A billion dollars for the relaunch of TMI?

The U.S. Department of Energy will provide Constellation Energy with a loan of one billion dollars to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania (formerly known as Three Mile Island), DOE officials announced.

The one-billion-dollar loan will cover the majority of the estimated restart project costs, which are estimated to be around $1.6 billion. The first payment to Constellation Energy is expected in the first quarter of 2026, said Greg Beard, an official of the Department of Energy's Office of Credit Programs.

DOE officials justify the financial aid by the need to ensure reliable and affordable energy in the PJM Interconnection region, which serves more than 65 million people. Consumers in many of the federal states in the PJM region face a significant rise in electricity prices as the rapid growth in demand from data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) outpaces the available supply.

The Crane Clean Energy Center power plant, formerly TMI Unit 1, is located at the same site as Three Mile Island Unit 2, the reactor in which in 1979 a partial core meltdown occurred, which is the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.

The plant, formerly known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, ceased operation in 2019, but is expected to resume producing electricity in 2027. Constellation Energy, which is also the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the U.S., announced the restart of the reactor in September 2024 through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, which plans to support the demand of its data centers in the region. The plant's operation is expected to resume in 2027.

We add only one doubt: the contract between Constellation and Microsoft is essentially commercial, and the energy produced by this plant will be used to power Microsoft's data center in Pennsylvania, so it remains unclear to us why the U.S. government is helping the entire project.

By the way, this project is one of three shut-down nuclear plants in the U.S. that plan to restart during this decade. The Department of Energy also supports restarting the Palisades plant in Michigan with a loan of $1.5 billion, while NextEra Energy has announced plans to restart Duane Arnold in Iowa through a contract with Alphabet's Google unit. Trump's executive orders require the DOE to 'prioritize restarting nuclear reactors,' and in the United States there are plans for the construction of ten new reactor units in the coming decades.

Thus, Energy Secretary Kris Wright (Chris Wright) stated that the department's loan office will use most of its funds to support the nuclear industry and that this policy is in line with four executive orders that President Trump signed back in May, which aim to significantly expand new nuclear capacities.