The US military said it has launched its 10th consecutive round of strikes on Iran to force the reopening of the strait of Hormuz.
Earlier on Monday, Iran’s president said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing.
From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge
In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.
The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.
Campaigners hope move will force commercial banks to rethink holding assets linked to the fossil fuel
Climate campaigners have declared a victory after the Bank of England said it would no longer accept bonds linked to one of the most polluting industries on the planet for key loan arrangements.
The ban, which comes into force in October, marks a fresh crackdown on thermal coal, which is burned in power plants to create electricity, and has long been a target of green policy activists.
Party manifesto pledged to honour existing North Sea exploration licences but not issue new ones
Andy Burnham risks his first confrontation with Labour MPs if he announces new oil and gas drilling licences when he becomes prime minister, insiders have warned.
Speculation is rife that Burnham will unveil fresh plans for drilling in the North Sea after he is installed in Downing Street.
Apartment living can be a barrier to solar and battery adoption. Here’s how to navigate the hurdles and practicalities
Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com
Australia is a world leader in household solar, but the benefits of rooftop renewables are unevenly distributed – and many of the 2.5 million people living in apartments or units are missing out.
About 39% of Australians living in detached or semi-detached houses have solar, compared with 6% of those in apartments or units, research by Energy Consumers Australia (ECA) finds. A gap also exists in the take-up of batteries, installed in 7% of houses but only in 3% of apartments or units.
The predicted £264bn cost by 2050 could be even higher, plus renewables avoid a far higher total of emissions than can be captured, writes Andrew Boswell, while Simon Oldridge calls out vested interests
Prof Myles Allen and colleagues, in their letter (12 July) on carbon capture and storage (CCS), propose licensing gasfields on condition that producers store an increasing proportion of “the carbon dioxide their products generate”. Their proposal only considers CO2. Methane is excluded by choice although it leaks throughout global fossil-fuel supply chains, including during extraction, processing, liquefaction and shipping.
A growing academic literature, supported by satellite observations of major methane plumes, shows that these emissions can be very substantial, and are the dominant near-term climate impact for gas supplied as liquefied natural gas.
Campaigners say field will bring minimal benefit for UK economy, as industry lobbies Burnham for go-ahead
More people can fit on to the top deck of a standard London bus than will be directly employed on the new Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea, industry documents show.
Prices of sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, are rising as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupts global fuel markets. Higher oil-product prices are increasing demand for biofuels, particularly for road transport, as governments seek to soften the impact of elevated fuel costs. Prices in Northwest Europe, the largest SAF consumption hub, are set to remain elevated over the next year according to BloombergNEF analysis, averaging $2,746 per metric ton.
“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”
Austin-based SuperCritical Materials Corp. has secured a license from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to commercialize a patented uranium and critical materials extraction technology developed by DOE laboratories.
The development is a significant step toward expanding future nuclear fuel supply through unconventional uranium resources.
Licensed technology is designed to extract uranium from seawater
Developed with support from the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy and led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the licensed technology is designed to extract uranium from seawater using advanced adsorbent materials. SuperCritical said the agreement grants the company rights to manufacture and deploy the technology at industrial scale in the United States, with plans to expand into allied nations in the future.
The announcement comes as the United States accelerates investment in advanced nuclear energy to meet rising electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centers, advanced manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries. Industry experts have increasingly highlighted that while reactor development is advancing, expanding the upstream nuclear fuel supply chain—including uranium production, enrichment and fuel fabrication—remains a critical challenge.
According to the company, the world’s oceans contain an estimated 4.5 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium, representing a resource far larger than known terrestrial reserves. While extracting uranium from seawater has long been considered technically feasible, commercial deployment has remained limited due to economic and engineering challenges.
SuperCritical intends to commercialize DOE-developed process
SuperCritical said it intends to commercialize the DOE-developed process using advances in adsorption chemistry and materials science. In addition to uranium, the company believes the technology could also enable the recovery of other strategically important critical materials from seawater.
The company describes its long-term strategy as building infrastructure to support what it calls the “Intelligence Economy,” a period of economic growth expected to be driven by artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced computing, defense technologies and digital infrastructure. It argues that reliable nuclear energy and secure fuel supplies will be essential to sustaining this growth.
“Our objective is straightforward,” said Alexander Canon Bryan, founder and chief executive officer of SuperCritical Materials. “If the Intelligence Economy requires abundant, reliable nuclear energy, then it will also require abundant, reliable nuclear fuel.”
