News Updates

California and the Mexican state of Sonora have announced a partnership aimed at advancing clean energy innovation, strengthening energy supply chains, and expanding access to renewable energy in the region, The Hill reports. The effort aligns with recommendations offered in Issues by Christopher A. Scott and colleagues who led a consensus study by US and Mexican academies of science to identify how the nations can best sustain their shared drylands region. Collaborative success, the authors note, will require approaches that span geographical boundaries, involve experts from varied scientific disciplines, and incorporate input from civil society and the private sector.

After decades of leadership, the United States is losing ground to China in turning nuclear fusion into commercial reality, CNBC reports. As one marker, China’s government spends roughly two times more annually on fusion than the US government does. In charting a “public path” to fusion, Michael Ford argues in Issues for increased US funding to answer some fundamental scientific questions in fusion research and to meet practical needs of fusion commercialization. He also calls for greater coordination “between the public and private sectors to further develop the technology, while assuring its proper regulation, public acceptance, and certainly its affordability.”

Small nuclear reactors are often viewed as a way to provide needed energy while helping curb climate change, but the “technology is struggling,” Reuters reports. In Issues, Jessica Lovering and Suzanne Hobbs Baker examine the challenges nuclear energy—writ small or large—faces. Beyond addressing technological needs, they write, the nuclear industry “will need to fundamentally rethink its history and how it operates today.” This will require “hard work to understand and address the underlying causes of opposition to nuclear,” and developing processes for siting nuclear plants “that empower communities and leave them in charge of their energy future.”

In a first, a private company named Firefly has successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon, and two other firms are poised to deploy their own lunar landers. In Issues, the space analyst Bhavya Lal argues that this push makes sense, for both businesses and the nation. Companies, for example, have an incentive to engineer systems that are cheaper to produce and operate in order to generate greater profits. Companies are also financially motivated, she writes, to “push the boundary of the art-of-the-possible in space beyond what government managers can envision, and the footprint of space activities will grow apace.”