Currently, the two-unit nuclear power plant, commissioned in 1982 and 1984, which has a nameplate generation capacity of just over 2.5 GW, is licensed for operation through 2042 (Unit 1) and 2044 (Unit 2).
Perhaps more importantly, the facility is fully fuel-contracted through its 2025 outage, and substantially through its 2028 outage (an outage is the term used to describe a scheduled shutdown of a reactor for annual maintenance and refueling).
This is important due to the lack of US production for nuclear fuel and where that fuel is currently produced.
There is currently only a single private company in the US, Centrus, along with two European governmental programs that enrich uranium for use as nuclear fuel. Centrus was created when the US government looked to privatize enrichment technologies from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Currently, Russia controls almost half the world’s enriched uranium market. An obvious problem given current relations between the US and Russia.
The data center campus is directly connected to the nuclear facility and, as such, is zero-carbon for power supply.
Four substations are available with up to 960 MW potential redundant capacity, with 240 MW of that capacity expected to be fully developed in 2024.
Up to 300 MW of that power capacity is currently contracted to Terawulf Nautilus Cryptomine, which has decided to exercise an existing contract option to add 50 MW of capacity, doubling its current demand, when it comes online in 2025.
Almost a year ago, Cumulus had announced that they had completed the shell for a 300,000 sq ft, 48 MW data center on the site.
The Terawulf facility is also on-site and operational and is a joint operation between Terawulf and the current owner of the campus, Talen Energy Corporation.
