Londonderry Township, PENNSYLVANIA — Three Mile Island, the 1979 partial nuclear reactor meltdown site, harkens back to the troubled times of Jimmy Carter‘s presidency, along with soaring gas prices, persistent stagflation in the economy, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Forty-six years since the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, the Three Mile Island Generating Station has a much more positive glow — and not the threatening kind usually associated with radiation. Efforts to restart Unit One of the nuclear plant, near the state capital of Harrisburg, align closely with President Donald Trump‘s growing interest in carbon-free energy. Trump and his energy team are turning to nuclear as a reliable and cost-effective source of power in tandem with the administration’s embrace of fossil fuels to secure energy security.

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It’s an ironic turn of events at Three Mile Island, as the March 28, 1979, cooling failure in the plant’s second unit heavily contributed to growing suspicions of nuclear power in the United States. Doubt was already etched deep into the American psyche by the theatrical release 12 days earlier of The China Syndrome. The movie, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, depicts a television reporter and her cameraman who discover safety cover-ups at a nuclear power plant.

That life-imitates-art series of events spurred enduring public concerns about nuclear energy, which were compounded by the 1986 accident at the Ukrainian Chernobyl nuclear plant and the major 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Broad concerns about nuclear power plant development have only eased in recent years, with advances in safety testing and scientific research as well as a growing desire to lower carbon emissions in the energy sector.

The Trump administration touts nuclear energy as an attractive solution to satiating growing U.S. energy demands. Through executive orders, agency action, and advocacy before Congress, it has begun to pave the way for a federally backed domestic nuclear renaissance. 

In the administration’s view, it couldn’t happen soon enough since American energy consumption is set to soar by the end of the decade largely due to power-hungry data centers and the artificial intelligence technologies they store. 

In early July, the Department of Energy estimated that peak-hour energy supply demand will rise by at least 100 gigawatts by 2030, roughly equivalent to the same amount of energy needed to power more than 80 million homes. Out of this, at least 50 gigawatts of demand will be directly attributed to data centers. 

To meet this demand and support AI technologies, the administration has been adamant about securing reliable and stable electricity to pump into the grid. 

Trump has long supported baseload sources such as coal and natural gas, touting them as much more reliable than greener alternatives such as wind and solar. However, these fossil fuels are far from the most reliable energy source in the U.S., as nuclear sits at the top of the list.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that nuclear power has a capacity factor of 92.5%, meaning that nuclear power plants produce maximum electricity 92.5% of the time during the year. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a capacity factor of 56%, and coal is around 40%.

This reliability, combined with the fact that nuclear is also a carbon-free power source, has made it an extremely attractive resource to both the administration and Big Tech looking to fuel their AI advancements. 

The administration’s support 

The Trump administration has voiced its support for the rapid deployment of nuclear energy for months, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright vowing to “unleash commercial nuclear power” in the U.S. just two days after his confirmation in February.

In late May, Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at jumpstarting the construction of domestic nuclear reactors over the next four years. These orders also called for simplifying the nuclear regulatory process, increasing domestic mining and enrichment of uranium to reduce reliance on imports of nuclear fuel, and overhauling the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Within the orders, Trump laid out his intention to quadruple domestic nuclear power production by 2050 through large traditional reactors and advanced nuclear projects, such as small modular reactors. 

It is an ambitious timeline, as only two large reactors have been built from the ground up in the U.S. within the last 50 years, and only three SMRs are operational worldwide (none of which are in the U.S.).

As critics and industry advocates have long blamed overregulation for stymying industry growth, cutting red tape remains at the forefront of the administration’s agenda.

“The goal of most efforts by the administration so far has been to remove real or perceived barriers to deployment of nuclear energy,” Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a Berkeley, California-based economic research center, told the Washington Examiner.

