Trump Admin To Turn On Three Mile Island Reactor (Not That One)

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Tuesday that it will loan Constellation Energy around $1 billion to restart one of Three Mile Island’s reactors in Pennsylvania.

Unit 1 at Three Mile Island was shut down in 2019 but never fully decommissioned. Constellation Energy is now working to restart the reactor in 2027 under its new name, the “Crane Clean Energy Center.” The loan will be issued through the DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week will largely finance nuclear projects under the Trump administration.

“One of the biggest challenges American people [have] faced over the last several years has been the rising price of electricity,” Wright told reporters Tuesday. “We want to bring as much net addition of dispatchable, reliable electricity onto the grid to stop these price rises in electricity and increase American capacity to generate reliable electricity, so we can reshore manufacturing in our country, and we can stay ahead in the AI race.”

Wright noted the reactor was shuttered prematurely six years ago and that bringing Crane back online is expected to add nearly a gigawatt of “new firm, reliable generation” to the grid, backed by a Constellation “parent guarantee” to protect taxpayers. The DOE said the reactor will be operational in 2027 and require only 600 to 700 workers to restart.

The agency issued emergency orders to keep coal plants running while also advancing nuclear development in line with President Donald Trump’s directives. The DOE has sounded the alarm over America’s energy crisis, with one July report projecting that rolling blackouts could increase by a factor of 100 by 2030 if the U.S. continues to phase out reliable energy sources without adequate replacements.

Wright told reporters Tuesday that under the Biden administration, “there were plans to close 100 gigawatts more of affordable, reliable, secure, dispatchable electricity generation, mostly coal, but also natural gas.”

“This is exactly what America needs,” Wright said, noting the DOE is “constantly looking for ways to rapidly expand firm, reliable generating capacity.”

While the Biden administration aggressively promoted intermittent energy sources like wind and solar through billions in subsidies, loans and grants, the Trump administration has prioritized conventional energy sources like coal and expanded support for nuclear innovation. American energy demand is rising for the first time in decades, driven by increased onshore manufacturing, widespread electrification and the growth of artificial intelligence data centers, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Institute for Energy Research.

LPO’s Senior Advisor Greg Beard told reporters Tuesday that the agency is looking for other nuclear power plant restart opportunities.

“If you have a large project that will help make American energy more affordable, reliable or secure, we are active and in business to support those projects and those companies,” Beard said.

Constellation has been working to restart the reactor since September 2024, with President and CEO Joe Dominguez arguing that Unit 1’s closure “symbolized more than a decade of policy failures that focused only on new clean energy resources that couldn’t match the reliability of nuclear energy, and both the security of our energy grid and air quality suffered.”

Beard believes Constellation could have accomplished the feat without the DOE’s help, though the loan will “lower the cost of capital and make power cheaper for those PJM ratepayers.”

PJM runs the grid for all or parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C., and has drawn scrutiny as ratepayers grapple with high utility costs. Regional politicians have tried to hoist the blame on the grid operator despite their own moves to retire reliable power plants in recent years.

“The Trump administration is highly focused on restarting the nuclear energy industry in the United States safely,” Wright said, pointing out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to play a central role in ensuring the safety of U.S. nuclear operations. “We want to get rid of the bureaucracy and focus on what are the critical issues that make reactors safe.”