President Donald Trump and his energy secretary just made a major step in growing nuclear energy in the U.S.
On Tuesday, Chris Wright’s Department of Energy announced that they were loaning $1 billion to Pennsylvania’s previously closed Three Mile Island plant.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright
“Thanks to President Trump’s bold leadership and the Working Families Tax Cut, the United States is taking unprecedented steps to lower energy costs and bring about the next American nuclear renaissance,” Wright said in the press release. “Constellation’s restart of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy to Americans across the Mid-Atlantic region. It will also help ensure America has the energy it needs to grow its domestic manufacturing base and win the AI race.”
Nuclear energy has gained a bad reputation in the U.S., given its shaky safety record and past meltdowns causing public exposure to radioactive material.
Accidents like those in Chernobyl, in Russia, and Fukushima, in Japan, still ring in public discourse when talks of bolstering nuclear power come up. And given one of the plants set to reopen previously had a partial meltdown in 1979, releasing amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, public trust might waver with this news.
The thing is, Three Mile Island’s partial meltdown at one of its sister reactors marked one of the greatest nuclear scares on American soil.
Joseph Dominguez, chief executive of Constellation Energy who owns the plant, previously told The New York Times that Three Mile Island was “the site of the industry’s greatest failure.” But now, it’s being given a “rebirth,” Dominguez said.
This deal with Constellation was initially sparked when Microsoft and Constellation penned an agreement in late 2024 for the tech giant to resurrect a unit to use.
A cartoon by David Horsey.
Microsoft and other tech companies are consuming more energy than ever before as artificial intelligence demands exorbitant amounts of power fed to their data centers. To meet these demands, Trump signed an executive order in May ordering an expedited approval process of nuclear reactors in the U.S. After all, hastened deadlines are the greatest way to ensure safety.
Wright’s helping hand to open a reactor with a sketchy past comes at a time when his role in the White House is shakier than ever. According to Politico’s sources, the former energy businessman was too slow to loop in officials about slashing clean energy programs and approving Trump’s beloved natural gas plans.
But this push for more nuclear power in the U.S. has been a part of Wright’s larger plan for a while. Around the same time as Trump’s executive order, he said in a video posted to social media that he intended to make a “Manhattan Project 2.”
As for the Constellation project, all of this is being done in the name of feeding the Trump administration’s goal of making America the “AI capital of the world.”
After all, these companies building out our AI dystopia that no one wants require an exorbitant amount of energy. But it’s full speed ahead into uncharted territory, it seems.
