The Trump administration finalized a loan to help reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, its latest effort to rapidly build out nuclear energy to meet soaring energy demands brought on by artificial intelligence.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office announced on Tuesday that it finalized a $1 billion conditional loan commitment to Constellation Energy for its efforts to restart the shuttered nuclear plant, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center.
“We want to bring as much net addition of dispatchable, reliable electricity on the grid to stop these price rises in electricity and increase American capacity to generate firm, reliable electricity,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters ahead of the announcement.
“This is exactly what America needs, and we are constantly looking for ways to rapidly expand firm, reliable, generating capacity,” he added.
Constellation Energy announced that it would pursue the reopening of the plant, focusing on restarting the facility’s Unit One reactor, in September of last year. This reactor was not damaged during the 1979 incident, which saw the partial meltdown of Unit Two and marked the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Unit One was shut down in 2019 and could be back online as early as 2027. Once operational, the facility will have the capacity to generate approximately 835 megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power around 800,000 homes.
The Department of Energy said Tuesday that roughly 600 to 700 workers would be required to get the facility back up and running. In June, Constellation Energy said it had already hired more than 64% of the necessary full-time employees.
The restart has crucial backing from Microsoft, which has announced plans to enter a 20-year purchase agreement with Constellation to use the electricity generated by the plant to power its AI operations and data centers, pending approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The utility initially expected it would take until 2028 to reopen the facility. However, given increased support from Microsoft, significant progress in hiring, and approval for an early interconnection request from grid operator PJM Interconnection, Constellation Energy said this summer that it was shortening its timeline by a year.
Given this, Greg Beard, senior adviser of the LPO, told reporters that he believes Constellation Energy could have reopened the Pennsylvania plant without federal support.
“They could have done this loan without our help. But we want to show support for affordable, reliable, stable, secure energy in the U.S., as directed by President Trump,” Beard said.
“We want to highlight that the administration and the Department of Energy support the restart of not only existing … but shuttered nuclear reactors, as well as the development of new reactors across the country,” he added.
Amid soaring energy demand, nuclear energy has become an increasingly attractive resource for both the administration and technology industries seeking to secure enough power to expand AI capabilities.
While the administration is primarily leaning on traditional fossil fuels to secure this base load power, nuclear energy is known for being the most reliable source of energy.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that nuclear energy has a capacity factor of 92.5%, meaning that nuclear power plants produce maximum electricity 92.5% of the time during the year. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a capacity factor of 56%, while coal has a capacity factor of around 40%.
Tuesday’s announcement marks the first new significant loan commitment for a nuclear power project under the Trump administration.
Just last week, Wright indicated that the administration would allocate the largest portion of funding from the LPO to support new nuclear energy projects, including those involving the restart of existing facilities and the development of new reactors.
“The biggest use of those dollars by far — the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants, to get those first plants built,” Wright said.
The Department of Energy is expecting to dole out the first disbursement of the $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy in the first quarter of 2026.
CHRIS WRIGHT REVAMPING BIDEN GREEN BANK TO FOCUS ON NUCLEAR POWER
In May, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders calling on the United States to quadruple domestic nuclear power production by 2050 and have 10 new large reactors under construction by 2030.
The LPO has continued to distribute funding for the restart of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, a deal that was finalized under the Biden administration. Palisades is on track to be the first decommissioned nuclear plant in the U.S. to come back online as soon as the end of this year.
