Science

She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death

Published

1 year ago

February 16, 2025

She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death

Soon, Irene Mekel will need to pick the day she dies.

She’s not in any hurry: She quite likes her life, in a trim, airy house in Castricum, a Dutch village by the sea. She has flowers growing in her back garden, and there is a street market nearby where vendors greet villagers by name. But if her life is going to end the way she wants, she will have to pick a date, sooner than she might like.

“It’s a tragedy,” she said.

Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease. It was diagnosed a year ago. She knows her cognitive function is slowly declining, and she knows what is coming. She spent years working as a nurse, and she cared for her sister, who had vascular dementia. For now, she is managing, with help from her three children and a big screen in the corner of the living room that they update remotely to remind her of the date and any appointments.

In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone. She had a bad fall and broke her elbow in August. She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.

In 2023, shortly before her diagnosis, Ms. Mekel joined a workshop organized by the Dutch Association for Voluntary End of Life. There, she learned how to draft an advance request document that would lay out her wishes, including the conditions under which she would request what is called euthanasia in the Netherlands. She decided it would be when she could not recognize her children and grandchildren, hold a conversation or live in her own home.

But when Ms. Mekel’s family doctor read the advance directive, she said that while she supported euthanasia, she could not provide it. She will not do it for someone who has by definition lost the capacity to consent.

A rapidly growing number of countries around the world, from Ecuador to Germany, are legalizing medical assistance in dying. But in most of those countries, the procedure is available only to people with terminal illness.

The Netherlands is one of just four countries (plus the Canadian province of Quebec) that permit medically assisted death by advance request for people with dementia. But the idea is gaining support in other countries, as populations age and medical interventions mean more people live long enough to experience cognitive decline.

The Dutch public strongly supports the right to an assisted death for people with dementia. Yet most Dutch doctors refuse to provide it. They find that the moral burden of ending the life of someone who no longer has the cognitive capacity to confirm their wishes is too weighty to bear.

Ms. Mekel’s doctor referred her to the Euthanasia Expertise Center, in The Hague, an organization that trains doctors and nurses to provide euthanasia within the parameters of Dutch law and connects patients with a medical team that will investigate a request and provide assisted death to eligible patients in cases where their own doctors won’t. But even these doctors are reluctant to act after a person has lost mental capacity.

Last year, a doctor and a nurse from the center came every three months to meet with Ms. Mekel over tea. Ostensibly, they came to discuss her wishes for the end of her life. But Ms. Mekel knew they were really monitoring how quickly her mental faculties had declined. It might seem like a tea party, she said, “but I see them watching me.”

Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as “five to 12” — five minutes to midnight. Doctors, patients and their caregivers engage in a delicate negotiation to time death for the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking.

They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.

“This balance is something so hard to discover,” he said, “because you as a doctor and she as your patient, neither of you quite knows what the prognosis is, how things will develop — and so the harrowing aspect of this whole thing is looking for the right time for the horrible thing.”

Ms. Mekel finds this negotiation deeply frustrating: The process does not allow for the idea that simply having to accept care can be considered a form of suffering, that worrying about what lies ahead is suffering, that loss of dignity is suffering. Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her.

More than 500,000 of the 18 million people in the Netherlands have advance request documents like hers on file with their family doctors, explicitly laying out their wishes for physician-assisted death should they decline cognitively to a point they identify as intolerable. Most assume that an advance request will allow them to progress into dementia and have their spouses, children or caregivers choose the moment when their lives should end.

Yet of the 9,000 physician-assisted deaths in the Netherlands each year, just six or seven are for people who have lost mental capacity. The overwhelming majority are for people with terminal illnesses, mostly cancer, with a smaller number for people who have other nonterminal conditions that cause acute suffering — such as neurodegenerative disease or intractable depression.

Physicians, who were the primary drivers of the creation of the Dutch assisted dying law — not Parliament, or a constitutional court case, as in most other countries where the procedure is legal — have strong views about what they will and will not do. “Five to 12” is the pragmatic compromise that has emerged in the 23 years since the criminal code was amended to permit physicians to end lives in situations of “unbearable and irremediable suffering.”

