The dormant power plant renowned as the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history - Three Mile Island - may be switched back on, driven in part by the ravenous energy appetites of artificial intelligence developers.
Thu 11 July 2024
To the alarm of some nuclear safety advocates, owner Constellation Energy is laying the groundwork for a recommissioning with recent tests at Three Mile Island’s dormant Unit 1 reactor. Shut down in 2019, Unit 1 sits next to the former Unit 2 reactor that partially melted down 45 years ago. The company told investors recently it is weighing its restart, a process that would take several years.
“We’ve found the plant is in pretty good shape,” CEO Joe Dominguez said in an interview. “We think it is technically feasible to restart it.”
Not long ago, the nuclear power industry was consumed with shutting plants down, many of them sunk by an inability to compete financially with natural gas and highly subsidized wind and solar power. But Three Mile Island is part of a burst of fresh activity at mothballed plants as tech companies, manufacturers and energy regulators scramble to find enough zero emissions electricity to keep up with surging demand.
Elsewhere, the owner of the mothballed Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan is planning to have it up and running again by the end of next year, and the energy company NextEra is mulling whether to restart a nuclear plant in Iowa. Meanwhile, owners of functioning nuclear plants are scrapping plans to retire them, instead drafting regulatory applications to keep them operating in some cases as long as 80 years.
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