Here’s another way AI is good at mimicking human beings: it’s really greedy for gold. That’s a problem, considering that right now, the world’s hunger for the coveted yellow metal is worsening Sudan’s civil war, enriching drug cartels in Latin America, and may even have sparked the Ebola outbreak in central Africa.

Expensive though it is, gold has physical properties that make it tremendously useful in electronics, especially high end computer chips. It’s an excellent conductor of electricity, does not corrode, and can be stretched into extremely thin wires. Small amounts of gold are used in almost every type of the high-tech hardware that underpins AI, including computer chips, servers, and telecommunications gear.According to figures released last week by the World Gold Council, AI helped drive the electronics industry’s demand for gold up by four per cent in the last year, topping 68 tons in the last fiscal quarter alone. “Demands from AI infrastructure remained the dominant growth engine for high-end electronics, with many manufacturers struggling to keep up with seemingly insatiable appetites for these products,” explains the Council’s report. Four per cent is a relatively modest rate of growth, but it’s a safe bet that rate will grow as the data center building boom keeps roaring upward. (Gold, by the way, is also used in almost all the key equipment of the Electro-Digital era, including cell phones, electric vehicles, robots and satellites.)

Where will that gold come from? Some of it, at least, from some very troubling sources. Researchers think that the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has grown faster than any other and has already killed more than 1,500 people, started in the remote gold mining town of Mongbwalu. Miners there have pushed deep into the surrounding jungle in recent years, increasing the risk of exposure to disease-carrying animals like bats. Conditions in the crude, mostly small-scale mines don’t help. “Muddy pits filled with miners surround (Mongbwalu). They work closely, digging, pumping water through sluices and sifting for gold ore,” reports NPR. “There were no visible health measures in the gold pits: no protective equipment, sanitation controls or medical oversight. Around town, hand-washing stations are also rare.” The flow of workers, traders, prostitutes and smugglers in and out of the area likely helped spread the disease, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile in nearby Sudan, the brutal civil war has devastated the economy — but not gold production, which has actually increased since the shooting started in 2023. Both of the two main fighting forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, control lucrative gold mines in their respective territories. Much of the metal is smuggled out of the country, to be exchanged for weapons and cash. “Gold has transitioned from a national resource to a currency for arms, accounting for over 70 percent of total national revenue,” writes analyst Carlota Ahrens Texeira. “The illicit gold trade and uninterrupted weapons supply have created a self-sustaining cycle of violence.” Analysts fear that the growth in gold mining in the neighboring nation of South Sudan could similarly spur violence.

Africa is hardly the only place where gold is driving violence and corruption. The government of Ecuador recently declared illegal gold mining a national security threat, reports Mining.com, amid “growing concern that illegal mining has become one of organized crime’s most lucrative businesses in the country, fueling violence, money laundering and environmental destruction.” The biggest cartel in next-door Colombia, according to a recent New York Times investigation, “traffics in gold alongside cocaine — and uses the proceeds to maintain control through murder and bombings.”

Let’s keep things in context, though. It’s not as if every ounce of gold being used in AI hardware comes from Ebola-haunted or cartel-controlled mines. Dozens of countries sell gold into the world market, and the whole electronics industry currently eats up only about five per cent of all the gold that gets produced each year.

Still, AI’s share is growing. And even if only a fraction of the many tons of gold that go into the machines powering our chatbots and image generators are spawning suffering, crime and death, that’s a significant addition to the tally of what AI is really costing us.

Power Metal is free to read, but sadly, not to produce. Each issue takes me many hours of research, writing, and backstage nuts and bolts. If you can, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Just six bucks a month, or even less if you go annual!

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AI’s Other Metals

I’ve written before about AI’s hunger for metals besides gold—in short, it needs a lot. While researching the above piece about gold, I ran across this handy chart from the US Geological Survey and thought it was worth posting. I’m always struck by the number of minerals that we need, but of which the US produces zero.

More News Worth Knowing

😎 Plug-and-play, no permit required solar panels are blossoming in backyards across America. Meanwhile, California generated more than half its electricity with solar for the first time.

☀️ Squeezed by U.S. oil sanctions, Cuba is racing to build solar farms with China’s help

☠️ Chinese rare earth mines are quietly poisoning Laos’s rivers

🇿🇲 How a Canadian mining giant infiltrated Zambia’s democracy

🇵🇸 America’s support for Israel is complicating its access to Malaysia’s rare earths

💧 Two-thirds of the world’s mines are in places running short of water

With that in mind, I thought it worth re-upping this slightly updated version of a post from a while back, in which I used a little math plus imagination to picture what the world might look like if we could reclaim some of the physical space currently occupied by gas stations, those unloved but ubiquitous automotive watering holes.

Goodbye Gas Stations, Hello Homes and Gardens?

Here’s a little-noticed but potentially huge benefit of the switch to electric cars: we can start getting rid of gas stations. A staggering amount of real estate is currently occupied by these asphalt islands of fuel pumps and convenience stores. Imagine what else we could do with that space! Especially in urban areas, where space is always at a premium, those lots could be converted into housing, shops, parks, community gardens, libraries, you name it.

I’ve been wondering for a while about just how much land is devoted to gas stations, and decided to do a little research to figure it out. The best estimate is that across the United States there are about 150,000 locations that sell gasoline. About 80 percent of them are the kind with on-site convenience stores. Wal-Mart type superstores, truck plazas and other such make up the rest. It seems the minimum size for a gas station is about 10,000 square feet, or a quarter-acre—enough space for pumps, parking, and a little store. But I get the impression most American stations are substantially bigger. The gas stations for sale on this list, for instance, range from about 16,000 square feet to more than 30,000.

Even if we use 10,000 square feet as the average, that means America’s gas stations take up at least 1.5 billion square feet. That’s 34,435 acres—about the size of Bryce Canyon National Park, or more than two Manhattans. Either way: a lot.

But wait, won’t we still need filling stations to charge up our EVs? Sure, but not nearly as many. Unlike gas-powered cars, which require purpose-built stations equipped with elaborate underground storage tanks, you can refuel an EV anywhere you can find electricity—which includes most of the places your car already spends most of its time. 80 percent of EV charging happens at home. And a growing number of parking lots, including those of corporate giants from Walmart to Starbucks, provide chargers. That means driveways and parking lots become much more efficient uses of land, serving as places to both store and simultaneously refuel your car.

We’ll still need dedicated refueling stations on the highways and in remote locations, but the total number will be much lower. Even if we keep half the gas stations we currently have (converting many of them into charging stations) that still frees up 75,000 sizable and conveniently located lots.

There won’t be much to mourn in the passing of gas stations. They are, by and large, unattractive, germ-ridden, pollution spewing crime magnets. Gas pump handles are about the filthiest things you’re likely to touch on any given day. Researchers in 2011 found that 71 percent of gas pump handles were "'highly contaminated' with the kinds of germs most associated with a high risk of illness."

Of course, if you’re a gas station owner, none of this is good news. Despite their corporate branding, most American stations are owned not by oil companies but by small-time, independent operators. The thousands of jobs that will disappear along with gas stations are another unfortunate cost of the transition to renewable energy. (Along, of course, with the damage done by the hunt for critical metals.) But hopefully those workers will find new jobs in the new Electro-Digital economy, just as thousands of stablehands, farriers and grooms did when we switched from horses to cars.

