U.S. Department of Energy Deputy Secretary Visits Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant, Targeting Official Restart and Grid Connection in 2027

The Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently conducted an on-site inspection of Unit 1 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant in Pennsylvania. As the core platform for the plant's restart plan, the renamed “Crane Clean Energy Center” is currently pushing forward engineering preparations at full speed, with the goal of officially restarting and connecting to the grid in 2027.

Facing rapidly rising baseload power demand in Pennsylvania and across the entire Mid-Atlantic region, the restart project has secured more than $1 billion in federal dedicated investment and policy-based financial support. Three Mile Island Unit 1 was retired early in 2019 due to insufficient market economics under the impact of natural gas power generation at the time, but recently, driven by round-the-clock clean energy demand triggered by the explosive growth of hyperscale data centers and artificial intelligence computing, the plant has been placed on the restart agenda by nuclear operator Constellation Energy, and through long-term power purchase agreements with technology companies such as MicroStrategy and Microsoft, it has become a flagship benchmark project for the reactivation of large decommissioned light water reactors in the United States.