Environment & Energy

Why Are My Electric Bills So Brutal? California Prices Are About To Get Worse — Here’s What You Can Do
November 10, 2025

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California’s Electricity Crisis: Why Rates Keep Going Up
California has some of the highest electricity prices in the country, and they’re rising faster than ever. The three biggest utilities, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E, have all announced new rate increases for 2025 and 2026.

Here’s what’s driving the surge:

• Wildfire recovery and prevention costs. Utilities are spending billions to bury power lines, replace transformers, and reduce fire risks.
• Aging infrastructure. Much of California’s grid is decades old, requiring massive modernization.
• Climate goals and renewable integration. The shift to clean energy is critical but expensive in the short term.
• Administrative and transmission fees. These are quietly added onto every bill, often making up 30 to 40 percent of the total.

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Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants
Rising temperatures can affect our power supply, including nuclear and natural-gas power plants.
By Casey Crownhart June 24, 2026

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load.

On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947. Temperatures climbed to over 44 °C (111 °F), and overnight temperatures remained unusually high. This prolonged hot weather warmed up the water in some rivers across the country, a problem for the many nuclear plants that rely on those bodies of water for cooling. One reactor has already shut down, and others are being ramped down or will see limitations later in the week.

Unit two at the Golfech nuclear power plant in southern France shut down at about 11:45 p.m. on June 22 when the river used to cool the plant got too hot. The move was a precautionary measure, according to Brid Nelligan, a spokesperson for EDF, the plant’s owner and operator.

The power plant takes in water from the Garonne River and then returns most of it to the river at slightly higher temperatures after using it to cool equipment. French regulations limit the temperature of that return stream, so the warm water (it was expected to reach 28 °C, or around 82 °F) forced the operator to shut down the plant.

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Recycling Nuclear Waste: A Win-Win or a Dangerous Gamble?
As interest in nuclear power rises, startups are pursuing plans to recycle spent fuel and reuse its untapped energy to power reactors. Advocates tout new recycling methods as a breakthrough, but many experts warn it will extract plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons.

BY REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW • APRIL 2, 2025

Nuclear power plants keep their waste close by. Every nuclear plant in the United States includes an area onsite where spent fuel is being stored. This material — ceramic pellets stacked into rods and bundled together — consists mostly of uranium. But the spent fuel also includes elements that were created during the process: fast-decaying radionuclides such as cesium and strontium, as well as longer-lived, heavier elements, notably plutonium. Emanating intense heat and radiation, the spent fuel rods are placed first in cooling pools and then in “dry cask storage” — steel canisters that block these radioactive isotopes from escaping.

Most would see this legacy of radioactive waste as a burden and a danger. But some are now seeing it differently: as an asset and an opportunity. Although no longer capable of efficiently fissioning, spent fuel still contains significant amounts of untapped energy that can be harnessed and used again. In other words, it can be recycled — particularly in certain types of advanced reactors currently in development. Recycling would not only shrink the volume of radioactive material that would eventually need to be buried underground, advocates say, but it could also reduce the need to mine new uranium, another controversial aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Recycling nuclear waste is probably the single biggest point of contention among people who otherwise support nuclear power.

It sounds like a win-win, as sensible as putting our aluminum cans in the bins with chasing arrows. And as interest in nuclear energy has grown in recent years — driven by climate concerns and, more recently, demand from energy-intensive data centers — so has enthusiasm in some quarters for recycling this waste stream. Late last year, the Department of Energy announced $10 million in funding for research on recycling technologies and at least two relevant bipartisan bills were introduced in Congress: one would “require the Secretary of Energy to study new technologies and opportunities for recycling spent nuclear fuel”; another would streamline licensing requirements for recycling facilities.

Several advanced nuclear startups, including Oklo and Curio, say they intend to run their reactors exclusively on spent fuel. Oklo, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and based in Santa Clara, California, is working toward building its first commercial unit at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. Jake DeWitte, Oklo’s CEO, told me, “Frankly, there’s enough energy content in the waste of today’s reactors to power the whole country for 150 years.”

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