SuperCritical noted that its technical team includes former researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, including Dr. Gary Gill, a co-founder of the company and a scientist who has spent more than two decades researching uranium extraction from seawater.
The company said commercial deployment of the technology could contribute to strengthening domestic nuclear fuel supply chains while supporting broader U.S. efforts to improve energy security, expand critical materials production and reduce dependence on imported strategic resources.
The licensing agreement also aligns with ongoing federal initiatives aimed at strengthening America’s nuclear industrial base and increasing domestic production of critical minerals and materials.
Although seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated in research settings, analysts note that large-scale commercialization will depend on achieving competitive production costs and successfully scaling the technology for industrial use. Industry observers view the DOE licensing agreement as an important milestone toward evaluating the commercial viability of the process.
MIT researchers have developed a new framework that could help energy planners decide where to build renewable energy projects as climate change puts growing pressure on power grids.
The study combines fine-scale meteorology with detailed simulations of energy infrastructure. Researchers found that where new energy projects are built could significantly affect whether future power systems can meet demand reliably.
The team applied the framework to decarbonized energy systems in New England and Texas. Their analysis found that systems designed around historic climate conditions could experience up to a fivefold increase in energy shortfalls by 2050.
By incorporating future climate conditions into energy planning, however, the researchers found that both regions could improve grid resilience at little or no additional cost.
“As we mitigate climate change with renewables, we can also adapt to climate change by using future weather projections in our power system planning, and the extra costs of that adaptation are, at least in this study, not much,” said senior author Michael Howland, an MIT professor.
Climate change adds new risks to power grids
Electricity systems are already changing rapidly as demand rises from trends such as artificial intelligence and transportation electrification, while falling costs drive greater adoption of wind and solar power.
But renewable generation and electricity demand are both affected by weather, creating new challenges as climate conditions change.
“This study explores the joint, simultaneous impacts on multiple components of the energy system, similar to compound events studied in climate science,” Howland explained.
“An extreme weather event can impact wind and solar generation and electricity demand all at the same time. Our hypothesis is that’s likely to be the biggest impact we’ll see from climate change on energy systems,” he added.
The study found that climate change could increase energy failures by as much as 500% by 2050 if future climate conditions are not considered when siting and designing energy infrastructure.
Where wind and solar are built matters
The researchers found that locations best suited for renewable projects under future climate conditions can differ meaningfully from those identified using historic weather data.
“We are telling people where you put your wind and solar matters a lot for your ability to deliver energy when you need it,” Qiu explained.
“We need to think more about the when and where of adding renewables rather than only focusing on adding overall capacity,” he added.
In New England, climate-related disruptions increased the need for solar capacity and transmission lines close to major demand centers.
In Texas, risks were primarily driven by transmission constraints. Climate-informed designs prioritized wind farms in West Texas to better align renewable generation with future demand patterns.
Researchers seek faster planning tools
The current framework relies on expensive, high-resolution models, making it impractical for grid operators to use routinely today.
The researchers hope to develop faster models that could make climate-informed planning easier to apply.
“This study shows the opportunity and the need,” Howland says. “There are risks to not adapting our system, but if we do adapt our system, there could be big opportunities that are not costly.”
The United States is facing nine major supply chain challenges that could delay the rehabilitation of its hydropower infrastructure, according to a new report from the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR).
The report has examined the difficulties hydropower operators encounter when upgrading or replacing large power transformers (LPTs).
These custom-built devices raise the voltage of electricity generated by hydropower turbines, allowing it to travel efficiently across long-distance transmission networks.
Their importance extends beyond hydropower, as more than 90% of the electricity consumed in the United States passes through high-voltage transformers at some stage.
Transformer deliveries can take five years
One of the most serious challenges identified in the report is the time required to procure new transformers.
A typical LPT rated at 100 megavolt-amperes takes approximately 2.5 to three years to acquire. Lead times for extra-high-voltage units can extend to five years because only a limited number of facilities worldwide can manufacture them.
Transformer prices sharply increased by approximately 80% in 2025 compared with 2021 levels, according to the report. A single unit can now cost as much as $10 million.
These pressures come as demand rises across the power sector. Although domestic manufacturing and assembly capacity has expanded in recent years, the report found that it has not grown quickly enough to meet current requirements.
US manufacturers also depend heavily on international suppliers. Approximately 80% of the raw materials used in domestic LPT production, including grain-oriented electrical steel and refined copper, are imported.
