Kendra Pierre-Louis and Leslie Kaufman of Bloomberg write on the status of America’s dams. As flooding hammered Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents became intimately familiar with a new norm in the US’s post-storm script: dams at imminent risk of failing. Officials last week said multiple dams were on the brink, including Tennessee’s...

Mark Mills writes in The Wall Street Journal about AI’s role in bringing back Three Mile Island. The news that Microsoft plans to fund the reopening of the undamaged reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant spread almost as quickly as news about the nuclear accident at that same site in 1979. Microsoft’s decision was animated,...

Most recently, on September 20, Microsoft and Constellation announced that they will reopen a reactor at Constellation’s Three Mile Island nuclear energy center in Pennsylvania to power Microsoft data centers. Microsoft agreed to pay $16 billion to restart the Unit 1 reactor which has a capacity of 835 megawatts. It was shut down in 2019 under financial pressure from growing competition with cheap natural gas. (The Unit 2 reactor was destroyed in 1979 accident and is undergoing decommissioning;  however, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) noted there were no deaths or accidents, or discernible health effects from some small radioactive releases.) Microsoft has agreed to buy up to 100% of the electricity produced by Unit 1. This is part of the tech giant’s efforts to secure enough reliable, low-carbon electricity to supply its energy-thirsty data centers powering the boom in artificial intelligence.