America’s coal communities could help the U.S. triple nuclear power

The planned restart of Three Mile Island is a step forward for nuclear power, but the U.S. needs to deploy new plants to keep up with rising electricity demand, one of the nation’s top nuclear officials said this week.

The U.S. needs to at least triple its nuclear fleet to keep pace with demand, slash carbon dioxide emissions and ensure the nation’s energy security, said Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy.

The U.S. currently maintains the largest nuclear fleet in the world with 94 operational reactors totaling about 100 gigawatts of power. The fleet supplied more than 18% of the nation’s electricity consumption in 2023.

The U.S. needs to add 200 gigawatts of nuclear power, Goff told CNBC in an interview. This is roughly equivalent to building 200 new plants, based on the current average reactor size in the U.S. fleet of about a gigawatt.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” Goff said. The U.S. led a global coalition in December that formally pledged to meet this goal by 2050. Financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America endorsed the target at a climate conference in New York City this week.

Constellation Energy‘s plan to restart Three Mile Island by 2028 is a step in the right direction, Goff said. The plant operated safely and efficiently, only shutting down in 2019 for economic reasons, he said.

The reactor that Constellation plans to reopen, Unit 1, is not the one the partially melted down in 1979.

Microsoft will purchase electricity from the plant to help power its data centers. Goff said the advent of large data centers that consume up to a gigawatt of electricity only reinforces the need for new reactors.

“A lot of the data centers are coming in and saying they do need firm, 24/7, baseload clean electricity,” Goff said. “Nuclear is obviously a perfect match for that,” he said.

But restarting reactors in the U.S. will provide only a small fraction of the nuclear power that is needed, he said. There are only a handful of shuttered plants that are potential candidates for restarts, according to Goff.

“It’s not a huge number,” Goff said of potential restarts. “We need to really be moving forward also on deploying plants,” he said.

Coal communities across the U.S. could provide a runway to build out a large number of new nuclear plants. Utilities in many parts of the U.S. are phasing out coal as part of the clean energy transition, creating a supply gap in some regions because new generation is not being built fast enough.

Recently shuttered coal plants, those expected to retire, and currently operating plants with no estimated shutdown date yet could provide space for up to 174 gigawatts of new nuclear power across 36 states, according to a Department of Energy study…