It might have seemed like one of the weirder headlines of 2024: Microsoft is paying $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island. That’s the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania whose reactor #2 had a partial meltdown in 1979. There were no injuries, and nobody died, but it set the nuclear industry back years. Only two new plants have been started since that accident.
“This is hallowed ground in the nuclear industry,” said Joe Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, which owns about half of America’s 54 nuclear plants (including Three Mile Island). “This is a place where we learned and got better.”
He says that, as a result of the 1979 accident, there have been thousands of changes in protocols and procedures regarding nuclear power. “The thing that people forget is that there was another reactor at the site,” he said. “That site, that reactor, continued to operate until 2019, when it was closed for economic reasons. Cheap natural gas, low demand, subsidization of different technologies in the business, [and] no policy supporting nuclear caused plants to start retiring.”
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