Microsoft Working to Reopen Three Mile Island to Power Huge AI Datacenters

"This plant never should have been allowed to shut down."

Green Mile

Microsoft is backing a deal to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reports, as part of its plan to meet the staggering energy demands of its AI infrastructure.

The Three Mile Island facility is infamous for being the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history decades ago. Constellation Energy, which owns the plant, officially shut it down in 2019. But now, the company is investing $1.6 billion to bring it back into operation by 2028, which it expects to do with the help of federal tax breaks and an irresistible offer from a tech monolith.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will buy all the nuclear energy produced by the plant for twenty years. The exact sum hasn't been disclosed, but you can expect it to be enormous.

This is unprecedented in many regards. It's the first time that Microsoft has secured a source of totally nuclear power, Bloomberg reported — and if given the final go-ahead by regulators, it will also be the first time that a decommissioned nuclear plant has been brought back into service in the US, according to WaPo.

The fact that an entire nuclear plant's output is being allocated to a single customer is also novel, the newspaper noted, in the clearest sign yet of a surge of interest in nuclear energy by a ravenous tech industry.

"This plant never should have been allowed to shut down," Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez toldWaPo. "It will produce as much clean energy as all of the renewables [wind and solar] built in Pennsylvania over the last 30 years."

Fired Up

Three Mile Island became synonymous with public distrust in nuclear power after one of its two reactors underwent a partial meltdown in 1979, years before the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Constellation's plan is to re-kindle the site's other reactor unit, which was unaffected by the accident and continued to produce power without incident for decades. It was closed in 2019 because its owners judged that it couldn't economically compete with cheap natural gas — a feeling that saw many other nuclear plants shut down over the past twenty years.

Constellation will be using its own money to fund the four-year plan to bring Three Mile Island back online, but the plan hinges on tax breaks provided by the 2022 Inflation Recovery Act.

For Microsoft, bringing the plant into the fold is seen as an essential step towards achieving its goal of being carbon negative by 2030. Nuclear power produces only minimal greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining and refining its fuel sources, but it does create radioactive waste, the disposal of which remains controversial.

But there's significant work ahead. Constellation still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has never greenlit this kind of arrangement before.

Big tech intervention could be a lifeline for the struggling nuclear industry. Nuclear power advocates, though, would probably have preferred if this flagpole move wasn't attached to the site of an infamous meltdown — nor would it be ideal if a resurgence of nuclear power is totally subsumed by the interests of AI.

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