Getting Congress on board 

Wright has been the most prominent vocal supporter of nuclear energy in the administration thus far, advocating carbon-free power at conferences, during interviews, and repeatedly during testimony before Congress.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s signature of his sweeping agenda proposal, his self-proclaimed “one big, beautiful bill,” after it cleared Congress, Wright appealed to Democratic and Republican Congress members to save existing tax credits for nuclear build-out, even though it generated from a key domestic achievement of former President Joe Biden’s single term, the Inflation Reducation Act. He also urged the protection of his agency’s ability to issue federal loans to the industry. 

Wright notably advocated the agency’s Loan Programs Office, which was used under the Biden administration to primarily fund clean energy projects, and its ability to back the nuclear industry.

“It is really the most efficient tool we have in the department to help emerging energy technologies,” Wright said in May, urging Congress to keep funding for the office in the reconciliation bill. 

The final legislation signed by Trump on Independence Day includes substantial cuts to unobligated funding for the office. Wright’s pleas to save funding for nuclear did appear to make a difference. 

The law creates a new Energy Dominance Financing program, capitalized with around a billion dollars for projects aimed at improving grid reliability or increasing grid capacity, such as fossil fuel or nuclear energy projects.

“I think the administration, from my perspective, did have a role in bringing that to bear,” Emmet Penney, a senior fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation, told the Washington Examiner. “I know for a fact [that] Chris Wright’s testimony before Congress on the need for supporting nuclear was persuasive,” Penney said.

Others believe it was a joint effort from the administration and industry that helped get this federal backing in statute. 

“I think the industry strongly lobbied Secretary Wright to support these publicly,” Stein said. “So the administration and Secretary Wright supporting them is also with the support of industry’s request. Nuclear energy is also the most bipartisan form of energy [at] this point in Congress.”

A senior Department of Energy official confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the secretary was involved in discussions regarding the provision and noted that it would be used for nuclear power projects as well as other base-load energy sources such as coal and natural gas.

Working alongside the private sector 

Despite lingering tax credits and other provisions of law meant to help the nuclear energy industry, it shouldn’t solely rely on the federal government, according to the administration. 

“As a career entrepreneur to really make nuclear energy work, the biggest thing we need, by far, is private capital, investment capital,” Wright said before Congress this spring. “Our goal is to bring in tens of billions of dollars during this administration in private capital to get reactors built, and I’m highly confident we will achieve that goal.” 

In the months before Trump took office, private investments in the nuclear energy industry began to soar. 

Several major tech companies announced their intention to fund advanced nuclear projects, with a similar desire to secure the energy needed for new data centers and AI. Others supported traditional nuclear projects, such as restarting decommissioned facilities. 

For example, Microsoft is partnering with utility Constellation Energy to restart the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

This partnership between Big Tech and the energy sector aims to bring Unit One of the facility, which has since been renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, online as soon as 2027. This would be a major win for the administration, as most new projects are anticipated to be operational after Trump leaves office. 

The Washington Examiner got an exclusive look inside the facility in late June. Nearly 400 full-time employees have already been hired to bring the plant back online.

Constellation Energy is seeking a loan guarantee of as much as $1.6 billion from the federal government to help fund its restart efforts.

As the Department of Energy under Trump and Biden issued similar loans to other companies working to restart a nuclear plant, including Holtec International and the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, they will likely face little resistance. 

“This is one area where both Republicans and Democrats have truly been handing off policy to each other quite smoothly,” Mark Nelson, managing director of Radiant Energy, told the Washington Examiner.

“And now that the tech industry is playing catch-up, and the Trump administration wants to go visibly even further beyond what the Biden administration did, or make sure that they have plants starting under Trump’s watch, the urgency is truly there to get this done,” Nelson said. 

While the private sector is interested, it has yet to be seen how much investors will trust the administration to support long-term projects. Some still worry over sweeping staff reductions at agencies such as the Energy Department and Trump’s efforts to overhaul the regulatory process.

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However, many in the industry are still taking the administration, particularly Wright, at its word that it will support their impending nuclear energy renaissance. 

“If anything, the administration is no longer any kind of holdup or problem,” Nelson said. “As far as I can see, it’s that states don’t know what they want. It’s that the industry doesn’t know what it wants.”

Callie Patteson is an energy and environment reporter for the Washington Examiner.