This new switch is already underway. Electric vehicles sales topped 20 million* last year, a new record. And gas stations are starting to disappear. Shell recently announced plans to close down 1,000 American stations. Almost all of the once-plentiful stations in Manhattan are now gone, bought up by developers who replaced them with condos and commercial spaces. Similar story in Vancouver, San Francisco and other places. Meanwhile, nearly a dozen towns in California have banned the construction of new gas stations, and many others are considering doing the same, from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.

The possibilities for those liberated lots are endless. Micro solar farms? Community gardens? Dog parks? If you’re motivated and creative enough, you can even convert an old gas station into a stylish house! As the pumps dry up, let a thousand flowers bloom.

(*Updated figure from the original post.)

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⛏️ I’ve got a new piece in this week’s issue of The Economist magazine about how a surge in mining in western Canada is being welcomed by the local Indigenous nation—while their neighbors in Alaska fear it might spell disaster.

📡 Thanks to the folks at Sweden’s Sverige Radio who had me on to talk about the ongoing sand crisis.

🥾 I’ve been kinda slacking on this newsletter in recent weeks, because it’s summer in British Columbia and frankly the mountains are a lot more appealing than my office. Case in point: Here’s the view from atop Tin Hat Mountain, which my dauntless wife and I clambered up to climax a five-day backpack along the Sunshine Coast Trail.

More News Worth Knowing

💄 Drag show in an old copper mine. Why not?

🖲️ How China’s control of indium phosphide could be bad news for the AI boom.

☢️ Miners are using cosmic rays to find critical metals. (Are the Fantastic Four involved?!)

🤭 Ex-US Navy commander quits copper mining company that hired Kristi Noem. “I am willing to work with almost anyone so long as they have a moral compass. Kristi Noem does not.”

The wars involving Israel, Lebanon and Iran are stuttering to an uneasy pause, leaving wreckage and ruin in their wake. War kills people, of course, and it also destroys people’s livelihoods. For some, the only way to keep going is by feeding off the detritus of war itself.

The shattered buildings and blasted neighborhoods contain a valuable commodity: scrap metal. Steel rebar in concrete, copper in electrical wiring, sometimes even the steel in unexploded weapons can all be recovered and sold. Across the Middle East’s many battle zones, there are countless people—many of them children— scavenging a living from the ruins.

It’s a tremendously dangerous job. Hidden unexploded bombs and mines pepper the ruins, just waiting to be triggered. And sometimes the profits from the scavengers’ work goes into the pockets of warlords, further fueling the conflicts that wreaked all the destruction in the first place.

On the war-battered outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus, scavengers young and old “swarm across the blasted land,” write the journalists behind a recent investigation co-published by the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism Association, The New Arab and Spain’s El País newspaper. “They enter buildings through their gaping wounds to descend into basements or ascend through their battered floors in search of scrap metal. They are men and women with faces covered by rags and scarves, distinguishable only by their bloodshot eyes, ravaged by exhaustion, and their calloused, white hands. Day after day, from morning till night, they carry out this metallic harvest amidst clouds of dust, the stench of burnt plastic, and the ever-present threat of (explosive) fragments hidden beneath the rubble.” The heat can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, made worse by smoke from fires burning plastic insulation from copper wires. A pair of young teenagers the journalists interviewed said they earn as little as $1 US a day for their trouble.

But even that meager haul comes with a catch: Access to the area was until recently controlled by a Syrian military unit closely tied to former dictator Bashar Assad. To be allowed to work in the ruins, scavengers were obliged to sell their findings at low prices to the soldiers, who then resold the loot at a profit to bigger operators. (Other reports have also found links between the Assad regime and metal recyclers.) Similarly, the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar has used scrap metal as a source of cash with which to buy weapons.

Some of the steel recovered in Syria, Libya and other conflict zones ends up in industrial recycling plants in Turkey, where it is “turned into rebar for use in building apartments in the Netherlands, a new hotel in Dubai, a stadium in Spain, or new highways in Romania,” write the journalists. Which makes the scavengers, they write, “a small but essential cog in the immense wheel of global capitalism. In this case, in the business of profiting from armed conflicts.”

It’s a similar story in the towns of eastern and southern Lebanon, ravaged by fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. “The growing scrap trade has drawn in people from all walks of life, including children as young as 10, all desperate to earn a living,” reports China’s Xinhua news agency.

In Gaza, the violence of the last couple of years has taken the lives of one or both parents of more than 58,000 children, according to UNICEF. With no one to provide for them, some of those kids have turned to scavenging to survive. Noon Post, an independent Middle East-focussed news outfit, recently spoke to Mohammed Samaan, a kid who would be in the seventh grade if his school hadn’t been blown up. He survives by sifting through bombed-out rubble looking for “aluminum, copper, electrical cables, and anything else that can be of use.” Samaan says one of his friends was killed when he accidentally triggered a bomb while sifting through debris in a refugee camp. Such accidents have killed or maimed many more of Gaza’s children.

Obviously, this is an extremely risky way to make a buck. As I wrote in Power Metal, the book, “In places where poverty and warfare are prominent features of daily life, scrappers go after military debris deliberately. Eight children were blown to pieces in Sudan in 2019 while scouring for scrap near a military base. In Nigeria, Boko Haram insurgents have killed dozens of scrap‑metal collectors.” In Afghanistan, dozens of metal scrappers have been killed by unexploded mines and bombs.

Sometimes scavengers go after those weapons deliberately. In Yemen, there’s a brisk trade in used landmines. Villagers in conflict zones dig them up to sell for scrap, or as secondhand weapons for the thrifty insurgent. They apparently go for about $20 a pop. (Even in the US, scavengers have been known to sneak onto military bases to steal leftover mortar shells and bullet casings.)

All in all, it’s got to be about the grimmest form of recycling there is. But at least business is good for the dealers who buy the scrap scavenged from the broken husks of homes, shops and office buildings. “The war left nothing untouched,” a Lebanese scrap merchant told Xinhua. “Before, it took days to fill a truck. Now, I can fill three trucks in one day.”

Power Metal is free to read, but sadly, not to produce. Each issue takes me many hours of research, writing, and backstage nuts and bolts. If you can, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Just six bucks a month, or even less if you go annual!

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The Island of Ancient Copper

When I was in Cyprus recently (oh, just to collect an award, thanks for asking!) I took a side trip to one of the island’s old copper mining districts—and when I say old, I mean old. I took the picture below of a tunnel leading to the Platies mine in southern Cyprus, where copper was dug out of the ground from prehistoric times until the 7th century CE. The area’s mines were so famous that the Roman poet Ovid praised them. But with the waning of the Roman Empire, Plaities fell out of use for more than 1,000 years. It was reopened in the 1950s, only to be shut down again in 1965, probably for good.

The tunnel led to the mine itself, which is now just a big, albeit scenic, hole in the ground.

Platies isn’t the only copper mine of this vintage in Cyprus. Locals were making jewelry and tools from the metal as long ago as 4,000 BCE. Cyprus was one of the most important suppliers in the ancient world—so much so that the word copper comes from the island’s Greek name, Kupros.

Today there’s only one active copper mine left on the island, a place called Skouriotissa. Much of the metal produced there is extracted from the massive heaps of slag left behind by ancient miners. Thousands of years after we first started using the stuff, we need copper more than ever.

