The U.S. Department of Energy will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to help finance the restart of the nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island — the site of America’s worst nuclear accident in 1979.
The funding announced Tuesday, made under President Donald Trump’s energy and technology priorities, is aimed at bolstering both nuclear power and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Constellation, which owns the island’s remaining functional unit, said last year it would spend $1.6 billion to bring the reactor back online under a 20-year deal with Microsoft, which has agreed to purchase all of the plant’s 835 megawatts of electricity to power its data centers. The reactor, now renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, is expected to supply energy equivalent to 800,000 homes when it resumes operation in 2027, pending regulatory approval.
The facility’s Unit 1 was commissioned in 1974 and shut down in 2019 after cheap natural gas made it unprofitable. Its twin, Unit 2, was destroyed in the 1979 partial meltdown that nearly ended the U.S. nuclear industry. Constellation has begun refurbishing key equipment, including turbines, generators, and cooling and control systems, and has hired hundreds of workers for the restart project.
The loan is the first project to receive both a conditional commitment and final approval under the Trump administration. It was issued through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, originally created under the 2005 Energy Policy Act to support clean energy innovation. The program has financed ventures ranging from Tesla’s $465 million loan in 2010 to recent grid modernization efforts, and now falls under the rebranded Energy Dominance Financing Program, which succeeded the Biden-era Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment initiative.
Microsoft’s contract terms with Constellation were not disclosed, though analysts at Jefferies estimate the company will pay about $110–$115 per megawatt-hour over the two-decade deal. While that’s higher than the cost of renewable energy sources such as wind or solar, it underscores the growing tech sector interest in nuclear power as data center and AI energy demands surge. Meta, Microsoft’s main competitor, signed a similar deal this summer to source clean energy from a Constellation-run nuclear plant in Illinois.
“The goal,” said Greg Beard, head of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, “is to demonstrate our support for affordable, reliable, and secure U.S. energy.”
First published: 11:29, 11.19.25