Katherine Sullivan

Jennifer Hiller is an energy reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

For the last five years, she's focused on nuclear power.

For context, a gigawatt is about the energy demand of San Francisco.

Tech CEOs were talking about adding entire new cities' worth of energy needs to the grid, dozens of them.

Nuclear companies were listening, including Constellation, the company that owns the Three Mile Island site.

In 2023, their CEO, Joe Dominguez, was at a meeting of corporate executives.

He was listening to some leaders in tech.

Constellation quickly found a partner in Microsoft to help restart the plant they had retired just five years before.

Microsoft signed a 20-year deal with Constellation to buy the energy generated at the site for their AI data centers.

Along with Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all signed deals for nuclear power.

But these companies have a long road to getting nuclear electricity to their data centers.

For one, it's expensive.

Restarting Three Mile Island, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center, isn't as simple as flipping the lights back on.

Constellation estimates it will cost about $1.6 billion to restart the one non-damaged reactor.

Three Mile Island isn't the only plant being restarted.

Google is helping fund a reopen of a plant in Iowa, and another plant in Michigan is scheduled to come back online this year.

If $1.6 billion for Three Mile Island sounds like a lot, in the world of nuclear, it's a bargain.

A Bill Gates-backed company called TerraPower just got permitting to build an advanced type of reactor.

The project is estimated to cost between $4 and $10 billion.

Here's Gates on CBS in 2024.