More News Worth Knowing

⚖️ China Blacklists America’s Two Top Rare Earth Companies

🤦🏻‍♀️ Kristi Noem, Fired as US Head of Homeland Security, Lands New Gig with Canadian Mining Outfit

🇲🇳 Protesters (Briefly) Block Copper Shipments in Mongolia

🐆 Mining Billionaire Funds Wildlife Conservation — While His Mines Threaten Wildlife

Big money is pouring into American rare earths companies, which means opportunities to cheat or steal some of that bounty into your hands are also increasing. Exhibit A (there’s another one coming): According to a ProPublica investigation, the Pentagon’s recent loan of $620 million to a rare earth magnet startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. was made at the urging of a high-ranking adviser to Donald Trump Sr.

Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm bought an undisclosed stake last year in the company, Vulcan Elements, a two-year-old outfit based in North Carolina. Just three months later, the Trump administration announced the giant loan. “Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm,” writes ProPublica journalist Robert Faturechi, “was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.”

“Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president,” according to Faturechi. The deal was pushed through with unusual speed. A source told him: “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done.” Vulcan’s estimated value grew as much as tenfold on news of the deal, presumably fattening Trump Jr.’s share by the same magnitude.

The White House, Vulcan, and Trump Jr.’s fund, 1789 Capital, all insist there was nothing untoward about the loan. “No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson told ProPublica. Congressional Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren aren’t buying that. She and others are calling for an investigation not only into the Vulcan loan, but also into several government contracts awarded to other companies in which 1789 Capital owns stakes.

The loan to Vulcan is of a piece with the administration’s strategy to get the federal government directly invested in private companies that it thinks are important to national security—including outfits promising to help the US break its dependence on China for rare earths and other critical metals. As I wrote last October, under Trump the government has laid out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy stakes in American companies developing copper, lithium and rare earth mines. The possibilities all this creates for insider trading and other types of corruption are as obvious as they are abundant.

Government officials aren’t the only ones accused of shady dealings in the American rare earth scene. Another notable recipient of Washington’s largesse, rare earth producer MP Materials, which last year raked in a $400 million investment from the Pentagon, says it has been the victim of a different kind of unethical behavior: intellectual property theft. The company has filed a lawsuit against rival USA Rare Earth, claiming it recruited a former MP Materials employee and got that person to disclose secrets about MP’s technology. Maybe MP is just jealous, though, since USA Rare Earth just finalized its own Pentagon deal which could bring in as much as $1.6 billion.

Or maybe government-connected metals thievery is just in the air these days. A former CIA officer named David Rush was arrested in late May after investigators found hundreds of bars of gold bullion worth more than $40 million in his house. The gold is the property of the CIA. “What Mr. Rush was doing with the gold bars, and why the C.I.A. issued them to him, remains a mystery,” reports the New York Times. My guess is he was hoping to invest in a hot rare earth startup.

Power Metal is free to read, but sadly, not to produce. Each issue takes me many hours of research, writing, and backstage nuts and bolts. If you can, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Just six bucks a month, or even less if you go annual!

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The Continuing Crisis of Sand. Yes, Sand.

My first book, The World in a Grain, was about the deadly global struggle for, of all things, sand. Not unlike critical metals, sand is a little-noticed but absolutely crucial component of the global economy, the pursuit of which is wreaking havoc around the world. We need sand to make concrete, glass, silicon chips and much more—and incredibly, we are starting to run out. So much so that we’re tearing up beaches and riverbeds all over the world to get it, and in some places criminal gangs are stealing and even killing for it.

It’s an issue that receives far less attention than it deserves, so I’d like to raise a glass to the crack team at the United Nations Environment Programme that continues to produce some of the most important research on the subject. They just came out with a new report detailing not only the damage caused by sand mining, but the benefits sand generates when we leave it alone. “Extracted, (sand is) used to build homes, highways, solar panels, sea walls, and for land reclamation in coastal cities,” write the researchers. “Left in place, sand regulates rivers, protects coastal aquifers, filters water, sustains biodiversity, maintains habitats, buffers coastlines against storm surges, and supports fisheries and tourism that billions depend upon.”

The report includes a list of suggestions on how governments, companies and researchers can make things better. I’m especially intrigued by the idea of recycling bomb-shattered buildings in war zones into new construction materials, something that has been done in Iraq and Lebanon. The UN has taken note. It is setting up debris-recycling programs in Gaza, and there is even talk of using some of the mountains of rubble to build new land.

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I’ll be talking about the physical underpinnings of AI with nanomaterials entrepreneur Seoho Jung at “Festival: Celebrating Humanity in the Age of AI,” next week in Sausalito, California. There are still a few spots available if you want to come check it out!

And Canadian readers might be particularly interested in this interview with me on Alberta’s BetaKit: Why cleantech might not be as clean as it seems.

Interested in having me speak at your conference, university, school or book club? Drop me a line.

More News Worth Knowing

⛏️ Ghanaians Living Near a Giant Manganese Mine Are Paying the Price for EV Batteries

🪨 Amnesty International Says US Lithium Miners Failed to Consult with Nearby Indigenous People

🌊 Nickel Mining in Indonesia May Be Poisoning the Last Sea Nomads

🤝 India and Myanmar Agree to Deepen Cooperation on Critical Minerals and Rare Earths

🏖️ How China’s Hunger for Sand Is Fueling Illegal Extraction in Latin America

To the long list of troubles spawned by the global rare earth trade, we may have to add slave labor. According to a report published this week by the Shan Human Rights Foundation, a young Myanmarese man says that he and two other men were “trafficked” by a regional militia and forced to work in a Chinese-run rare earth mine.

The man said he had been working in one of Myanmar’s notorious online scam centers, run by the United Wa State Army, an ethnic militia. But after his boss accused him and two coworkers of embezzling, they were taken to a rare earth mine run by a Chinese company. The three men were held with about thirty other militia prisoners, some of them kept in chains. The prisoners were forced to dig and carry heavy loads, and fed only twice a day. The man, now 25, eventually managed to get away, but a couple of his coworkers were not so lucky. They were caught trying to escape, tied to a tree and beaten with sticks.

Of course, one anonymous whistleblower’s account isn’t proof that forced labor is widespread, or even exists, in Myanmarese mines. But the allegation chimes with the findings of a recent study of working conditions in militia-run Myanmarese mines by the University of Warwick and the Kachinland Research Centre. The researchers found that “numerous miners reported that some companies retained their ID cards to ensure that they did not leave, even if working conditions were bad or pay was less than initially agreed.”

As if forced labor weren’t bad enough, some of those mines are also spewing toxic waste into nearby rivers. The context, as I wrote last October: “At least 60 mines have popped up in southern Myanmar in recent years, according to satellite imagery analyzed by the Stimson Center, an American research outfit. Most are overseen by Chinese companies. They are gruesome affairs. Miners drill holes into the tops of mountains, then inject them with a mixture of water and chemicals that liquefy the minerals below, turning them into a slurry which drains into collection pools. Excess water full of arsenic, manganese, mercury and other toxins is dumped into nearby rivers. The process excretes as much as 2,000 tons of toxic waste for every ton of rare earth minerals produced.”

