Three Mile Island, the site of America’s worst nuclear accident, will restart operations to provide power to Microsoft, Constellation Energy announced Friday.
The 20-year deal includes the restart of Unit 1, which “operated at top levels of safety and reliability for decades before shutting down for financial reasons exactly five years ago,” the company said in a statement.
Unit 1 was not involved in the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown at the Pennsylvania site.
Before its early retirement in 2019, the plant could power over 800,000 average homes.
Microsoft will use this energy to support power grids in the mid-Atlantic states around Washington, an area considered a crossroads of the Internet.
This area is under severe pressure from the massive power consumption of data centers, raising concerns about network stability as AI demands increase.
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Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are rapidly expanding their data center capabilities to meet the computing and power needs of the AI ββrevolution.
Microsoft told US media that Three Mile Island’s nuclear power will power networks for expanding data centers in Chicago, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Many tech companies are betting on the rapid development of nuclear power to meet the electricity demands of artificial intelligence.
Amazon’s AWS agreed in March to invest $650 million in a data center campus powered by another 40-year-old nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, further underscoring tech companies’ growing interest in nuclear power.
They are also interested in small modular reactors (SMRs), which are more compact and potentially easier to develop.
However, this technology is still in its infancy and lacks regulatory approval, leaving companies looking to existing nuclear power options.
Constellation Energy expects the Three Mile Island reactor to come back online in 2028.
Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president of energy, called the deal “an important milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid to support our commitment to become carbon negative.”
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The partial meltdown of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island in 1979 caused panic in the United States and stalled nuclear power development for a generation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission called it the “worst accident in the history of U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operation,” although it noted that there are no detectable health effects to workers or the public from the small releases of radioactivity.
Source: AFP