The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Tuesday that it will issue a loan of approximately $1 billion to Constellation Energy to facilitate the restart of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. The reactor, Unit 1, was shut down in 2019 but never fully decommissioned.
Constellation Energy, which is now rebranding the facility as the “Crane Clean Energy Center,” aims to have the reactor back online by 2027. The loan will be provided through the DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which Energy Secretary Chris Wright indicated last week would primarily focus on financing nuclear projects under the Trump administration.
Secretary Wright framed the decision as a critical step to combat rising electricity prices and bolster U.S. industrial and technological competitiveness.
“One of the biggest challenges American people [have] faced over the last several years has been the rising price of electricity,” Wright told reporters. “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.”
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Wright noted the reactor was “shuttered prematurely” and its restart is expected to add nearly a gigawatt of “new firm, reliable generation” to the PJM regional grid, which serves all or parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C. The DOE stated the restart will require an estimated 600 to 700 workers.
The administration’s focus on conventional power sources, like nuclear and coal (via emergency orders), stands in contrast to the previous administration’s aggressive promotion of intermittent sources like wind and solar. This shift is driven by a rising U.S. energy demand, fueled by increased onshore manufacturing, widespread electrification, and the power needs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers.
Constellation President and CEO Joe Dominguez has been a proponent of the restart, arguing that Unit 1’s 2019 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.”
The loan, while not strictly necessary for the project, will help “lower the cost of capital and make power cheaper” for PJM ratepayers, according to LPO Senior Advisor Greg Beard. Beard also confirmed that the LPO is actively looking for additional opportunities to restart other closed nuclear power plants.
“The Trump administration is highly focused on restarting the nuclear energy industry in the United States safely,” Wright affirmed, emphasizing the central role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in maintaining safety standards while cutting down on bureaucratic hurdles to accelerate deployment.
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