Doe Gives Microsoft Partner $1b Loan to Restart Three Mile Island Reactor

Unit 2 is the reactor that melted down and it has been shut down ever since (and partially decommissioned). Unit 1, a separate reactor at the same site, was operated normally until 2019 when it was shut down due to high costs. It was originally scheduled to be decommissioned by 2079 (sic) but is now being brought back online.

The Wikipedia page makes it seem like it's been largely cleaned up for decades:

> In 1988, the NRC announced that, although it was possible to further decontaminate the Unit 2 site, the remaining radioactivity had been sufficiently contained as to pose no threat to public health and safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

No.

Chernobyl (which was a far worse accident) continued to produce power at other units on the same site for 14 years after the meltdown of unit 4.

The article says the reactor they are bringing back on was active until as recently as 2019, so it's safe to say it's probably not uninhabitable.

TMI was never irradiated and unsafe for humans to inhabit.

There's not much to go off of on this subject in the US - only two successful reactor projects have been started since the 70s: Units 3 and 4 at Vogtle in Georgia*. They cost $15 billion each and bankrupted the remnants of Westinghouse (in combination with a similar project in South Carolina which was never finished).

*Many reactors started construction in the 70s and were finished in the 80s or 90s, plus Watts Bar Unit 2 which was started in 1972 and finished in 2016 for a total of $5 billion. The US also of course builds many naval reactors.

Beat for beat it would probably be cheaper to get the Chinese to do it.Cost per watt charts [1] show US builds still high while they are decreasing for the rest.

Apart from the obvious labour costs difference , theres also the skills at scale.Chinese have been on a continous buildout of new plants , so at this point they have designs/skilled teams for whom this is another routine at this point(i think 30+ under construction concurrently).The US builds are almost artisinal at this point.

And yeah at $1B , given prior examples , it expect them to be late and costs to baloon.Unless they use this as a template to upskill/retrain a workforce that will lead a new buildout so economies of scale take over and put downward pressure on the costs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/climate/china...

Most of the cost is not in building -- it is in planning, wrestling with capricious government agencies, and rebuilding when said agencies come up with "improvements".

There is less and less real willing (<=> project starting on the field) to do so because finance likes predictability ( https://x.com/SustainableTall/status/1619246745074139138 ) and competitors are booming ( see, for example, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices and https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Cost varies with the site conditions. It's one of the many things that push nuclear construction costs up; every build needs to take into consideration the geographic nature of the site (bedrock levels, etc) and so every location requires customizations to the design.

With that said, while it doesn't provide numbers, the article does say the refurbishment (costing $1.6 billion, estimated) will be cheaper than a new build. It'll also likely be much faster, projected to open in 2028.

A quick google search puts construction costs of new nuclear of a Unit 2 size in the $5-10 billion range. 3 Mile Island itself was constructed for $2 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars. All in all, refurbishing sounds like a good bargain compared to a green field build.

Actually building it? Peanuts. Getting it through planning approval and the inevitable environmental etc. lawsuits? Infinite time and money.

It's in the article.

> The debt facility is being made through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which was formed under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to foster the growth of clean energy technologies.

> The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed during the Biden administration, created another pot of money under the LPO known as the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. That program was created to restore existing power plants to operation provided they avoid or reduce pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration kept it largely in tact, rebranding it the Energy Dominance Financing Program.

Congress passed the Energy Policy act of 2005 and then the Inflation Reduction Act allocating money to the DoE to make these loans.

It's right in the article:

> The debt facility is being made through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which was formed under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to foster the growth of clean energy technologies

and, more importantly:

> The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed during the Biden administration, created another pot of money under the LPO known as the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. That program was created to restore existing power plants to operation provided they avoid or reduce pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration kept it largely in tact, rebranding it the Energy Dominance Financing Program.

Learn all about it from the guy who ran the office in the last administration!

https://www.ms.now/msnbc-podcast/msnbc/discussing-explosion-...

Looks like this falls under existing congressionally appropriated spending for the DOE

Do you have any idea how little Uranium reactors use?

And in any case Australia host a LOT of uranium and is a very close ally and is happy to sell it to the US.

Did you honestly not look at the numbers in the chart? It's sorted alphabetically by default lol.

The U.S. is ranked #17 in that list at 101,900 tonnes, not #55.

Number 55 when sorted alphabetically, if you're talking about the USA.

Maybe the loan is cheaper than using their own money.

You dont get a billion dollar loan if you have no money. You are still expected to pay it back in the end.

Studies also don't take into account that by subsidizing solar you're subsidizing an industry that's already subsidized by the Chinese gov, it's cool in the short term but we're making the same mistake we've been making for the last 50 years

Home grown nuclear programs will always be better than solar propped up by foreign entities.

As of 2025, even accounting for the costs of storage, solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear.

What costs on the nuclear side of the equation should we add for the backup when 50% of the nuclear fleet is unplanned offline?

Like happened in Sweden twice this year and in France at the peak of the energy crisis.

> tiny incandescent bulbs behind plastic covers…

Not too disagree with the bulk of comment, but this sentence is not true. They're 90V neon indicator lamps, a technology that's really cool but also so inefficient that people rip it out and replace it.

Neat rabbit hole to do down.