When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 19

For Now, There’s Only One Good Way to Power AI

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2024-09-23 16:30:16

When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history: a partial reactor meltdown that didn’t release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades. Many existing plants stayed online, but 40 years later, Three Mile Island joined a wave of facilities that shut down because of financial hurdles and competition from cheap natural gas, closures that cast doubt over the future of nuclear power in the United States.

Now Three Mile Island is coming back, this time as part of efforts to meet the enormous electricity demands of generative AI. The plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, announced yesterday that it is reopening the facility. Microsoft, which is seeking clean energy to power its data centers, has agreed to buy power from the reopened plant for 20 years. “This was the site of the industry’s greatest failure, and now it can be a place of rebirth,” Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation, told The New York Times. Three Mile Island plans to officially reopen in 2028, after some $1.6 billion worth of refurbishing and under a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center.