Changing trade conditions could further increase the baseline costs of copper and steel, adding uncertainty to transformer procurement.
Remote dams create transportation problems
Delivering an LPT to a hydropower facility presents another layer of difficulty. Many dams are located in isolated regions surrounded by rugged terrain, making them considerably harder to reach than conventional power facilities.
Transformers require specialized vehicles and heavy-duty trailers capable of carrying oversized loads. However, the United States has a limited domestic fleet of such equipment. Transportation routes must also be planned carefully and require special permits.
Permitting and regulatory procedures can produce additional delays, particularly when an operator must remove an existing transformer before installing its replacement.
Federal contracting rules and domestic-content requirements could also create near-term bottlenecks while US production capacity remains limited.
Report could guide domestic investment
The NLR study builds on the US Department of Energy’s broader Hydropower Supply Chain Gap Analysis, which previously identified five gaps affecting the domestic industry.
DOE’s Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office funded the follow-on study to provide a closer examination of the LPT supply chain. Researchers used feedback from hydropower industry participants to define the nine challenges.
The findings could help shape federal policies, incentives, lending programs, workforce initiatives and investments intended to expand US transformer production.
Strengthening the domestic supply chain will be important for new construction as well as upgrades, refurbishments and relicensing work at existing facilities.
Hydropower currently provides more than 6% of total US electricity generation, making the availability of critical transformers essential to its continued contribution to the grid.
The report is titled as Large Power Transformer Supply Chain Gap Analysis and Domestic Content Strategies for Hydropower Rehabilitation.
Fresh off a month that saw all but five states mired in severe drought, the US is reeling from multiple crises of national proportions.
First, there’s the record-breaking heat dome which is currently baking most of the continental US. According to the Guardian, over 100 million Americans are currently living under extreme heat warnings, forecasted to persist well into the weekend.
At the same time, the country is being smoked out by dozens of wildfires across North America, a situation the heat wave isn’t exactly helping. On top of that, smoke from over 800 blazes in Canada is helping choke out the US Midwest and North-East, making the air hazardous to breathe.
Things aren’t necessarily any prettier outside of the smoke-zone — just wetter. Communities situated around the Guadalupe River in Texas are reeling after near endless rainfall triggered massive floods across the state for the second year in a row.
So far, at least one person is dead, while thousands have been forced to evacuate. At least 57 counties representing over six million people were placed under flood watches over the past few days. With even more rain on the horizon, it remains to be seen when Texas will get relief from the torrential downfalls.
Stepping back, it’s clear this cascade of extremes isn’t happening in a vacuum. The overlapping wildfires, floods, and heat waves are all being amplified by the same climate forces: a rapidly warming planet, fueled in no small part by skyrocketing carbon emissions from the US itself.
All in all, it’s been an action-packed summer as the El Niño cycle rolls on — and unfortunately, the devastation is far from over.
Unsure what to do with your rancid old hot dog factory? Apparently, the answer is simple: turn it into a fusion reactor facility.
As TechCrunch reports, a company called Realta Fusion is building a fusion reactor inside an old Oscar Mayer hot dog factory in Wisconsin. The refurbished facility is called Forge, and according to Realta cofounder and CEO Kieran Furlong, it’s due to begin operations by 2029 to test whether fusion reactors can actually make a profit by generating more electricity than they require.
“From sausages to fusion,” Furlong told TechCrunch, touting Realta as Wisconsin’s nuclear “state champion.”
The company chose the site because of its “ample” access to power and its proximity to the startup’s existing headquarters.
Per TechCrunch, Realta recently demonstrated that it could generate electricity using a fusion device dubbed Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror, or WHAM for short, a successful experiment that the startup claimed as the first of its kind.
Put simply, nuclear reactors replicate the process our Sun uses to generate energy by fusing atoms together under extreme conditions. Realta’s WHAM uses a novel process called direct energy conversion (DEC), which extracts electricity from charged particles emitted by plasma. That sets it aside from other fusion reactor designs that capture heat to spin turbines and generate electricity.
Despite early promising results — scientists only recently started showing that fusion reactors can indeed generate a surplus of energy — we’re still far from proving that it’s a scalable and renewable source of electricity.
But that hasn’t stopped a flourishing cottage industry of fusion startups from trying. With backing from some of the most influential names in tech, from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, companies are promising a safer alternative to conventional nuclear fission reactors that can’t experience catastrophic meltdowns.