A Shock

Ms. Mekel, petite and brisk, had suspected for some time before she received a diagnosis that she had Alzheimer’s. There were small, disquieting signs, and then one big one, when she took a taxi home one day and could not recognize a single house on the street where she had lived for 45 years, could not identify her own front door.

At that point, she knew it was time to start making plans.

She and her best friend, Jean, talked often about how they dreaded the idea of a nursing home, of needing someone to dress them, get them out of bed in the morning, of having their worlds shrink to a sunroom at the end of a ward.

“When you lose your own will, and you are no longer independent — for me, that’s my nightmare,” she said. “I would kill myself, I think.”

She knows how cognition can slip away almost imperceptibly, like mist over a garden on a spring morning. But the news that she would need to ask Dr. Keizer to end her life before such losses happened came as a shock.

Her distress at the accelerated timeline is not an uncommon response.

Dr. Pieter Stigter, a geriatric specialist who works in nursing homes and also as a consultant for the Expertise Center, must frequently explain to startled patients that their carefully drawn-up advance directives are basically meaningless.

“The first thing I tell them is, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not going to happen,’” he said. “Assisted dying while mentally incompetent, it’s not going to happen. So now we’re going to talk about how we’re going to avoid getting there.”

Patients who have cared for their own parents with dementia may specify in their advance directive that they do not wish to reach the point of being bedridden, incontinent or unable to feed themselves. “But still then, if someone is accepting it, patiently smiling, it’s going to be very hard to be convinced in that moment that even though someone described it in an earlier stage, that in that moment it is unbearable suffering,” Dr. Stigter said.

The first line people write in a directive is always, “‘If I get to the point I do not recognize my children,’” he said. “But what is recognition? Is it knowing someone’s name, or is it having a big smile when someone enters your room?”

Five-to-12 makes the burden being placed on physicians morally tolerable.

“As a doctor, you are the one who has to do it,” said Dr. Stigter, a warm and wiry 44-year-old. “I’m the one doing it. It has to feel good for me.”

Conversations about advance requests for assisted death in the Netherlands are shadowed by what many people who work in this field refer to, with a wince, as “the coffee case.”

In 2016, a doctor who provided an assisted death to a 74-year-old woman with dementia was charged with violating the euthanasia law. The woman had written an advance directive four years earlier, saying she wished to die before she needed to enter a care home. On the day her family chose, her doctor gave her a sedative in coffee, and then injected a stronger dose. But during the administration of the medication that would stop her heart, the woman awoke and resisted. Her husband and children had to hold her down so the doctor could complete the procedure.

The doctor was acquitted in 2019. The judge said the patient’s advance request was sufficient basis for the doctor to act. But the public recoil at the idea of the woman’s family holding her down while she died redoubled the determination of Dutch doctors to avoid such a situation.

A Day Too Late

Dr. Stigter never takes on a case assuming he will provide an assisted death. Cognitive decline is a fluid thing, he said, and so is a person’s sense of what is tolerable.

“The goal is an outcome that reflects what the patient wants — that can evolve all the time,” he said. “Someone can say, ‘I want euthanasia in the future’, but actually when the moment is there, it’s different.”

Dr. Stigter found himself explaining this to Henk Zuidema a few years ago. Mr. Zuidema, a tile setter, had early-onset Alzheimer’s at 57. He was told he would no longer be permitted to drive, and so he would have to stop working and give up his main hobby, driving a vintage motocross bike with friends.

A gruff, stoic family man, Mr. Zuidema was appalled at the idea of no longer providing for his wife or caring for his family, and he told them he would seek a medically assisted death before the disease left him totally dependent.

His own family doctor was not willing to help him die, nor was anyone in her practice, and so his daughter Froukje Zuidema found the Expertise Center. Dr. Stigter was assigned to his case and began driving 30 minutes from his office in the city of Groningen every month to visit Mr. Zuidema at his home in the farming village of Boelenslaan.

“Pieter was very clear: ‘You have to tell me when,’” Ms. Zuidema said. “And that was very hard, because Dad had to make the decision.”

When he grasped that the disease might impair his judgment, and thus cause him to overestimate his mental competence, Mr. Zuidema quickly settled on a plan to die within months. His family was shocked, but for him the trade-off was clear: “Better a year too early than a day too late,” he would say.