The results are increasingly dire. Several months ago I wrote about how arsenic-laden runoff from Myanmarese rare earth mines was poisoning several waterways, including some that feed the Mekong, one of Asia’s most important rivers. More recently, authorities in neighboring Thailand found dangerous levels of arsenic in the Mekong itself, which may have come from Myanmar’s ever-expanding mines. (Rare earth mines are also proliferating in next-door Laos, where they have spilled chemicals into waterways.) “The tests conducted in March by Thailand’s Pollution Control Department mark the first time that arsenic contamination has been detected on the mainstream of the Mekong, a vital transboundary river that supports thousands of plant and wildlife species and the livelihoods of millions of people,” reports Mongabay.

Those mines are probably far away from you, but their products may well be in the cell phone in your pocket or the EV in your garage. Myanmar is the world’s third-largest source of rare earths. In particular, it currently supplies around half of the entire world’s supply of dysprosium and terbium, important elements in the permanent magnets that make EVs go and cell phones vibrate when you get a call. Chinese companies buy essentially all of Myanmar’s rare earths, then use them to make the majority of the world’s permanent magnets. According to Global Witness, a British environmental research group, Chinese companies connected to Myanmarese rare earth mines sell their products to foreign carmakers including Ford, Hyundai, Tesla, and Volkswagen.

The United States and other Western countries have been trying to build up a rare earth magnet supply chain outside of China for several years now—not so much because they’re concerned about slave labor or environmental damage, but because those magnets are also crucial for digital technologies and a range of military hardware, from drones to submarines. Progress is slow, though, especially when it comes to relatively rare and hard-to-refine dysprosium and terbium. The US mined more rare earths last year than it has in decades—but that was still only enough to satisfy about one-third of the country’s demand. Most of the rest came from China. Similarly, “Japan has spent more than a decade trying to reduce its reliance on Chinese rare earths, yet China still accounts for 76% of its supply,” notes Bloomberg.

That publication predicts that China’s rare earth magnet dominance will almost certainly last into the 2030s, at least. The International Energy Agency recently published a similar estimate. Hey, scientists at Ames National Laboratory who are trying to develop permanent magnets that don’t use rare earths—could you hurry up, please?!

Power Metal is free, because I want this information to be available to everyone. But like a park or a library, a newsletter does need financial support from those who can afford it. If you can, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It costs less than a pair of socks and is way more interesting.

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Putting Retired EV Batteries Back to Work

I had an interesting conversation about how used electric vehicle batteries can be repurposed to for grid-scale energy storage with Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang last week at WebSummit Vancouver 2026. It’s an important issue: Reusing batteries, of course, is MUCH cleaner and more efficient than recycling them. You can watch the whole interview, or check out excerpts below.

EXCERPTS (edited for clarity):

VINCE: So, Edward, why don’t you start off by explaining what Moment does, what the whole concept of a “second life for batteries” is, and how it fits into the energy transition.

EDDIE: Yeah, absolutely. Our goal is to make sure that we’re solving two major problems. One is we want to make sure that these (used) batteries don’t end up in landfills. And then: how do we actually fix this broken grid that’s over a hundred years old?

Both of those didn’t really have an elegant solution up until our thesis of: why don’t we actually not landfill these batteries, but instead repurpose them into stationary storage for another 10, 15, 20 extra years of life before we finally recycle them? (Moment’s repurposed EV battery systems now help provide power at the Vancouver airport as well as a hospital and several businesses.)

VINCE: What you do often gets lumped in with recycling. It’s taking something and making a second use of it, but really it’s sort of upstream of recycling, right? Explain that a little bit.

EDDIE: Unfortunately, what has happened is we threw billions of dollars into battery recycling, but we still haven’t figured out the technology to make (EV battery) recycling as profitable as lead acid battery recycling is today.

So we’re still trying to figure that out, and we hope that in the next 10, 15, 20 years battery recycling — where you grind up these batteries into black mass — is profitable. But while we figure that out, why don’t we repurpose them for extra years?

If you come to our facility you’ll see these modules. They’re like Lego blocks. We just have to test them, ensure that they’re nice and safe for the second-life application, and then we’ll Lego-block them together into this beautiful container and deploy it to power buildings.

VINCE: I think this is a really important idea that gets short shrift: Repurposing something, reusing the thing for its original purpose. It’s always more energy efficient. And it’s usually cheaper.

I always use the example of milk bottles. When my mom was young, everybody would get their milk delivered in bottles, and then they’d return those bottles to the milkman. You can take that bottle and crush it down, grind it down, melt it, and turn it into a new bottle, with emissions and energy use all along the way. Or you can just wash it out and fill it up again with milk. And that’s basically the concept behind what you guys are doing.

EDDIE: Yeah, absolutely. We gathered a lot of interest in the early days, especially out in Asian countries like Japan and India, mainly because waste is something that is not acceptable. Unfortunately, we’re really used to just using something a little bit and then throwing it away.

I’m really happy that over the past two years we’ve culturally taken a new turn on repurposing before recycling, trying to use as much of a material or mineral as possible. Mainly because now the narrative has turned from sustainability and energy into a national security issue. Especially in the United States, a lot of Americans have realized 90 percent of the world’s batteries are from China. And unfortunately, if we were to go through an adversarial event, is it really that great of an idea to rely on only one country? That’s why they’ve really been trying to onshore battery manufacturing. Our current Canadian government is also trying to onshore a lot of manufacturing as well.

VINCE: I don’t really think there’s been so much of a shift around recycling. I know there’s been quite a lot of talk about it, but actually the industry is still pretty small. It’s much smaller than the recycling industry in China. Under the Biden administration, they were giving all kinds of money for metal recycling, for stuff like you guys do. Under Trump, a lot of that’s been scrapped, pulled back. That funding is gone.

You guys also have a lot of competition in your space, right? There’s other startups. There’s an outfit called BTU Energy that I talked to in California. And then Redwood Materials, which is probably the biggest battery recycler in North America, founded by one of the guys who co-founded Tesla. They’re getting into exactly the same game as you guys.

What about AI data centers? Everybody’s talking about huge energy demand — where are we going to come up with all this energy? Can you guys really help with that?

EDDIE: Actually we work with most of the hyperscalers at this point asking us for batteries. One issue is that the current Trump administration doesn’t allow them to buy batteries from China, so they’re trying to find domestic sources. The problem is even if you build battery cells in America or Canada, where do you source the lithium and cobalt? You still source it from China. They select us because these vehicles are already driving on domestic roads and allied roads today.

Right now AI data centers are pulling huge amounts of electricity. Nobody can afford their energy bills doubling or tripling. Affordability across North America, and really across the world, has been declining. So it makes a lot of sense that people are not very excited about data centers in their backyard. Which is really where batteries help.

You can charge batteries at 3:00 a.m. when everybody’s asleep and power is really cheap. Then you can discharge during peak times so that you can fully decouple that data center from the grid and decouple it from the neighborhood and increasing prices from there.

VINCE: All right, that’s a great optimistic note to end on.

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I got to revisit the improbable subject of my first book—sand—on Outside/In, an excellent show on New Hampshire Public Radio, and in this article in Esquire’s Italian edition. In other Italian news, I Metale del Potere got a nice review. Sono lusingato e felice!

