The Owner of Three Mile Island Is Turning the Nuclear Power Plant Back on to Fuel Microsoft's AI Operations
In this latest skirmish between the future and its enemies, the future won.
We're back!
Today Bloomberg reports that Constellation Energy Corp., the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, plans to turn back on one of the plant's shuttered reactors. Microsoft has agreed to purchase 100 percent of the plant's output for the next 20 years to feed its power-hungry AI operations.
Constellation had closed one of Three Mile Island's reactors in 2019. But Microsoft's surging power demands, combined with tax breaks from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, have encouraged the company to spend the $1.6 billion needed to turn it back on.
Three Mile Island is infamously the site of a partial reactor meltdown in 1979. That incident led to the permanent shutdown of one of its two reactors and helped fuel a regulatory crackdown on the nuclear industry. Only two new commercial nuclear power plants have opened this century.
The same anti-growth, anti-progress environmentalists that succeeded in halting the growth of the nuclear industry in the wake of Three Mile Island have in recent months turned their sights on AI. They've labeled the power-hungry industry an "energy hog" and "a threat to climate change."
It's an irony, then, that degrowth environmentalism's past enemy is seeing a revival to fuel its latest one.
The general public shouldn't be so worried. That AI is boosting demand for power is good news, not bad.
The fact is the future requires power and the plants needed to generate it. That we need new power plants at all is evidence that new things are happening and new things are being built.
Indeed, a few wonks and scholars argue the slowdown in economic growth since the 1970s can be primarily attributed to the war on new electrical power-generating capacity. If that's true, turning power plants back on and reviving nuclear generally could reverse that trend.
To be sure, tax credits and subsidies are bad. But libertarians can still cheer the reopening of Three Mile Island. In this skirmish between the future and its enemies, the future won.
