and other downwinders believe the radiation from the blast mutated their ancestors' DNA, making their children and grandchildren more susceptible to cancers and other diseases. Five generations of Cordova's family have had cancer, dating back to 1955. Her 24-year-old niece was the latest to be diagnosed this year. 'It just doesn't end for us.' Cordova said. 'I always say we bury somebody, and someone else is diagnosed. And that is true and has been true in my family forever.' One of her cousins was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor several decades ago, and traveled around the country to find treatment. He died in October of compounding health problems. Two months later, Cordova said her brother was diagnosed with cancer. 'This is a legacy that we will carry forever. Our bodies bear the remnants of the Trinity bomb.'