Dr. Stigter pushed Mr. Zuidema to define what, exactly, his suffering would be. “He would say, ‘Why is it so bad to get old like that?’” Ms. Zuidema recalled. “‘Why is it so bad to go to a nursing home?’” She said the doctor would tell her father, “ ‘Your idea of suffering is not the same as mine, so help me understand why this is suffering, for you.’ “

Her reticent father struggled to explain, and finally put it in a letter: “I don’t want to lose my role as a husband and a father, I do not want to be unable to help people any longer … Suffering would be if I could no longer be alone with my grandchildren because people did not trust me any longer: even this thought makes me crazy … Do not be misled by a moment in which I look happy but instead look back at this moment when I am with my wife and children.’”

The progress of dementia is unpredictable, and Mr. Zuidema did not experience a rapid decline. In the end, Dr. Stigter visited each month for a year and a half, and the two men developed a relationship of trust, Ms. Zuidema said.

Dr. Stigter provided a medically assisted death in September 2022. Mr. Zuidema, then 59, was in a camp bed near the living room window, his wife and children at his side. His daughter said she sees Dr. Stigter “as a real hero.” She has no doubt her father would have died by suicide even sooner, had he not been confident he could receive an assisted death from his doctor.

Still, she is wistful about the time they didn’t have. If the advance directive had worked as defined in the law — if there had been no fear of missing the moment — her father might have had more months, more time sitting on the vast green lawn between their houses and watching his grandchildren kick a soccer ball, more time with his dog at his feet, more time sitting on a riverbank with his grandson and a lazy fishing line in the water.

“He would have stayed longer,” Ms. Zuidema said.

Her sense that her father’s death was rushed does not outweigh her gratitude that he had the death he wanted. And her feeling is widely shared among families, according to research by Dr. Agnes van der Heide, a professor of end-of-life care and decision making at Erasmus Medical College, University Medical Center Rotterdam.

“The large majority of the Dutch population feel safe in the hands of the doctor, with regards to euthanasia, and they very much appreciate that the doctor has a significant role there and independently judges whether or not they think that ending of life is justifiable,” she said.

For five to 12 to work, doctors should know their patients well and have time to track changes in their cognition. As the public health system in the Netherlands is increasingly strained, and short of family practitioners, that model of care is becoming less common.

Ms. Mekel’s physician, Dr. Keizer, said his lengthy visits to patients were possible only because he is mostly retired and not in a hurry. (In addition to his half-time practice, he writes regular op-eds for Dutch newspapers and comments on high-profile cases. He is a bit of an assisted-dying celebrity, and, Ms. Mekel confided, the other older women at the right-to-die workshops were envious when they learned that he had been assigned as her physician.)

Now that he is clear on her wishes, the tea parties are paused; he will resume the visits when her children tell him there has been a significant change in her awareness or ability to function — when they feel that five to 12 is close.

An Intolerable Price

Ms. Mekel is haunted by what happened to her best friend, Jean, who, she said, “missed the moment” for an assisted death.

Although Jean was determined to avoid moving to a nursing home, she lived in one for eight years. Ms. Mekel visited her there until Jean became unable to carry on a conversation. Ms. Mekel continued to call her and sent emails that Jean’s children read to her. Jean died in the nursing home in July, at 87.

Jean is the reason Ms. Mekel is willing to plan her death for sooner than she might like.

Yet Jean’s son, Jos Van Ommeren, is not sure that Ms. Mekel understands her friend’s fate correctly. He agrees that his mother dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years, he said. She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours.

Most of the last years were good years, Mr. Van Ommeren said, and to have those, it was worth the price of giving up the assisted death she had requested.

For Ms. Mekel, that price is intolerable.

Her youngest son, Melchior, asked her gently, not long ago, if a nursing home might be OK, if by the time she got there she wasn’t so aware of her lost independence.

Ms. Mekel shot him a look of affectionate disgust.

“No,” she said. “No. It wouldn’t.”

Veerle Schyns contributed reporting from Amsterdam.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.

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Science

Diarrhea-causing cyclosporiasis exceeds 1,000 cases in U.S. What Californians should know

Published

7 hours ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

Diarrhea-causing cyclosporiasis exceeds 1,000 cases in U.S. What Californians should know

Several states, primarily in the Midwest and on the East Coast, have reported thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic disease that can cause an extended bout of debilitating diarrhea.

