Where nuclear power meets AI and surging energy demand — data centers, grid pressure, and whether nuclear can power the future.
Can you restart a nuclear reactor that’s sat cold for years? The steel was the easy part. In Part 2, a reactor engineer walks the two hurdles no inspection can fix — the licensed crew that scattered when Three Mile Island went dark, and the legal wall of reopening a reactor the law had closed for good.
The headlines make the Three Mile Island restart sound like flipping a switch. It isn’t. Unit 1 has sat cold and dark since 2019, and waking it means reversing years of coolant chemistry gone wrong — and proving that steel damaged by decades of neutrons still holds enough margin.
Microsoft restarted Three Mile Island for AI. Behind that deal stands the small modular reactor — the nuclear revolution that keeps being five years away.