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☀️ For the First Time, Texas Is Getting More Electricity from Solar Than Coal

✈️ A Visit to the World’s Largest Aircraft Scrapyard

⛏️ Group Linked to Trump Sons Asks the US for $400 Million for a Tungsten Mine

🦌 Europe’s Green-Energy Future Has a Problem: Reindeer

🤖 Deep-Sea Mining Nearly Killed RoboCop’s Career

Everyone knows that the switch to renewable energy will require loads of giant batteries to store electricity for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Problem is, nobody wants those batteries in their own backyard.

From California to Sweden, locals are organizing demonstrations, filing lawsuits and generally kicking back against proposed energy storage projects. Battery farm builders “are increasingly encountering an implacable foe,” writes Todd Woody in Bloomberg: “Communities afraid that large lithium-ion storage farms could spontaneously burst into flames.”

I wrote about this issue back in 2024, but it is becoming ever more pressing as the rollout of grid-scale battery energy storage systems, aka BESS, gathers momentum. In 2020, according to the American Clean Power Association, an industry group, the US added 968 megawatts of utility-scale storage capacity; last year, the number was 16,175 megawatts. This year, with dozens of projects in the works, it is projected to hit 24,000 megawatts. That’s enough to power millions of homes. Batteries are booming around the world, in fact. “In Inner Mongolia, three massive sites were recently switched on …enough to rival several large power plants for short periods. In Scotland, two huge neighboring battery farms at the site of a former coal mine will start up this year,” notes Bloomberg. “Brazil is preparing its first tender for grid-scale batteries. In Egypt, Africa’s largest hybrid solar and battery installation was partially switched on earlier this year and is expected to become fully operational this summer.”

But especially in the US, local opposition is drastically slowing down the deployment of new projects, driving up their costs, and not infrequently scuttling them altogether. Just since last August, developers have scrapped plans to build at least three major BESS facilities that faced local resistance in California and New York. Dozens of city and county governments across the US have passed restrictive laws or outright moratoriums on battery storage facilities. More have been thwarted in the UK, Canada and other countries.

People have good reason to be concerned. Just last year, a fire at a battery facility in Moss Landing, California—one of the world’s biggest—forced some 1,200 nearby residents to evacuate and spewed toxin-laden smoke into the air. Another major battery fire in New York in 2023 took four days to put out, eructing potentially toxic smoke all the while. Those serious but rare disasters often get conflated with more common accidental blazes. As I’ve written before, grid-scale battery energy storage systems are mostly just gigantic versions of the familiar lithium-ion batteries that power your laptop, power drill or Tesla. Those batteries have a well-documented tendency to burst into flames when they are punctured, crushed or overheated. Dozens of people have been killed in such fires in recent years.

The fear of fires comes on top of other, more conventional concerns about the impacts of these facilities—the trees that will have to be cut down to make room for them, their impact on property values in neighboring communities, and so on. A typical facility comprises hundreds or even thousands of shipping containers full of battery cells, all surrounded by security fending. It doesn’t help that many of them are owned by foreign companies.

(Another problem, of course, is all the lithium and other critical metals that will have to be dug up to build these giant energy storage systems. That would be less of an issue if we recycled more batteries. On that front, the International Energy Agency recently came out with an interesting new study which found that, for all of our yap about American “innovation,” it’s China and Japan, by far, that have in recent years patented the most new inventions related to battery recycling.)

Makers of battery storage facilities and their fans, for their part, say that serious accidents are rare, and safety standards have much improved in recent years. They’re going to have to do a lot more to convince the public of that, for all our sakes. Renewables just can’t work at scale without batteries.

A quick note: Power Metal is free, like a park or the library, because I want it to be available to anyone who wants to check it out. But like a park or a library, it does need financial support from those who can afford it. If you can, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It costs less than a pair of socks and is way more interesting.

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US: Give Us Your Copper Or Lose HIV Aid

Sure, the US needs critical metals, and sure, sometimes it has to play hardball geopolitics to get them. But is it really necessary to hold HIV-infected Africans hostage unless their government pays up in copper and cobalt?

That’s reportedly what the Trump administration is threatening to do in Zambia, according to The New York Times and the Zambian foreign minister. Zambia is loaded with copper, lithium and cobalt, and Washington wants more access to those riches. (At least two American companies are already active in Zambia’s copper sector.) As the Times reported in March: “Some 1.3 million people in Zambia rely on daily H.I.V. treatment that is provided through the decades-old U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (known as PEPFAR) and on tuberculosis and malaria medications that save tens of thousands of Zambian lives each year. The Trump administration is considering whether to ‘significantly cut assistance’ as soon as May, to increase pressure on Zambia.”

Two billion dollars in US health assistance to Zambia are now on hold while the governments thrash it out. The aid package comes with other strings attached that Zambia objects to, especially demands for potentially sensitive health data.

Last week, outgoing US Ambassador Michael Gonzales denied that Washington was making access to critical metals a condition of the health aid deal. But yesterday, Zambia’s foreign minister, Mulambo Haimbe, said the opposite, declaring that negotiations had stalled in part because of “the insistence on preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.” You can make your own judgments about whom to believe. Just remember that Gonzales works for a president who obliterated USAID and makes no secret about his transactional approach to international relations.

Hat tip to fellow Substacker Kevin Brunelli, from whose Charged States newsletter I first heard of all this.

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Glad to have had the chance to chime in on this piece in The Wire China on “How China’s EV Companies are Winning the War”.

Nice review (in Italian, ovviamente!) of I Metalli del Potere, the Italian edition of Power Metal, the book.

And just for laughs/to flatter my own vanity, here are a few pictures from the ceremony at the Fetisov Journalism Awards in Cyprus last month—including the folk dancers and balancing-glasses-on-his-head guy that provided an odd but welcome break from all the speeches.

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More News Worth Knowing

🤮 Remember the recycling plant in Quebec I wrote about recently that has for decades been spewing arsenic and other toxins into the air? Its emissions increased last year.

🪧 Environmental protesters shut down a copper-gold mine in the Dominican Republic.

😦 The Metals Company moves another step closer to receiving license to start deep sea mining.

🚴 “Just 6 percent of people in Manila own private vehicles; the rest walk, cycle or rely on public transport.” Here’s how those without cars are winning the fight for safer streets.

Hello from the island nation of Cyprus! I’m here because an excerpt from my book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future just won a Festisov Journalism Award—second place in the environmental reporting category. I’m very grateful for the honor, not to mention the trip it included to the award ceremony on this aforementioned island.

The complete list of finalists is here, and includes some really outstanding work. For you readers who just can’t get enough about critical metals, I recommend checking out this Guardian feature about how pollution from a copper mine in Peru may be poisoning the locals, and this expose, also in the Guardian, on how pollution generated by recycling American batteries in Mexico is probably also poisoning locals. Hm, almost seems like there’s a pattern here…

China is Winning the US-Iran War

By the time you read this, who knows whether Iran and the US will be back at the negotiating table, firing missiles at each other, or both. There’s no telling whether either of them will end up with any kind of “win” from this war. But there is one country that is definitely benefiting from all the chaos and destruction: China.

Once again, Beijing is cashing in on its dominance in critical metals and the products made from them. With oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf blocked and prices at the pump spiking, there has been a worldwide surge in demand for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems—two industries China utterly dominates. Exports of Chinese EVs more than doubled in March, according to Bloomberg, “with industry observers noting parallels with the 1970s oil shock, when Japan gained global market share by offering fuel‑efficient cars during a period of sustained turmoil.” China’s lithium battery exports were also up by 50 percent in the year’s first quarter, and its overseas sales of wind turbines jumped by almost as much. Small wonder that stock prices for big Chinese battery makers are soaring.