There have been cases of cyclosporiasis infection in California this year, but none has been linked to the current outbreak. Public health officials, however, have advice for residents to stave off illness.

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by several species of the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis and is spread through the feces from an infected person that has contaminated food or water, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People become infected with the illness by consuming food or water that has been contaminated with the parasite — the infection is not transmitted from person to person.

The epicenter of the current outbreak is in Michigan, which has reported more than 1,000 cases since June, including 44 people who were hospitalized. The state typically reports about 50 cases of cyclosporiasis annually. Now there may be hundreds more infected as 17 states have reported numerous cases.

Officials say the true number of infected people is likely higher because some people recover without medical care and are not tested for the parasite.

In the United States, food-borne outbreaks of cyclosporiasis have been linked to various types of fresh produce imported from Latin America, including raspberries, cilantro, basil, snow peas and mixed salad, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Officials say those who have fallen ill became sick after eating food in the United States and did not report travel during the 14 days before they got sick.

Those who have contracted cyclosporiasis have ranged in age from 5 to 86.

There is currently no evidence of a single, multi-state cyclospora outbreak, meaning there isn’t a common source linking all cases, according to the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which are working with local public health authorities to investigate the cases in each state.

At this time, there aren’t any local outbreaks in California, and current cases of cyclosporiasis infection are not linked to the multi-state outbreak, according to the California Department of Public Health.

“From January to June 2026, California has reported 41 provisional cases of cyclosporiasis, compared to 80 cases during the same period in 2025,” said Beth Deines, information officer for the state agency.

Most of these cases are associated with recent international travel, she said.

“With the significant increase in cases in the Eastern and Midwestern states, we will monitor for cases that may be associated with travel to areas of the country that are experiencing these increases,” Deines said.

Similarly, officials with the public health department will look for clusters of cases that may indicate transmission occurring in California.

There have been four domestic cases reported since May 1.

Two of those who were infected reported that they had traveled to the Midwest. Investigation of these cases is ongoing. To protect patient privacy, the state public health department does not disclose where in the state the patients reside.

Symptoms of cyclosporiasis

Cyclosporiasis cases are reported year-round; however, infections are most common when temperatures are warmer, in the summer and early fall.

Infected people experience symptoms from two days to two weeks after consuming food or drinking water containing the parasite.

Some people who are infected, particularly those from areas where cyclosporiasis is endemic, may not have any symptoms.

Those who do develop symptoms could experience:

Watery diarrhea
Loss of appetite
Weight loss
Cramping
Bloating
Increased gas
Nausea
Fatigue

Less common symptoms may include:

Vomiting
Body aches
Headache
Low-grade fever
Other flu-like symptoms

Cyclospriasis can be treated with a combination of antibiotics. Without treatment, symptoms can last from a few days to a month or longer.

Some symptoms, such as diarrhea, may go away and then return.

How to protect yourself

When traveling to areas where cyclospriasis is endemic — including tropical or subtropical regions — avoid drinking tap water. Also make sure hot food is served piping hot, health officials say, and cold food should be kept thoroughly chilled. Germs that cause food poisoning can grow quickly in lukewarm food.

A complete list of food and drink considerations provided by the CDC can be found here.

Most food-borne outbreaks of cyclosporiasis in the U.S. have been linked to various types of imported fresh produce, so public health officials in California and in states reporting infection cases recommend:

Wash your hands with soap and water before and after handling or preparing raw fruits and vegetables. Note that hand sanitizer does not kill the parasite that causes cyclosporiasis.
Wash all fruits and vegetables thoroughly under running water before eating, cutting or cooking.
Scrub firm fruits and vegetables, such as melons and cucumbers, with a clean produce brush.
Cut away any damaged or bruised areas on fruits and vegetables before preparing and eating.
Refrigerate cut, peeled or cooked fruits and vegetables as soon as possible.

Science

‘I’d rather my house burn down than get cancer’: Herbicide use upends California’s fight to save forests

Published

18 hours ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

‘I’d rather my house burn down than get cancer’: Herbicide use upends California’s fight to save forests

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — For years, Reid Reichardt walked the forest trails behind his Tahoe Basin cabin nearly every day with his dog Jasmine. Then in 2021, the Caldor fire swept through, incinerating it all.

