If all goes according to plan, the nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s iconic Three Mile Island power plant – site of a major accident in the 1970s – will be restarted by utility Constellation Energy to fulfill an agreement with Microsoft to power its data centers with carbon-free energy.
The reactor that is back in operation is not the one that was supposed to partial collapse in 1979that has remained dormant since the accident. That was TMI-Unit 2. The adjacent reactor, TMI-Unit 1, was restarted in 1985 and operated until 2019, when it was shut down due to “poor economics,” according to Constellation.
After renovations and necessary federal and state approvals, Constellation hopes to have TMI-Unit 1 operational by 2028, and he says that The restart of the reactor “will add approximately 835 megawatts of carbon-free power to the grid.” It also renames the plant the “Crane Clean Energy Center” in honor of Chris Crane, a nuclear power “titan” who died earlier this year.
Both Pennsylvania politicians and the U.S. Department of Energy have praised Constellation’s plan. Dr. Michael Goff, acting deputy secretary of the federal agency’s Office of Nuclear Energy, said that “always-on, zero-emission nuclear power plays an important role in combating climate change and meeting the nation’s growing energy needs.”
Microsoft’s data centers are the infrastructure that powers its cloud storage and computing services, including its recent and notoriously power-hungry AI computing. Microsoft’s VP of Energy, Bobby Hollis, says the energy deal, the largest ever with Constellation, is “a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to decarbonize the grid.” Separately, we know that Microsoft has considered using “small modular reactors” and “microreactors” to power its data centers.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is also in the nuclear energy business: TerraPower, the company he founded in 2006, began construction on a recent power plant in Wyoming earlier this year.
“The United States didn’t need much new electricity, but as we get more and more things, from electric cars and buses to electric heat pumps and home heating, the demand for electricity is going to go up a lot,” Gates said. he told NPR in June“And now these data centers are adding to that. So big tech companies are looking at how they can help provide more power so that these data centers can handle the exploding demand for AI.”