Meanwhile, other Chinese companies are happily filling in gaps in global supply chains created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As you may recall from my last newsletter, Arab countries on the Persian Gulf produce a huge amount of the world’s aluminum—but now, that aluminum can’t be shipped to overseas buyers. Meanwhile, Iranian missiles have knocked out at least two major aluminum smelters. All of which is great news for China’s vast aluminum industry, which is expected to see export volumes and profits rise as their Gulf competitors are stuck off-line.

(Beijing is keeping some newly-scarce commodities for itself, though: It recently announced it would ban exports of sulfuric acid, a chemical needed to produce many critical metals. That’s presumably because of a looming shortage of the stuff, much of which originates in the Persian Gulf.)

Of course, the view from Beijing isn’t all cherry blossoms. Chinese battery makers depend heavily on natural gas to power their factories, as Henry Sanderson points out over at Volt Insight, so the rising price of that fuel could cut into their profits. China is also a big buyer of Iranian crude oil—or it was. If the war drags on, fossil fuel supplies could become a serious issue for China’s energy system, not to mention that of the rest of the world. For now, though, the bombing is mainly just boosting the bottom line for China’s renewable industries.

Recycling Phones Into Scamming Tools

We’ve all heard of the growing scourge of digital scams run with botfarms—collections of computers that masquerade as humans in order to, say, add counterfeit ‘likes’ to boost an unscrupulous influencers’ Instagram post, or post fake reviews to glaze a shoddy product on Amazon. I hadn’t realized, though, that some of those farms are made up of thousands of recycled cell phones. The US Department of Justice recently helped shut down one such operation in Cambodia that was using some 1,250 phones to operate more than 76,000 social media accounts.

It seems used phones are useful scam tools because their activity is harder for anti-bot software to detect as fake. That’s presumably because the signals they send really are from individual devices, as opposed to a computer sending many signals camouflaged to look like they came from separate devices. Phone farms are easy to set up, too. You can buy used mobiles in bulk on Ebay or Alibaba, and online vendors will sell you all the software and hardware you need to operate them en masse. The helpfully named “Phone Farm Box,” for instance, cheerily offers services like “Mass Account Registration: Create multiple TikTok accounts simultaneously,” and “Account Warming: Gradually increase account activity to appear more natural.” I guess recycling really can mean “green”—just not the type environmentalists had in mind.

A grateful hat tip to friend and fellow journalist Scott Carney, who first clued me in to this bizarre intersection of recycling and the scamoverse!

More News Worth Knowing

💨 This Texas town is fed up with the thousands of used wind turbine blades dumped on its outskirts.

😢 Billion-dollar battery recycling startup goes bust

😱 “Parents allegedly abandoned infant at crime scene after stealing copper wire”

🤦🏻‍♀️ The US Treasury Secretary wants the World Bank to forget about climate change and fund critical metals projects instead

Rising gasoline prices are getting the biggest headlines, but the war on Iran is also doing damage to electric cars and renewable energy.

Several Persian Gulf nations—Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—have in recent decades built themselves into major producers of high-grade aluminum, as part of their strategy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. They have focussed especially on the high-grade stuff needed to manufacture EVs, which use much more aluminum than gas-powered cars. But with the Strait of Hormuz closed, that metal isn’t getting to car factories.

“The aluminum that gives electric vehicles their range is now stuck behind the same choke point as the oil they were built to replace,” notes Rest of World’s Indranil Ghosh. Early in the war, a huge aluminum smelter in Bahrain cut output by almost one-fifth because it couldn’t move its product out through the strait—and has since been hit directly by an Iranian attack. A smelter in Qatar has reduced operations by 40 percent. And the Middle East’s single biggest aluminum producer, in the UAE, shut down completely last week after it was slammed by Iranian missiles and drones. All in, the global supply chain may lose as much as 3.5 million tons of aluminum this year.

In normal times, Gulf nations provide about 9 percent of the whole world’s aluminum supply, but Japanese carmakers like Toyota and Nissan get as much as 70 percent of their aluminum from the region. Gulf companies geared themselves specifically to that market: “Much of the metal is specialized, made with solar power, certified as low-carbon, and built into green supply chains that help carmakers meet emissions rules, meaning they cannot simply swap it for any grade off the market,” explains Ghosh. The Hormuz closure has already forced those companies to cut back on production.

Crimping the supply of aluminum, of course, drives up its price. That means higher costs not only for EV makers, but also for manufacturers of solar panels, which use the metal for frames, racks and other components. Panel prices have already jumped by as much as 20 percent. Scarce supplies also make the whole process of expanding and upgrading electric grids more difficult and expensive, since many of the overhead wires that carry juice to people’s homes are made with aluminum.

There’s another problem even further back up the renewable supply chain: sulfur. About half of all the world’s seaborne sulfur is carried through the Strait of Hormuz—or was, until the war choked it off. Sulfur is used to make sulfuric acid, which is in turn used in the production of several materials crucial for not only EVs but for lots of American military hardware. Sulfuric acid “is needed for everything from the copper in the American electrical grid to the semiconductors in precision-guided munitions,” write a trio of researchers in a recent piece for the US-based Modern War Institute. “It is one of those unglamorous industrial inputs that operators and planners ignore until a crisis hits, prices spike, and replacement capacity becomes nonexistent.”

Sulfuric acid is is used in hydrometalurgical processes that convert low-grade copper ore into high-purity product. Copper, of course, is central to electric grids and EVs, and is also a key input for military gear. “It will take over thirty thousand kilograms of copper just to replace the two major US radars destroyed in Bahrain and Qatar, not to mention needing thousands of kilograms of additional copper to fix or replace other damaged US communication equipment, sensors, and radars in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE,” the researchers estimate. Sulfuric acid is also used to extract nickel, cobalt and lithium—materials used in the batteries in everything from EVs to dustbusters, as well as military drones. Indonesia, which produces more than half the world’s nickel, depends on the Middle East for more than 75 percent of its sulfuric acid.

To top it all off, the war is even messing with e-waste recycling. In recent years Dubai has built up a major international hub that takes in and processes junked electronics from around the world, then ships out the scrap and recovered metals to factories in other countries. But according to David Daoud at Resource Recycling, the fighting has left thousands of shipping containers full of e-waste, headed both to and from Dubai, stranded.

I’m writing all this on a day in which President Trump first threatened to annihilate Iranian civilization, and then declared he wouldn’t, at least for the next two weeks. The only thing that’s for sure is that this war poses a threat to the future in more ways than one.

Sea Mining Prospects Deepen

While critical metal supplies are getting snarled on the ocean’s surface, they’re moving a step closer to being opened up on the ocean floor. The Trump administration, which has essentially given itself the unilateral authority to issue permits for deep sea mining regardless of international law, has moved applications by two different companies forward along the approval process, and is looking at several more. Meanwhile, the US also recently signed an agreement with Japan to share research and findings from their respective sea mining efforts.

Here’s a reminder, though, to be careful about what news you believe! The Canadian Mining Journal last week deleted an article it had posted about sea mining because it “contained quotes attributed to individuals who do not exist.” Better late than never when it comes to fact-checking, I guess?