“It was really a sense of mourning and grief to lose this,” Reichardt said, eyes fixed on the towering blackened sticks around him.

Since then, Reichardt has watched birds, flowers, a sea of green shrubs and baby conifers fill in the moonscape. It’s been a ray of hope for him, as Jasmine aged and eventually passed.

Reid Reichardt’s dog Jasmine.

(Reid Reichardt)

But two months ago, Reichardt got a text from a friend: The Forest Service had approved a plan to kill off shrubs it says are blocking the conifers from growing. It plans to use glyphosate, an herbicide California has determined causes cancer.

“I think many people, including me, would say, I’d rather my house burn down than get cancer,” he said.

Increasingly severe wildfires — fueled by climate change and more than a century of forest mismanagement — have forced an environmental reckoning on mountain towns nestled in California’s Sierra Nevada. Their residents face difficult questions: Will some kind of forest grow back? And, if not, should humans intervene to make that happen? Two communities, 100 miles apart, may be choosing different answers.

Many foresters and fire ecologists argue the plentiful baby conifers behind Reichardt’s home will struggle to compete with the fast-growing shrubs for sunlight, water and soil nutrients. Should another fire roll through, the seedlings are not yet tall enough to hold their branches above the flames.

But many Tahoe Basin residents say they are willing to live with whatever grows back, if it keeps glyphosate away.

Reid Reichardt stands next to Saxon Creek in the Caldor fire burn scar area near South Lake Tahoe.

“I’ll never see it like it was in my entire lifetime, and we need to be OK with that,” said Madeline Moritsch, who spent summers at her parents’ Tahoe cabin growing up and now lives in town. “It’s really sad … to lose connection to the forest, but then also, it is part of the forest life cycle. I have great trust that the forest is going to do what it’s going to do.”

In the Tahoe basin, opposition to the herbicide reached a fever pitch after an article chronicling the Forest Service’s use of the chemical across California appeared in Mother Jones magazine.

The agency had posted newspaper notices and sent emails mentioning herbicide use and seeking public input last year, but Tahoe residents said they had missed them or didn’t make much of them.

“We continue to welcome feedback from community members and appreciate the ongoing interest and involvement from the public,” the Forest Service said in a statement.

The controversy over reviving the forest is a shame, some say, because, done right, these projects can help restore the identity of forest towns and a feeling few have felt in decades: safety.

The stewards of the forest

Hand-made burn piles are gathered in an area of land that the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu.

About 100 miles northwest of the Tahoe Basin, lower down in the foothills, survivors of the epic 2018 Camp fire that destroyed the town of Paradise have a very different relationship with forest stewards.

The Butte County Fire Safe Council — made up of three dozen foresters, former firefighters and local fire survivors — has countless stories of working with local landowners to heal forests and reduce wildfire risk.

In a ride with four of them in one of the council’s heavy-duty white pick-ups, conversation is constantly interrupted as they point out areas across the county’s rugged wild lands that they’ve worked on.

More than a third of Butte County’s 1 million acres have burned over the past decade. That has made taking action and having tough conversations — including about herbicide — unavoidable.

A flag marks a Konkow Valley Band of Maidu cultural site.

Connor Gilmartin, the Fire Safe Council’s director of development, sympathized with residents in the Tahoe Basin. “It’d be completely reasonable that people feel slighted if they were to have something happening in their proverbial backyard without knowing about it,” he said. “It’s a non-option for us.”

The Fire Safe Council and forestry herbicide experts stressed that when herbicide is used, crews take significant precautions to protect ecosystems and communities. They post signs along trails and mix in dye so residents can see where the chemical has been used. It can’t be applied near streams and lakes.

Experts also said it is extremely unlikely for people using trails to get accidentally exposed to glyphosate levels that scientists deem unsafe.

Why use glyphosate

For well over a century, the state and federal government aggressively suppressed all fire in California forests — many of which were adapted to low-severity flames that rolled through the understory every five to 20 years. These free-range “good” fires, set by lightning and Indigenous tribes, thinned out and rejuvenated forests for millennia.

Without them, parts of the Sierra Nevada have grown five to six times as dense as they were a few hundred years ago.

