1979’s Impact on U.S. Nuclear Energy

In the past few years, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all signed agreements to purchase nuclear power. In September 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1, which is the same plant that partially melted down in 1979. In 2024, Google announced its first nuclear energy deal with Kairos to build out a fleet of nuclear reactors and in that same year, Amazon bought a 1k acre nuclear power plant from Talen Energy to power its nearby data center.

In each of these cases, the driving factor behind these tech companies buying nuclear energy  is the energy required to run their data centers to power AI. As we discussed last week (The Merits of Maritime Data Centers), the current power grid was not set up to meet the energy demands of AI.

This nuclear power is created by a process called nuclear fission, which is the process of splitting a heavy atom’s nucleus apart (typically uranium or plutonium). This releases an immense amount of energy which is then captured and converted back into the power grid.

To put into context how much energy nuclear fission generates: one kilogram of uranium fuel produces roughly the same energy as 2.7 million kilograms of coal. Also, a single uranium fuel pellet (6 grams) contains roughly the energy equivalent of 1 ton of coal, 3 barrels of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

1979: The Reason Why America Stopped Building Reactors

The United States invented commercial nuclear power. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 opened civilian reactors, and by the late 1970s there were more than 100 operating or under construction across the country.

1979, the accident of Three Mile Island: after the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stopped all new reactor licensing, despite the fact that no deaths occurred due to the accident The approximately 2 million people living near the plant received an average radiation dose of 1 millirem, which is only one-sixth of a routine chest X-ray. Studies by Columbia University, the University of Pittsburgh, and multiple federal agencies found no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public. The containment structure held.

The reactor was destroyed, but the radiation disaster people feared never materialized. What it did produce was a public reaction so severe that it functionally shut down the American nuclear industry for the past four decades. It resulted in no new reactor orders from 1979 through the mid-1980s and a regulatory environment that made new construction nearly impossible. This accident that hurt nobody effectively killed the construction of new reactors in the United States for 40+ years.

This freeze continued through the mid-1980s and the public was fully shut off to the idea of nuclear power after the meltdown of Chernobyl in 1986.

While the US Halted, France and China Kept Building

At the same time, other countries have pushed into nuclear power quite aggressively over the past 40 years. France’s electricity is ~67% nuclear today, making it one of the cheapest and cleanest grids in all of Europe. France built 52 reactors in 15 years after 1979. China has commissioned 57 reactors since 1991.

U.S. Energy Information Administration

The chart above shows that the U.S. (the creator of nuclear energy) is currently the world's largest nuclear generator. However, this is running on 50-year-old infrastructure. The U.S. built 2 in the last 30 years, and those took 11 years and cost double the budget.

Additionally, the U.S. let its nuclear workforce age out and its enrichment infrastructure collapse. As a result, America became dependent on a geopolitical adversary for the fuel its own reactors run on. In 2023, Russia supplied 27% of all uranium enrichment services purchased by U.S. nuclear operators, more than any other foreign supplier. Rosatom (state owned nuclear energy company) controls roughly 40% of global uranium enrichment capacity.

U.S. Congress then passed a ban on Russian uranium imports in May 2024. However, deliveries continued anyway, through government-issued waivers, into 2025 (because we needed it and had no backup plan).

Workforce atrophy, a lack of investment into enrichment, and a supply chain reliant on foreign adversaries has put the U.S. in a precarious position; we need to rebuild the capability to construct and fuel new reactors.

The Simulation + Software Layer of Modern Nuclear

Shifting to modern day, the process of building a single nuclear reactor involves an immense amount of design, testing, licensing, and staffing. Each of these steps has been historically quite slow, expensive, and lined with paperwork. A modern tech stack of simulation and AI tooling is improving the outlook for nuclear power getting to market faster.

Here are 3 areas where simulation and software are helping:

• Construction tech is speeding up delivery. The last two reactors built in the US, the Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4 in Georgia, peaked at 9,000 workers on site and were coordinated largely on paper. Palantir and The Nuclear Company signed a $100m deal in June 2025 to build software that tracks materials in real time, monitors construction progress against the original plan, and uses AI to process the mountains of regulatory paperwork that used to take months of manual review.
• Digital twins are solving a problem unique to next-gen nuclear. Most advanced reactor designs have no physical units operating that are close enough to their modern design. To address this, the Argonne National Laboratory built digital twins using graph neural networks to predict reactor behavior in real time before a plant exists. ARPA-E's GEMINA program is funding this category federally, recognizing that software-first testing infrastructure has to be built before the physical infrastructure breaks ground.
• Simulation for nuclear energy operators is leveraging gaming technology. Argonne is using Unreal Engine 5 to train nuclear operators in VR on facilities that do not physically exist yet. The industry needs an estimated 100,000 new nuclear workers by 2030. Leveraging gaming technology to build digital worlds is a great solution to train a nuclear workforce on reactors that are not built yet.

Nuclear Will Turbo Charge the AI Market

In 2020, only ~$360m was invested into 35 nuclear companies. Last year in 2025, that was $4.8b across 91 rounds into 75 companies. The investment and attention in nuclear, especially in nuclear fission (given it commands 92% of the $41b nuclear energy market), is ramping.

The tech companies signing 20-year power deals at the top of this piece are now writing checks into the ecosystem that makes more nuclear energy deals possible. Microsoft needs the grid. Google needs the grid. Amazon needs the grid. And the grid needs nuclear power. The capital flowing into this sector is not a bet on clean energy, it is about powering AI infrastructure. Nuclear just happens to be the only answer that works.

Takeaway: The nuclear energy industry in the United States is dormant, constrained, and misunderstood by the American public. The United States invented nuclear energy yet new reactor construction approvals were effectively ceased back in 1979 due to a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania. This meltdown was at a location called Three Mile Island, it was fully contained, there were no deaths, and the radiation leakage was one-sixth of a standard chest X-ray (i.e. no health impact). As a result, largely driven by misinformed public opinion influencing domestic U.S. public policy, nuclear energy has been under-invested in for 40+ years. Meanwhile, other countries like France and China are quickly building capacity, much of which will power the global demand from AI infrastructure.

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