President Joe Biden wants to meet the surging demand for electricity by reactivating decommissioned nuclear power plants, his climate adviser said Monday.
“We’re working on it in a very concrete way,” Ali Zaidi told the Reuters Sustainability conference in New York.
Two projects are already planned at the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan and the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, where a partial reactor meltdown in 1979 remains the worst nuclear accident in American history.
When asked if any others were under consideration, Zaidi said, “There are two that I can think of,” Reuters reported. Zaidi declined to identify those plants or provide further details.
Biden has called for a tripling of U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050 as part of a global push to fight climate change by reaching net-zero carbon emissions.
Bringing decommissioned plants back online is part of a three-pronged nuclear strategy that also involves developing small modular reactors (SMRs), and advanced, next generation reactors, Zaidi said.
On Monday, Zaidi said, the Navy requested information about building SMRs on a half-dozen bases.
“SMR is a technology that is not a decades-away play,” he said. “It’s one that companies in the United States are looking to deploy in this decade.”
Last week, the Energy Department said it closed a $1.5 billion loan to Holtec International to reactivate the Palisades plant, which was shut down in 2022 and would be the first one restarted in the U.S.
Holtec, a privately held company in Jupiter, Florida, hopes to restart the reactor in Covert Township, Michigan, during the fourth quarter of 2025.
Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Corp. is also pursuing a $1.6 billion government loan guarantee to help it reopen Unit 1 at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pennsylvania, by 2028.
Last month, the company said it struck a 20-year deal to use the reactor to exclusively power Microsoft’s data centers for AI development.
Unit 1, which was shut down in September 2019, wasn’t damaged during the accident in Unit 2, which led to the repeated release of radioactive gas.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that “comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well respected organizations” found that the radiation “had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”
Constellation Energy stock closed at $278.58 a share Monday, down 2.4%.