Combine that with increasingly hotter and drier weather due to climate change, and forests in the Sierra Nevada are left with a ton of stuff that’s ready to burst into flames.

Now when a fire ignites, it’s often high-intensity, devouring virtually everything in its path — including hundred-foot-tall trees.

After such a fire, shrubs that usually fight for scarce sunlight on the forest floor suddenly have it all day and take over.

One of the many baby conifers and pine trees growing amongst the shrubs.

It’s for this reason many experts say intervention is necessary if the forests are to grow back within the next several decades.

Without intervening, “the Forest Service is not getting a forest back. That’s pure and simple,” said Scott Stephens, UC Berkeley professor of fire science. Hoping fire stays out of the forest during its slow recovery process, “I would call that risky business,” he said.

To cut back on the shrubs and give the conifers a chance, Stephens said land managers have a few options: Goats, hand crews and herbicides.

Goats are great at munching up unwanted vegetation; however, if they aren’t introduced immediately, the goats are no match.

Land managers can also send in hand crews to take down shrubs with loppers, hoes and chainsaws. But that is labor intensive, and when a fire burns thousands of acres, the time and cost involved can be too high.

That leaves herbicides.

Of those, glyphosate is one of the few reasonably priced, effective and, many argue, comparatively safe herbicides that land managers can rely on for restoration work.

Reid Reichardt hikes up a famous mountain bike trail called Toad's Wild Ride

In the Tahoe Basin, the Caldor fire restoration plan outlines roughly 3,600 acres where the Forest Service could use ground crews to apply herbicide directly to shrubs — no aerial spraying.

“Even though it’s gotten a bad name because so much attention has been focused on it, it’s actually effective and comparatively benign,” Jon Souder, retired Oregon State University forestry professor, said of glyphosate.

Whether glyphosate causes cancer is still debated.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined it is not likely a human carcinogen. The cancer research arm of the World Health Organization says it probably is.

For many residents near Lake Tahoe, it’s not a risk worth taking.

Teaching the land to trust

Matthew Williford Sr., tribal chairperson of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu, shook his head as he stood on a dirt road overlooking the fire-ravaged Concow Basin, separated from Paradise by just one canyon.

“Nature needs help too, just like we need help from nature,” he said. “We don’t understand that because we went another way. We lost connection with the land. That’s why.”

“This is 3A,” he said, referring to the Forest Service’s name for this plot. “We have a tribal name for it — it’s called the Place of the Grasshoppers.”

Growing up, Williford heard stories of ancestors catching giant grasshoppers, wrapping them in a maple leaf, adding a berry, then roasting them in fire and eating them like popcorn.

But those grasshoppers were long gone.

Matthew Williford Sr., wearing a hard hat, gestures while speaking near a burn pile

California outlawed cultural fire in 1850, the year it became a state. The forests grew dense. Conifers took over the oaks. The plants and animals Williford’s ancestors held relationships with became strangers.

Then everything burned.

The Forest Service began increasingly approaching the tribe for help.

With the blessing and support of the Forest Service, the tribe began working to restore parts of its homeland — not as a shrubland, or thick conifer forest, but an open and free tapestry anchored by oaks.

For the work, the tribe has sometimes leaned on herbicide — particularly to kill ornamental French and Spanish broom, which are invasive. The alternative, digging it up, risks damaging cultural sites.

Close-up of a left hand in a pinch grip near a plant

On plot 3A, the tribe worked with the Forest Service to grow oaks and bring back good fire.

One day, Williford stopped by 3A.

As he hopped back into his truck, a loud buzzing startled him. His truck was covered in giant grasshoppers.

“It’s just getting the land to trust us and to see that we’re here to help it — like we used to,” he said. “The land will respond. There’s no doubt about it.”

Science

Not everyone is leaving California. A new commercial battery maker just landed in Sacramento

Published

1 day ago

July 9, 2026

Press Room

Not everyone is leaving California. A new commercial battery maker just landed in Sacramento

The lithium-ion batteries that supply much of today’s clean energy come with some infamous drawbacks, from fire risk to reliance on foreign mining.

Alternatives have been slow to get off the ground.

But California startup Peak Energy announced Wednesday it’s building a factory in Sacramento that will be the first in the U.S. to make sodium-ion battery packs at commercial scale.