Even old hot dog factories are fair game as firms like Realta pursue the idea. Besides, we think that it’s only natural that Realta works on turning some old Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles into fusion-powered cars.
While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations such as color changes in the ocean’s surface.
The six satellites were meant to encompass three regions split between the US West, Central, and East. Starting in April 2025, however, the Trump administration directed the NOAA to make drastic cuts to GeoXO. These included cutting two satellites from the mission altogether — scrapping the central observation region entirely — and canceling major contracts for existing GeoXO instruments. The purported goal was to refocus the program on a “core weather mission,” as opposed to long-term climate monitoring, following the administration’s broaderattacks on any effort to mitigate or even mention climate change.
One of those cancelled instruments, the GeoXO Atmospheric Composition device, was a high-resolution spectrometer designed to give the NOAA advanced capabilities to monitor air pollutants, like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and excess particulate matter. In the long term, the tool would have helped scientists paint a clearer picture of how particular weather events relate to broader climate shifts, an NOAA report explains.
Of course, the timing of the cancellation couldn’t have been worse. Huge swaths of the United States and Canada are currently being smoked out by noxious fumes emanating from hundreds of wildfires across North America.
Though the GeoXO program wouldn’t have gone live until the 2030s, Trump’s decision represents a devastating loss for our future ability to monitor this exact phenomenon, which is becoming something of an annual tradition for millions of people.
As Susan Anenberg, chair of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University observed, the NOAA “had spent years planning an air pollution instrument on the GeoXO satellite which would provide near-real-time, location-specific data on smoke levels, giving people the information they need to avoid exposure.”
Anenberg explained that the public health benefits this kind of monitoring would provide “could amount to about $13 billion per year.”
“As smoke events happen more often,” Anenberg continued, “we need more data, not less.”
Scientists have taken another important step toward making next-generation solar panels more powerful and longer lasting. An international team of researchers has developed a new chemical treatment that helps perovskite solar cells convert sunlight into electricity more efficiently while also improving their durability. The breakthrough allowed the experimental solar cells to reach a power conversion […]
Researchers at the University of Toronto Engineering have developed six new metal alloys using an artificial intelligence-driven discovery platform that could improve the durability of parts used in jet engines, nuclear power plants, and other extreme environments. The findings show that the AI-assisted system identified promising alloys within just a few weeks, significantly speeding up the search for high-performance materials.
These new alloys also work well with 3D metal printing, enabling the production be complex parts that are hard or impossible to produce with traditional methods.
AI speeds up alloy discovery
Led by Yu Zou, Canada Research Chair in Materials and Manufacturing for Extreme Environments, the team worked with Jason Hattrick-Simpers to build a system that uses computer modeling, machine learning, and robots to help with manufacturing.
Their method, called active learning, acts like a self-driving laboratory. Rather than testing thousands of metal combinations by hand, the system picks the best options, makes them, tests how they perform, and uses those results to guide the next experiments.
“There’s enormous demand for materials that can stand up to huge swings of temperature and pressure, such as what you would find inside a jet engine or in the steam generators inside nuclear power plants, anywhere conventional steel just can’t survive,” said Yu Zou, who led the project.
“We also need materials that can be printed layer by layer, enabling us to make components that can’t be created by traditional manufacturing processes. For example, to make a material that is both lightweight and strong, you can vary the composition: a hard, tough alloy on the outside to something softer and lighter on the inside.”
The project was partly supported by the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium, a group that uses AI and automation to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
Active learning cuts the need for massive datasets
Most AI systems need a large amount of experimental data to make accurate predictions. This becomes a problem when researchers look at materials that have not been tested yet.
“One problem you often run into when trying to use AI to design materials is that most machine learning models require lots of data about material properties to learn from,” revealed Ajay Talbot, a Ph.D. student in Zou’s lab and lead author of the study.
“But if you’re working in part of the design space that hasn’t been explored yet, that data doesn’t exist, so you’re kind of flying blind.”
“The way we get around that challenge is to use data-lean models that essentially feel their own way along. Our active learning model strategically selects a few samples to manufacture and test, and the data from those experiments is fed back into the model to inform where we go next. It really speeds things up.”
To demonstrate the system, the researchers focused on compositionally complex alloys made from nickel, cobalt, and chromium. Within weeks, the automated platform identified six new alloy formulations with strong performance.
“One of the properties we were targeting was puncture resistance at temperatures of up to 1,112°F (600°C), which is what you’d find in the front section of a jet engine,” Talbot said.