If you like what you’re reading, do me a big favor and hit the Like button, or even better, share this newsletter with a friend!

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I had a great couple of radio/podcast conversations last month, one on the CBC’s Ideas show, and another on The Next Big Idea Daily. That’s me, all about ideas.

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If you want to understand why critical metals are so important to the modern world, just look at the war on Iran. From fighter jets to missiles to drones, virtually every type of weapon the US is wielding—and the defensive systems it is using to thwart Iranian counterattacks—depend on components made with rare earths, lithium, nickel and other critical metals.

That fact, however, points up a major strategic vulnerability. Those components, and the metals from which they’re made, are almost all produced in a single country—and it’s not the United States, nor even one of its allies. As a recent report by Govini, an American defense analytics company, sums up: “From raw minerals to advanced weapon systems—from rock to rocket … America’s military superiority increasingly depends on China.”

There are countless Chinese-produced metals and parts embedded throughout hundreds of American weapons systems, but probably the most concerning are rare earth magnets. These bits of hardware perform a head-spinning variety of jobs in a wide range of weapons.

Missiles, whether offensive types like Tomahawk cruise missiles or defensive ones like those used in Patriot and THAAD interception systems, typically depend on rare earth magnets to move the control fins that steer the projectile to its target. “These magnets must be extremely powerful, compact, and resistant to heat and vibration,” notes Rare Earth Exchanges, an American research outfit. That means magnets made with the rare earth neodymium for strength, alloyed with dysprosium and terbium to increase resistance to heat and stress. Most precision-guided missiles also require neodymium magnets, or in some cases magnets made with samarium, another rare earth, for components used in target tracking and data-link stabilization.

Predator drones, Joint Direct Attack Munition ‘smart’ bombs, radar systems and other weapons also rely on rare earth magnets. So do the war machines that launch those weapons. According to the Pentagon, missile-firing destroyers, submarines, fighter jets, and bombers all require hundreds or thousands of pounds of rare earths.

Then there are good old lithium ion batteries, which are as ubiquitous in the military as they are in your own gadget-supported life. Many war-fighting drones, as I’ve written before, are powered by the same kind of batteries made of lithium, cobalt and nickel that are used in cell phones, laptops and dustbusters. So are military lasers, radios, night vision goggles and satellites.

A whole constellation of other metals are used in all manner of military gear. “Critical minerals such as aluminium, titanium, magnesium, and scandium form the structural backbone of drones,” says SFA-Oxford, a British consulting outfit. “Communication, electronics, and precise navigation systems depend on specialised materials like beryllium, gallium, germanium, and indium, whose unique properties ensure reliability, accuracy, and operational effectiveness.” According to Govini, “more than 80,000 parts across 1,900 weapon systems incorporate antimony, gallium, germanium, tungsten, or tellurium.” The list includes destroyers, aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles.

As I’ve said before: “You can probably guess why all of this is a problem. Who manufactures over 70 percent of the world’s batteries? Who makes more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earth magnets? Who produces most of the world’s gallium, indium, and other critical metals? China, China, and China.”

That means America’s war fighting capacity could be seriously hobbled if China were to cut off those supplies. Beijing has already restricted overseas sales of some critical metals, and last year threatened to throttle rare earth magnet exports in response to President Trump’s proposed tariffs, forcing him to back down. That was all sparked by trade disputes. Imagine what could happen if the two countries actually went to war.

After years of sleepwalking ever deeper into this situation of material subordination, the Pentagon is now working to break free of its dependence on China. It is doling out billions of dollars to support American critical metal miners and would-be magnet and battery makers, including by buying direct ownership stakes in several of them. (I’m sure it’s a coincidence that one of Trump’s sons and one of his major donors are investors in two of those companies. Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric are also investors in a drone startup that is merging with…a golf course holding company?! Seems they’ve found a way to cash in on two of their dad’s hobbies at once: starting wars and playing golf.)

The Trump administration is also putting in place new rules forbidding military contractors from using Chinese parts and materials in the weapons and gear they manufacture. It’s hard to imagine how that can actually happen any time soon, though. For a start, the Defense Department doesn’t even know where all the parts in its supply chain come from. More than 200,000 companies produce weapons and other goods for the US military. A 2025 report from the General Accounting Office found that “the primary procurement database for the federal government … provides little visibility into where these goods are manufactured or whether materials and parts suppliers are domestic or foreign.”

The biggest obstacle, though, is the complexity, expense and sheer scale of building up a full-scale mine-to-military supply chain. Ore has to be mined. Then it has to be put though potentially hundreds of chemical processes to separate out the raw metals. Those raw metals then have to go to refineries to be processed into pure metals and alloys. Then that stuff has to be sent to factories to be made into things like magnets and batteries. China has most of the world’s capacity for virtually all of these steps, while the US has hardly any by comparison.

Catching up will take many years. Still, it’s not impossible. Ukraine, which faces the same problem, claims this year to have begun producing its first (mostly) “China-free” drones. Two of the companies making those drones may soon start selling them to the Pentagon.

There is a silver lining to all this. Former President Biden’s administration had earmarked billions of dollars to support domestic battery manufacturing, but Trump froze most of those funds as soon as took office, viewing batteries as part of the “green scam” that included electric vehicles and solar and wind power. Now, however, the administration has come to realize that batteries and critical metals aren’t only important for things liberals care about. And so, according to The New York Times, “The Energy Department has quietly allowed many Biden-era grants for battery makers to proceed. It also recently announced up to $500 million for battery materials and recycling projects.”

It’s long past time the US started building the infrastructure to manufacture its own batteries and magnets. They’re going to need plenty more, considering how many they’re blowing up in Iran.

Power Metal News

CBC’s Ideas show, known for its in-depth explorations of complex topics, is featuring me and the critical metals issue on March 18. Check it out even if you’re not Canadian! And if you happen to be in Brussels on May 7 and 8, I’d love to see you at the Circle 2026 conference on recycling and circularity, where I’ll be speaking.

More News Worth Knowing

🐬 Chemicals from junked TVs and computers are showing up in dolphins and porpoises?!

💀 Another 200 people killed in mine collapse in Democratic Republic of Congo. (The last one was in January.)

🚘 Ethiopia banned imports of gasoline cars, and now EVs are booming!

🔋 This Canadian startup is reusing old EV batteries to bring power to remote areas

Not that long ago, just about anyone who considered themselves an environmentalist would have told you that nuclear energy is dreadful and dangerous. Especially to those of us who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when movies like The China Syndrome and Silkwood were in theaters and real-life disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were in the headlines, the very idea of nuclear power was, you might say, radioactive. But in recent years, there’s been a surprising twist: many people genuinely concerned about the future of the planet are now cheering for nuclear. In fact, according to a January survey by the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of Americans now support nuclear power—the highest number in at least ten years. Why? How did this happen? And do they have a point?

Journalist and lifelong environmentalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow tackles those questions in her recently released book, Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy. To her own surprise, the many months of research she put into it left her not exactly won over, but more open than she expected to the arguments of the pro-nuclear camp.

It’s not a critical metals story per se, but it is an issue that has a powerful bearing on the energy transition, so I was very pleased to have the opportunity to chat with Rebecca about it all. Herewith, the highlights of our conversation (condensed and edited somewhat for flow).

