boosts

WASHINGTON — The narrow victory of progressive doctor Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s bitterly fought Democratic Senate primary sets up a defining test of the party’s progressive wing in one of the highest-stakes U.S. Senate contests of the midterms.

Whether El-Sayed, a former public health official, can carry swing voters in a battleground state could both determine the outcome of a Senate seat viewed as crucial to determining control of Congress and have broader ramifications on the Democratic Party’s struggle for its identity.

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old epidemiologist, defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, by a narrow margin Wednesday after a long and intense campaign that was seen as a proxy for the party’s fissures.

The race was far closer than some polls had indicated. El-Sayed was leading Stevens by 15,000 votes, about 1 percentage point, with 99% of votes counted Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.

El-Sayed will face former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, in the general election. The winner will succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose seat Democrats see as critical to retain for the party to have a chance at flipping the Senate.

“We’ve got an opportunity to bring ourselves back together, to come together around a movement, to take our democracy back,” El-Sayed said Wednesday on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”

El-Sayed’s victory will put to the test in a swing state the broader strength of the progressive movement, which has found success in deep-blue places like New York City, where Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor last year, and Los Angeles, where City Councilmember Nithya Raman is locked in a tight race mayoral contest with incumbent Karen Bass. Both Mamdani and Raman are democratic socialists.

As Democrats struggle over the party’s post-2024 identity and grapple with how to win back voters, the divide between the party’s progressive and centrist wings has been on display in primary fights. Both camps have notched victories: Many of the leftist wins have come in intensely blue districts, such as in New York, while more moderate districts have chosen centrists, as in Iowa.

On Tuesday, two progressive congressional candidates in Michigan beat out establishment Democrats in House races — in one case, ousting an incumbent. But in Missouri, democratic socialist and former Rep. Cori Bush lost to incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate, for a key House seat.

In California, a handful of progressive candidates are on the November ballot, including the challengers to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford). In the Aug. 18 runoff to fill the vacant seat of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, progressive state Sen. Aisha Wahab is battling it out with fellow Democrat and BART board president Melissa Hernandez.

Progressive leaders celebrated El-Sayed’s win on Wednesday. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backed El-Sayed, argue that his working-class-centered politics are more likely to have mass appeal.

“If you’re a working-class Republican in Michigan, I think you’re going to listen to what El-Sayed says,” Sanders told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I think many of them will end up voting for him, independents as well, of course.”

Throughout the campaign, Stevens argued that El-Sayed would not be able to defeat Rogers, a refrain some moderates repeated Wednesday. El-Sayed vowed to unite Democrats around defeating Rogers, who previously served seven terms in Congress, saying that he and Stevens would be focused on “bringing the party back together.”

Rogers on Wednesday portrayed El-Sayed as an “extremist,” saying in a statement that the election is “about deciding whether Michigan has a future built on common sense — or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation.”

El-Sayed, a former city and county health official, focused on opposing money in politics and pushing for Medicare for All, among other issues. His opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and Stevens’ support for Israel became a major issue in the campaign. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, spent millions in support of Stevens.

Early in the primary race, El-Sayed sought to temper some of the concerns around his progressive agenda by presenting himself as a Michigan-first, working-class-focused candidate, said John Barry Ryan, a University of Michigan professor of political science.

But as excitement over his campaign began to mount among progressives on a national level, Ryan said, El-Sayed’s public posture swung to a middle ground.

“The signal he’s trying to send is, I’m not a moderate, but I’m also not an extremist,” Ryan said.

Whether El-Sayed can effectively sell his message to undecided voters against Rogers now becomes a key question of the general election, said Corwin Smidt, a politics professor at Michigan State University.

“[Rogers] has experience. He has credentials,” Smidt said. “El-Sayed doesn’t have that. But I do think he’s got the skill and the right language to get him over.”

At least two key Michigan Democrats signaled a desire to move past the primary’s fights. Late Tuesday, Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator who launched her own bid for the seat but suspended her campaign in early July, released an endorsement of El-Sayed.

“Whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race, those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November,” McMorrow wrote on X. “The only way we get there is together.”

After conceding, Stevens sent a similar signal in a statement:

“We need to win this Senate race,” she said.

The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil for October delivery lost 5.16% to $83.39 a barrel, while US crude, or WTI, futures for September delivery declined nearly 6% to $79.66 per barrel.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Crude declined after US President Donald Trump said fresh talks with Iran would begin later in the day, easing concerns over potential supply disruptions. Additional downward pressure came after Saudi Arabia, Russia and five other key members of OPEC+ agreed in an online meeting on Sunday to boost oil production by 188,000 barrels a day from September, against a backdrop of disruption caused by the Middle East conflict.

“The seven participating countries decided to implement a production adjustment of 188 thousand barrels per day,” they said in a joint statement.

The increase, decided by the key countries in the enlarged Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, was widely expected by analysts.

“OPEC+ has finished unwinding its voluntary cuts. The next challenge is managing the surplus that could emerge as export flows normalise,” Jorge Leon, analyst at Rystad Energy, said.

He warned, however, that the decision “changes little in the near term because (the Strait of) Hormuz remains constrained. The real market impact will come when normal export flows resume.”

The Gulf countries have struggled to increase exports due to the near-paralysis of the Strait of Hormuz orchestrated by Iran during the war in the Middle East – despite a brief upswing in shipping traffic after a US-Iran memorandum of understanding was signed in June.

Many OPEC+ members cannot produce as much oil as their official targets allow due to a “decline in production capacity”, so increasing targets has become less meaningful, Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS, said.

Future pause foreseen

The September increase, agreed by OPEC+ countries Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman, completes the unwinding of the second of the three production-cut packages introduced by organisation.

“Having completed the restoration campaign, OPEC+ has little incentive to rush into further supply changes. Our base case is a fourth-quarter pause while the group prepares for the 2027 quota negotiations,” Rystad Energy’s Leon said.

“For now, geopolitics is masking the scale of the supply increase. That will become much clearer once export flows normalise,” he added.

It remains unclear when the group will actually be able to increase its oil volumes. Some member countries, such as Iraq, have expressed a desire to significantly boost production.

Russia, though, is confronted with repeated Ukrainian drone attacks on its oil infrastructure that have crimped production, currently hovering around nine million barrels per day – compared with a target of 9.8 million barrels per day.

OPEC+ “faces potentially difficult talks over new production quotas” starting next year following the September increase, according to analysts at DNB Carnegie.

Between late 2022 and 2023, OPEC+ became concerned that oil prices were falling, and agreed to cut oil production in three separate rounds, reducing total output by nearly six million barrels per day.

But Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Oman and the United Arab Emirates – before the latter’s exit from the group on May 1 – then changed their strategy by gradually upping production starting in 2025.

“I don’t think cohesion is at risk at this very moment,” Leon said, warning, however, that the UAE’s withdrawal from the group in May has highlighted a weakness in this area.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to eliminate a foundational safety principle that has for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to and that has been adopted around the world.

Currently, facilities such as nuclear plants, hospitals or academic institutions that use radioactive materials must ensure radiation exposures are kept “as low as reasonably achievable” — the ALARA principle. The NRC proposal would abandon that philosophy while keeping a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure.

The two standards have worked together in radiation safety. Dose limits set the maximum amount of radiation the public and radiation workers can be exposed to, while ALARA kept radiation exposure as low as practical under those limits. Research shows radiation exposure increases a person’s chance of getting cancer, a risk that increases as the dose increases.

The dose limits are not changing. But the NRC, which regulates civilian nuclear energy technologies and radioactive materials, now wants to replace ALARA with a “graded approach” that includes several actions facilities must take depending on the potential dose of radiation to workers. More rigorous radiation protection measures would be required when approaching dose limits to ensure they aren’t exceeded.

