I don’t know much about fusion or the companies, but just started looking into it because of the weird circumstances surrounding his murder and the involvement of so many big oil companies/anti-regulation/anti-science billionaires currently running the department of energy. They seem to want to get these data centers rolling as soon as possible, regardless of who they might hurt in the process.

Even more than just competition between different fusion companies, it seems very odd that 5 days before he was murdered, there was a House meeting to discuss the reorganization to the Department of Energy.

Office of Fusion and Office of AI and Quantum, which he said will focus on supporting companies to deliver “real” quantum capabilities and fusion power plants. They also said it is unclear if the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations will continue to exist. The headline of this story has since been updated accordingly.

In particular, this information really stood out:

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, are you doing it in tension with the support of the basic science?’ We’re not. We’re saying, because we’ve succeeded in investing in that, we have the opportunity now to create an industry,” he said.

But what if there was tension with basic science? In particular basic scientists who couldn’t necessarily be bought to agree with everything the DOE is doing?

Lofgren criticized Wright (secretary of the DOE) for not testifying before the committee, saying “there must be accountability” for actions at DOE this year, including “the mass firings and coerced departures of dedicated experts throughout DOE, the illegal elimination of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, insanely inaccurate statements regarding the role that renewables play in ensuring the reliability of our electric grid, [and] the widely debunked climate ‘science’ report that the secretary commissioned.”

I don’t know much about Loureiro, but I have a hard time believing he devoted his life trying to help humanity solve the issue of sustainable and clean energy, but was totally chill with some shadowy billionaires using his work while ignoring science and safety to win a race against other billionaires.

$9 billion already invested by venture capitalists isn’t chump change, but those are also the kind of people who don’t understand integrity and the work and legacy you want to leave behind isn’t always for sale.

What if the most well known expert in the field was asked to provide testimony about his own views on the DOE reorganization, or if he believed closing the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) conflicted with basic science? Would the people pushing to close these offices, reshuffle the funds to other places, and end regulations be willing to kill somebody who gets in their way? When they so clearly value money above the future/fate of the entire planet and all humanity, it’s difficult to believe they would place much value on a single human life.

This article was published yesterday: How Chris Wright remade DOE

The Department of Energy is moving at a fast clip and making major changes under Secretary Chris Wright as the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term wraps up. Thousands of staffing positions have been cut. Over $11 billion in grants has been canceled. Decades-old energy efficiency regulations have been dismantled. DOE has issued emergency orders to keep coal plants from retiring, part of its focus on fossil fuels. And it’s pushing to expand the data center boom.

“We’ve moved from an energy scarcity era in the Biden administration to an energy abundance era in the Trump administration,” she said. “There’s no need for the government to set rules for efficiency.”

“under the recent DOE reorganization, unspent OCED funds are being reprogrammed to other offices within the department.”

Wright himself is a major change-maker in the federal government and energy world. As a former CEO of fracking services company Liberty Energy, Wright is steeped in data on energy systems and a frequent guest on media outlets like Fox News. At an event last week, Trump called Wright the “greatest oil man anywhere in the world.”

Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a major priority for the administration. The White House has pledged to quadruple nuclear energy in the United States by 2050 and is pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to expedite license approvals.

DOE is poised to fund new uranium enrichment projects in the U.S., with a deadline approaching on a cutoff for Russian imports that are vital to the U.S. nuclear sector. But so far, utilities are moving sluggishly — if at all — to contract to build new nuclear plants.

With other emerging technologies, like fusion, funding is also a critical issue. Wright has been pushing for fusion — which envisions power plants using the same reaction powering the sun — and the recent DOE reorganization created a new office for the industry. The move will help gear the department more toward commercialization of projects, but details are being sorted out, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association.

The new office shows the “administration takes seriously the goal and challenges of getting fusion energy commercialized,” said Holland, who met with Dario Gil, DOE’s undersecretary for science, this month.

But “there’s a reality that we’re in a budget-constrained environment,” he said in an interview. The fusion office currently is funded at around $800 million, and the industry is pushing for funding closer to $1 billion annually.

“We’re confident if the administration asked for it, Congress would support them,” Holland said.

That could almost be seen as vaguely threatening in context of everything else.