Sodium-ion batteries have long held promise. They are made from cheap and abundant sodium ash deposits. The materials are less prone to overheating, so they don’t have the fire risk of lithium.

But they also store less energy per cubic inch. That means they have to be bigger and heavier, which makes them harder to fit into electric vehicles. So far, they’ve struggled to compete.

Peak Energy thinks it has an edge. The company focuses on storage systems big enough to power large data centers, factories and whole segments of the grid, where battery size matters less.

The company already delivers battery packs out of a small pilot project in San Francisco, but it has gotten $1.1 billion in preorders and now needs more space.

CEO and co-founder Landon Mossburg said its first products, each about the size of a shipping container, will begin rolling out in early 2027.

“We’re a 3-year-old company with over a billion in deposit-backed customer contracts, we’ve got grid deployment already, and all those products are exceeding expectations on the grid,” Mossburg said. “Those are really great signals.”

He founded Peak after working at Tesla and the now-folded Swedish battery company Northvolt. The battery cells, which make up the systems, will come from China.

Customers for Peak who have put down a deposit include independent power providers Jupiter Power, Energy Vault and RWE Americas, who are connecting utilities, and increasingly data centers, with batteries. Peak also works with utilities directly including one unnamed customer in California, and is “in fairly advanced discussions with two of the major hyperscalers,” Mossburg said.

Not everyone is so optimistic about the technology. Lithium-ion batteries are still cheaper, at least up front.

“Sodium-ion batteries attracted considerable interest when lithium-ion battery prices surged in 2022,” said Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. Since then, he noted, those prices have come down.

And as with lithium-ion battery chemistry, Asian manufacturers already have an edge.

“Sodium-ion cells are currently exclusively manufactured on a commercial scale within China,” said Evan Hartley, a research manager at the Benchmark Minerals consulting firm. Large producers such as BYD and CATL are spending enormous amounts to research and develop new products, he said.

Other U.S.-based sodium-ion startups have floundered of late. Natron Energy canceled plans to produce sodium-ion battery cells in North Carolina last year after funding difficulties. Bedrock Materials, which was making sodium-ion batteries for EVs, also closed up shop, citing a bet on a lithium supply shortage that hadn’t panned out.

But Peak Energy’s model is different, Mossburg said. Unlike Natron, it won’t be trying to make the batteries that go into their systems at first. They’ll import them, initially from China and later from other countries in Asia.

“While working at Tesla, I saw the advantage of focusing on a great end product that customers want before you try to bite off more of the scope,” Mossburg said.

Last month, Peak announced a partnership with General Motors to develop their own cells.

Once up and running, Peak Energy’s Sacramento factory will make three to four battery systems per day, each filled with almost 8,000 battery cells. One system can power hundreds of homes for four hours, Mossburg said. Customers will deploy tens or hundreds in a single project, “basically creating a power-plant sized battery” that can store power and supply the grid when energy is expensive, or directly serve facilities like data centers.

Although sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium ones, Mossburg said Peak Energy’s battery systems still save customers money: The technology does not heat up like lithium, so it eliminates the need for expensive cooling technology.

“Because lithium-ion needs to actively cool, you’re basically paying to refrigerate your batteries or using energy to refrigerate your batteries, and we don’t need any of that stuff,” said Mossburg.

The upshot is a battery that’s cheaper, quieter, and safer.

“Safety is a major advantage for sodium-ion batteries,” Kikuma said.

That could matter in California, where battery opposition has surged after a fire at a Moss Landing energy storage facility drove the evacuation of 1,200 residents and contaminated nearby wetlands.

California has typically been a hub of battery research and development, not manufacturing. Mossburg said Peak Energy, which also has offices in Colorado, chose Sacramento for its proximity to a talented workforce, a growing energy storage market and the company’s engineering teams in Burlingame. He said the factory would create 239 new jobs.

The company hasn’t received any federal clean energy tax credits, but it got a $10.5-million tax credit from the state of California.

While sodium-ion is likely to remain a small fraction of the global battery market, Kikuma said stationary energy storage is one of the fastest growing applications for sodium-ion batteries.

Mossburg sees Peak as being ahead in this corner of the market.

“Everybody from CATL to GM have sort of validated now what we’re doing,” he said. “The market is trying to catch up.”