“The industry standard in this space is nickel-based alloys such as Inconel 625. But we found one made of 12 percent nickel, 62 percent cobalt, and 26 percent chrome that was great for retaining hardness at extremely high temperatures. Even with just three components, our alloy outperformed Inconel 625, an alloy of more than 10 different elements, by 4.5 percent in our lab tests.”
The team also developed another alloy designed for hotter sections of jet engines, where temperatures can reach 1,832°F (1,000°C).
“One of the things that happens in an environment like that is the formation of oxide scale, which essentially means that your material is just getting burned away,” Talbot explained.
“We found a material made of 36 percent nickel, 14 percent cobalt, and 50 percent chrome that was extremely good for oxidation resistance at these high temperatures: It even outperforms Inconel 625 by 85 percent. We’re eventually aiming to ramp up to even higher temperatures, up to 2,192°F (1,200°C).”
Researchers plan to expand to more complex materials
The researchers say the current alloys represent an early demonstration of what the AI-driven discovery platform can achieve.
“This nickel-cobalt-chrome system has just three elements in it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively simple system,” he added.
“But it’s great for showing that this whole closed-loop discovery platform really works. What we want to do next is ramp up the complexity a bit more to make even crazier stuff, with maybe up to 10 or 12 different elements.”
“As you add more components, you can get different strengthening mechanisms, different kinds of useful properties. There’s a lot more out there just waiting to be discovered.”
The study was published in the journal npj Advanced Manufacturing.
A process called Alkaline Thermal Treatment (ATT) has been tested to turn mixed plastic waste into high-purity hydrogen fuel.
Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea undertook this new study. This process eliminates the costly and laborious step of sorting plastic waste before recycling.
The single-reactor method successfully processes a mixture of the three most common, hard-to-recycle plastics: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE), and polypropylene (PP).
“We are solving two urgent global problems at the same time,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of UCLA Samueli and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
“Plastic waste is accumulating at alarming rates, and clean hydrogen is essential for decarbonizing energy. This technology tackles both of these challenges in a creative and scalable way,” the co-corresponding author added.
Mixed plastic processing
Look around you. The water bottle on your desk, the crinkly shopping bag in your pantry, and the sleek dashboard of your car all share a drawback. Once you throw them away, the waste is almost impossible to recycle as a single stream.
A persistent challenge in global recycling is the labor-intensive requirement to sort plastics by type before processing. It leads to 79 percent of plastic waste ending up buried in landfills, while another 12 percent is burned away into atmospheric pollution. Only 9 percent ever get a second life.
But the new study overcomes this challenge. The team demonstrated a chemical technique that takes a chaotic, unsorted cocktail of the world’s three most common plastics and transforms it into hydrogen fuel. Interestingly, the method does it without releasing a single puff of carbon dioxide.
Alkaline Thermal Treatment uses heat to trigger a reaction between sodium hydroxide and organic matter, generating hydrogen fuel in the process.
It was originally designed to extract hydrogen fuel from ocean biomass, such as seaweed. The researchers wondered if the same principles could dissolve our mounting plastic problem.
While plastic bottles (PET) broke down easily during the process, shopping bags (PE) and food containers (PP) resisted the chemical attack due to highly stable, stubborn carbon-hydrogen bonds.
To overcome this chemical defense, a thermal oxidation pretreatment was introduced. In this process, the mixed plastic was briefly exposed to mild heat in the air. After this, oxygen was introduced into the stubborn polymer chains, which created the reactive weak spots needed for the treatment to dismantle all three plastic types.
Eco-friendly process
Once activated, the unsorted plastic soup degrades beautifully inside a single reactor, pumping out hydrogen gas with a purity level exceeding 90 percent.
ATT process changes the game for environmental footprints by operating at temperatures around 400 degrees Celsius (752 F), which are cooler than those of extreme gasification methods.
Furthermore, the technique uses a sodium hydroxide reagent to capture the plastic’s carbon rather than venting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The carbon is permanently bound into a stable, solid mineral called sodium carbonate.
The researchers have already outlined a simple secondary process to turn that byproduct into calcium carbonate. That is the exact mineral used by the concrete and construction industries, locking the plastic’s carbon away forever in infrastructure.
The breakthrough is currently confined to precision laboratory settings. Significant optimization is required to scale the technology up for municipal recycling plants, and its long-term economic viability still needs to be rigorously tested.
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