Featured Image Credit: Rebecca Noble/Getty Image
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Donald Trump, Microsoft, US News, Money
Ellie Kemp
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Donald Trump, Microsoft, US News, Money
Donald Trump's government is loaning $1 billion to revive America's most controversial power plant.
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, spooked the nation when its unit two reactor had a partial meltdown in the 70s.
It is the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history and majorly knocked the public's confidence in the energy source.
While the second unit has been shutdown for decades, its unaffected first unit was only closed in 2019.
Advert
But that's all set to change; unit one will become operational by 2027 under new plans generously funded by the government.
The $1 billion loan was announced by the Energy Department on Tuesday (November 18).
And it's set to benefit a particular industry that's boomed over recent years.
On March 28 1979, the plant's unit two reactor suffered a partial meltdown.
A cooling malfunction caused part of the core to melt into the TMI-2 reactor, destroying it and releasing radioactive gas into the atmosphere.
Fortunately, no one was injured or died as a result of the accident, according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) report.
Two million people around TMI-2 during the accident are thought to have received an average radiation dose of about one millirem above the usual background dose, the NCR said.
Putting this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is roughly six millirem.
Follow-up studies found no link between the accident and an increase in cancer cases, either.
There's one major reason Trump is breathing new life into the nuclear plant; artificial intelligence.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the revival will 'help ensure America has the energy it needs to grow its domestic manufacturing base and win the AI race'.
When Trump returned to the White House in January, he vowed to invest $500 billion in the US' AI infrastructure.
He wants to make it the most powerful in the world, beating the likes of China and the European Union.
As part of the Three Mile Island agreement, Microsoft will buy as much power as it can from the plant for two whole decades.
This is in an effort to add carbon-free electricity to the grids that power its operations, reports the New York Times.
With a revamp comes a new name; the plant will know by known as the Crane Clean Energy Center.
It will be switched on in 2027, pending regulatory approval.
The Energy Department predicts the 835-megawatt reactor will produce enough electricity to power 800,000 homes.