A nuclear power plant at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island will be recommissioned thanks to a power purchase deal with Microsoft aimed at offsetting the tech giant’s carbon emissions.
Three Mile Island Unit 1, owned by Constellation Energy, has been offline for five years and is not the reactor responsible for the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, which occurred in another reactor at the same location in 1979.
The deal, announced by Constellation on Friday, comes as the tech industry is under increasing pressure to justify the energy demands and carbon emissions of data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.
Microsoft’s environmental impact has come under particular criticism in recent days. Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that it and several other tech giants were severely underestimating the carbon emissions caused by their data centers. According to the paper, Microsoft’s data centers were responsible for between 280,782 metric tons and 6.1 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2022, depending on the accounting method used.
Last week, The Atlantic reported that despite Microsoft’s publicly stated goal of becoming carbon-negative and promises that its AI is helping to avert environmental crises, the company has been furnishing some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies with AI tools designed to help locate new reserves of oil and gas.
“This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative,” Bobby Hollis, vice president of energy at Microsoft, said in a statement included in Constellation’s announcement. “Microsoft continues to collaborate with energy providers to develop carbon-free energy sources to help meet the grids’ capacity and reliability needs.”
Before it was shut down for economic reasons in 2019, the Three Mile Island Reactor, which will be renamed Crane Clean Energy Center, had a generating capacity of 837 megawatts, enough to power 800,000 homes, Constellation said. The reactor is expected to go back online in 2028 and Microsoft has agreed to a 20-year power purchase agreement.
In March 1979 a cooling malfunction and series of equipment failures at Three Mile Island’s Reactor 2 caused the core to melt, forcing operators to vent radioactive gas and raising fears of a pending explosion. While no one was hurt as a result of the accident, it ignited decades of distrust in nuclear power across the country.
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