This comes as President Trump attempts to quadruple domestic nuclear energy production because of surging electricity demand amid a data center and artificial intelligence boom. Reforming the NRC is one way Trump is trying to speed up nuclear reactor development. He instructed the federal agency in an executive order last year to “adopt science-based radiation limits.”

The Energy Department, which oversees national energy policies, has already stopped using ALARA. The NRC expects to finalize its radiation protection regulations in the coming months.

NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said the commission is not lowering the bar on safety.

“We’re just removing the ambiguity,” he said in a call with reporters. “But the standard for exposure to workers and the public, those are not changing. We’re just putting in place greater clarification.”

Nieh doesn’t expect major changes within the nation’s existing fleet of large, traditional reactors. But companies designing and building new, smaller reactors could move faster with a clearer picture of the radiation protection requirements, he said.

Could radiation doses creep higher?

The NRC said radiation exposure limits are set well below levels associated with health effects, and it expects remaining standards and industry practices to keep radiation doses far below the limits. There’s incentive to do so — it’s more expensive and time-consuming to work in areas with higher radiation because access must be restricted and more surveys are required.

The nuclear industry’s trade association agrees with the NRC.

“We will always continue to look at what can we do to reduce the dose to workers, and maintain our doses to the off-site public as low as possible,” said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “It’s not like we’re just going to throw open the doors and let everything run up to the limits.”

ALARA created a “moving target” for regulation, said Justin Friedman, a nuclear energy consultant who previously spent three decades at the U.S. Department of State. Getting rid of the rule would allow NRC scientists to make more rational decisions about appropriate levels of manageable risk, he added.

Some experts question cutting ALARA

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, cautions that some parts of the NRC proposal could raise permissible radiation doses in certain cases, while still staying below the cap. Lyman highlighted a proposed revision to radionuclide emissions standards, in particular.

Radiation exposure to the general public is limited to 100 millirem per year. A typical dose of radiation from a chest X-ray is 10 millirem.

The NRC wants to increase its radionuclide emissions standards from a conservative, 10 millirem per year dose to 25 millirem per year, based on a hypothetical person living in a house at the property line for a nuclear plant.

The NRC says actual doses to the public would remain far lower because, in reality, people live farther from nuclear sites and benefit from dispersion in air and water.

The NRC should improve, rather than eliminate, ALARA, Lyman said, to protect the public and workers. ALARA has become a political target because some people mistakenly believe radiation exposures have to be as low as possible no matter the cost, Lyman said. In reality, it allows trade-offs.

Katy Huff, a former U.S. assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said in some cases, the requirement may be challenging to regulate. Additional clarity would improve the regulatory environment without harming the public, added Huff, a professor and department chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

However, Huff said, she thought the NRC was going to clarify what “reasonably” means in ALARA without scrapping it. She said she’s open to being convinced the graded approach will be just as effective.

One expert sees a mixed bag

The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, chartered by Congress to provide independent scientific guidance, has not formally weighed in yet. Council President Kathryn Higley said she likes some things in the 180-page document but thinks others are problematic.

The NRC should look at the whole picture for managing risk, she said. For instance, if a worker at a nuclear power plant were to enter an area where airborne radioactive materials are present, in keeping with ALARA, they might wear full personal protective equipment with respirators, said Higley, professor emeritus at Oregon State University. That makes them move slower, potentially subjecting them to heat stress that could hurt them more than a low dose of radioactivity, she said.

A concern with the proposal, Higley said, is that it maintains the current occupational dose limit for adult radiation workers at 5 rem, or 5,000 millirem, per year. With ALARA in place, the average dose to workers has been well below that cap.

The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends an occupational dose of 2 rem per year on average. The NRC previously found it wasn’t justified to match that, because workers were exposed to less than that and changing regulations is costly.

Higley said the U.S. may need to align with the international community if ALARA is going away.

McDermott writes for the Associated Press.

China has raised its purchases of oil from the Middle East in recent days, with deep discounts offered by its main supplier Saudi Arabia expected to further boost its buying, the Financial Times reported Monday.

China bought at least 26M