White House: Government working to revive more idled nuclear reactors

Although construction of new nuclear units has faced tough times in recent years, not only in the United States, other options are also available. Plans have recently emerged in the US to restart former nuclear power plants that had previously been shut down. Two projects to revive idled reactors are already underway, but they may not be the only ones.

Nuclear power plants that were shut down in the past but not fully decommissioned could get a second wind. In recent months, two specific projects have emerged in the United States to bring old nuclear units back online to meet the growing needs of data centers, which are among the main drivers of rising electricity consumption.

Specifically, the projects involve the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. According to the US government agency the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the owners of these facilities have already signed power purchase agreements (PPAs). The electricity from the originally idled units is expected to be used by data centers operated by tech giants Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, which are major players in the cloud computing market.

However, a recent statement by a White House adviser suggests these may not be the only projects. Ali Zaidi, a climate adviser, told Reuters that the US government plans to bring more units back into operation to meet growing demand for electricity from low-emissions sources.

"We're working on this in a very concrete way. Two plants come to mind," Zaidi replied, according to Reuters, when asked about restarting other facilities, without specifying which nuclear power plants he meant or what steps the government was taking.

According to Zaidi, reviving old nuclear power plants is one of three pillars of the Biden administration's strategy for developing nuclear energy. The others are developing small modular reactors (SMRs) for specific purposes and advancing next-generation advanced reactors.

Small modular reactors could, for example, serve the needs of the US Navy. According to Zaidi, on Monday it requested information about the possibility of deploying modular reactors at several of its bases.

"SMR technology is not decades away. It is a technology that companies in the United States want to deploy this decade," Zaidi said.