⚛ The return of Three Mile Island (and an Up Wing America?)

AI and its need for energy is helping to end American's half-century Great Downshift in progress

Item: Constellation Energy will invest $1.6 billion to revive Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant, reopening one reactor by 2028 to sell its entire output to Microsoft for powering AI data centers. This marks Microsoft's first dedicated nuclear facility. The Unit 1 reactor, closed in 2019 due to economic pressures, is being revived amid surging interest in nuclear power as electricity demand soars, particularly from AI. While Unit 2 remains permanently closed after a partial core meltdown in 1979, this revival signals a shift in nuclear's prospects. As Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez told Bloomberg: “Policymakers and the market have received a huge wake-up call. There’s no version of the future of this country that doesn’t rely on these nuclear assets.” - “Microsoft’s AI Power Needs Prompt Revival of Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant,” 10.20.2024

Look, we’ve seen the green shoots of a nuclear renaissance before. Back in September 2007, for instance, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission received its first license application for a new nuclear reactor in nearly 30 years. This proposal for a facility near Houston was soon followed by 16 more applications for a total of 24 reactors. The climate seemed ideal for nuclear expansion: Natural gas prices had reached historic highs, the 2005 Energy Policy Act offered financial incentives for new plants, and carbon emission legislation appeared imminent under a likely Obama administration. 

“Then everything changed,” as University of California, Berkeley economist Lucas Davis writes in the 2011 paper, “Prospects for Nuclear Power.” Davis continues:

Natural gas prices fell sharply in 2009. Legislation to limit carbon emissions stalled in Congress. The global recession slowed the growth of electricity demand. And, in March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant in northern Japan, causing partial meltdowns at the plant’s three active reactors and large-scale releases of radioactive steam. Since 2009 only a single additional license application has been filed with the NRC. The project proposed for Southern Texas has been canceled and few of the applications pending with the NRC are moving forward. Fukushima has had perhaps an even stronger impact worldwide leading Germany, Switzerland, and Italy to announce plans to phase out their nuclear power programs and causing China to suspend approvals for new reactors.

A decade later, the gloomy tone of the paper looked prescient. On April 30, 2021, New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant shut down its last reactor. As Lea Booth and Cameron Tarry Hughes noted in a 2023 City Journal piece, New York’s then-governor, Andrew Cuomo, touted the shutdown as a major victory for state residents, “ending the threat the plant has long-posed to an area that is vitally important to our state, the nation, and the world.”

Next up: The expected 2024 shutdown of Diablo Canyon, California’s only remaining nuclear power plant. But at the end of 2023, California regulators approved a five-year extension for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, overriding environmental groups' closure demands. And earlier that year, Georgia Power's Vogtle Unit 3, the first US nuclear reactor built from scratch this century, came online, with a second reactor entering commercial operation last March.

And if you pull the camera back, you’ll see signs of a nuclear revival around the world. The short story: Global concerns about clean energy and energy security, particularly due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have led to a renewed embrace of nuclear power worldwide. Japan aims to double its nuclear energy share to 20 percent by 2030, setting an example that even countries with complex nuclear histories can reconsider this option. Across Europe, plans to phase out nuclear energy are being reversed, with new reactors proposed. (Climate activist Greta Thunberg has also expressed support for maintaining existing nuclear plants, at least in Germany.)

Here in America, President Biden's clean electricity goal relies heavily on nuclear power, with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act providing funding for advanced nuclear R&D and various incentives for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Some of that funding is helping restart the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, shut down in 2022.

But none of that has the symbolic power of a Three Mile Island revival.