Three Mile Island Rises Anew

The sister plant to the ill-fated Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania is getting a new life, according to Dan Eggers, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Constellation Energy.

Microsoft, with a voracious appetite for non-carbon emitting generation for its data centers, agreed to take the power from the Constellation plant. Nearby sits the reactor that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, America’s worst nuclear accident.

Constellation will pay $1.6 billion to refurbish the undamaged plant and plans to rapidly bring it back into power production in 2028. Eggers discussed the symbolic nature of plans to restart the plant for Microsoft with the Grid Talk podcast, energy.gov/gridtalk.

The undamaged plant closed in 2019. “We’ve gone a very long time with great performance,” Eggers said.

Now Microsoft will foot the bill for giving it an extended life. “They are undeniably a sustainability leader,” Eggers said of Microsoft. “When we realized that this was a viable project in the sense that we could bring it back from a mechanical and technical perspective, we brought the opportunity to them, explained what it could be and they were very enthusiastic.”