AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement

Here & Now Anytime

NPR

News

4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The White House has promised to quadruple nuclear power by 2050. To get there, some closed nuclear plants are coming back online, including one near the site of a reactor that partially melted down more than 45 years ago. Here & Now’s Chris Bentley visits two of them: the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan and the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island.

And, we talk with Katy Huff, associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, about what it will take to increase the role of nuclear in the country's future energy mix.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:05.8	What we're doing here is exciting.
0:08.3	Having a reliable power source that keeps your electricity costs as low,
0:13.0	everybody should be rooting for that.
0:16.4	Nuclear power plants are coming back from the dead
0:19.6	to feed a growing demand for electricity from
0:22.9	AI.
0:35.3	This is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR. I'm Chris Bentley.
0:42.7	The United States is ravenous for electricity. And lately, that's been the focus of our
0:48.7	environmental reporting project, reverse course. Today, we're taking a closer look at nuclear power. The White House wants to
0:57.1	quadruple it by 2050, to meet the recent surge in demand for electricity for data centers
1:04.0	and artificial intelligence. But nuclear reactors are expensive and difficult to build.
1:11.3	So in the meantime, there are at least three states facing a crunch between their climate
1:16.4	goals and that growing hunger for electricity.
1:20.0	Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa are all restarting plants that they closed just a few years
1:27.0	ago.
1:27.9	I recently visited two of them to see how it's going and what the neighbors think.
1:37.9	The Palisades Nuclear Generating Station is nestled between sand dunes on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.
1:46.0	It shut down for financial reasons in 2022, but you wouldn't know it now, with hundreds of workers streaming through its security barriers every day.
1:56.0	Palisades is on track to reopen early next year, and when it does, it'll be the first time
2:02.2	that's ever happened to an American nuclear plant.
2:05.8	Coal plants in Michigan are closing, but electricity demand is rising.
	...

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