Vince: What’s the argument in favor of nuclear, in the context of the energy transition?

Rebecca: There are a few major arguments in favor of nuclear. One is that it’s low carbon, of course. I use that term because “carbon free” is not really accurate to describe any energy source. There are greenhouse gas emissions at different stages of the process from extraction to waste disposal for any energy source, including renewables. But according to reputable studies I’ve seen, nuclear is roughly equivalent to say wind and solar.

Also, nuclear can run 24/7. When the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, solar and wind are not producing electricity. Of course, batteries can provide backup, but that’s still fairly limited. So reliability is the second argument for nuclear.

Another one is just the sheer energy density of nuclear. You can provide much more electricity per land unit and also per material inputs with nuclear than you can with wind and solar.

Vince: In other words it takes way less space to produce the same amount of energy?

Rebecca: Right.

Vince: OK. Let’s talk about the downsides. It seems like there are two really big issues. The first one is waste. In your book you explain that pro-nuclear folks say, “It’s really not a problem. Yeah, there’s this radioactive waste, but it’s treated with enormous caution, packed away in casks and encased in concrete. And anyway, there have never been any problems and so we really don’t have to worry about nuclear waste.” I get that it hasn’t been a problem yet. There hasn’t been an earthquake or a terrorist incident or some kind of catastrophe that’s scattered radioactive waste all over the place. But it seems like a really big potential problem, no?

Rebecca: Well, the waste, the spent fuel, is a dangerous substance. When it comes out of the reactor, just being in the same room with it would kill you. Within minutes you would receive a fatal dose of radiation. So I don’t think anyone should make light of that. But pro-nuclear advocates are correct that because it’s so dangerous, we take extreme measures. We handle it in a way that really isolates it from causing any harm by storing it first in cooling pools and then in these steel canisters surrounded by concrete.

If you compare that to the waste from fossil fuels, which has just spewed into the atmosphere for hundreds of years with very few controls and caused millions of deaths via air pollution in addition to the massive harms of climate change … I think putting it in that context really does change the way I think about it.

Vince: So in other words, it’s bad, but it’s less bad than the toxic waste created by fossil fuels.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s much less bad, I think, in terms of the harm actually caused. In terms of potential harm, I think certainly without rigorous regulations or if we had some kind of really apocalyptic societal collapse, and we were not able to monitor the waste anymore in the way that we have been, then yes, certainly there could be major problems.

Vince: The thing that I was raised worrying about is a catastrophic accident. You know, the China syndrome, the big meltdown, Chernobyl, Fukushima. The terrifying fear that if something goes wrong, it can go catastrophically wrong. So, what about that?

Rebecca: Well, the worst nuclear accident by far at a civilian nuclear power plant in history was Chernobyl. But one thing to note about that is that the reactor design was flawed. For instance, it didn’t even have a containment dome. In the US all of our nuclear reactors are surrounded by these concrete domes intended to prevent any radioactive releases from getting out. So an accident like Chernobyl couldn’t happen here, or, I don’t think, at any currently operating reactor in the world.

Of course, Fukushima was a lot more recent and is certainly disturbing, especially since it was caused by a tsunami. And in today’s world we have these various so-called natural disasters of increasing frequency and intensity. So they could pose increasing risks at nuclear plants. But it would not be anything like the scale of Chernobyl. And the new reactors that are in development, many if not all of them have what are called passive safety features. That basically means that the physical characteristics of the reactor itself would prevent a meltdown from happening, as opposed to having, like, an engineered way to turn it off. At least in theory they make a meltdown impossible. But it’s certainly possible that accidents can happen.

And I would add that since Trump took office he’s been really trying to undermine nuclear regulation in the US, which is disturbing. I think it’s really important to have robust regulation. These moves may increase the chance that we could have an accident.

Vince: So, where does “catastrophic accident” stand on your list of things to worry about?

Rebecca: It’s not that high.

Vince: Yeah?

Rebecca: Yeah. I think there are a lot of safeguards in place and nobody wants to have a catastrophic accident. Except for maybe terrorists. I think part of the reason I was more open to nuclear power in the first place is that climate change was at the top of my list. And I learned that nuclear could play a role in mitigating climate change.

Vince: Nuclear is kind of having a comeback in the US and around the world these days. Give me a sense of the trajectory.

Rebecca: So, China and Russia have been the countries that built the most new nuclear in the past decade or even few decades. We’re talking not hundreds or thousands of plants, but like in the dozens. In the US, there’s been a great deal of interest, I’d say, for the past decade or so. There’s been a series of bipartisan laws intended to nurture the advanced nuclear industry.

The challenge is that as opposed to solar and wind, which you can now just put up really quickly and really cheaply, nuclear plants are often over budget and go past deadline. That’s something nuclear proponents and the sector really need to address if they’re going to succeed.

Vince: So, what about the small modular reactors we keep hearing about? Is that even a real thing or is that just a concept at this point?

Rebecca: It’s a concept that is I think coming close to becoming reality. China and Russia are at the forefront of SMR development, but none have been deployed yet. (Correction! Reader Al Christie pointed out that in fact Russia has deployed at least one SMR. He and Rebecca hashed it out in the comments section below.)

Vince: Let me switch gears here a little bit. I write about metals and raw materials. Uranium is the primary raw material we’re talking about, yeah? Where are we getting our uranium from these days?

Rebecca: Russia actually provides a quarter of the enriched uranium that the US imports. Which has been a problem. In the aftermath of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were all of these sanctions placed on other energy sources, but we actually didn’t touch the uranium.

Vince: No kidding. That’s so interesting because we did the same thing with Russian nickel. So Russia is also an important enough supplier of enriched uranium that we depend on them to some extent?

Rebecca: Yeah, to some extent.

Vince: That doesn’t seem like a very good strategic position to be in.

Rebecca: There was also this amazing non-proliferation program in the wake of the Cold War. The US started paying Russia to dismantle excess nuclear weapons and they would downblend the highly enriched uranium in the weapons into low-enriched uranium and then ship it to the US. And we used it in our nuclear reactors as fuel.

Vince: Wow.

Rebecca: For a 20-year period from 1993 to 2013, that low-enriched uranium supplied 10% of our total electricity. Which is a pretty staggering figure.

Vince: No way. Let me make sure I understood that. We were getting 10% of our electricity from uranium that had been salvaged from Russian nuclear missiles?

Rebecca: Yes! The revenue helped stabilize Russia’s economy and integrate it into the global economy. It had all of these incredible benefits, but one unintended consequence was that we did start to depend on Russia for low-enriched uranium and our own capacity to enrich uranium kind of atrophied.

Vince: So what’s your bottom line? Nuclear good or nuclear bad?

Rebecca: I ended up thinking that there’s no perfect energy source. What probably makes the most sense is to have a portfolio of these different low-carbon sources that have different advantages and different disadvantages. Probably my preference would be to have nuclear providing what’s known as base load or dispatchable energy to the extent that it can help stabilize the system but also have lots of wind and solar and batteries that can do most of the work most of the time.
My own views kind of evolved over time. I think because I was writing about people, some of whom had an almost religious passion either for or against nuclear, that made me want to be sure that I remained open-minded and open to new evidence as it emerged, open to changes in the energy system, because it’s changing so quickly.