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Wright Discusses $1 Billion Federal Loan to Restart Three Mile Island on CNBC

November 19, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:07:21

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined CNBC’s Squawk Box on November 19, 2025, after the administration announced a $1 billion federal loan to Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, as the program introduced the news. Wright noted that the 1979 accident released no meaningful radiation and harmed no one’s health, in his telling, but frightened the public and stalled the industry. He distinguished the failed reactor, long permanently shut down, from reactor one, which ran until six years ago and is the unit being restarted with Constellation.

Wright said that reactor had been shut down because market design let subsidized wind bid power at effectively negative prices, chipping away at the economics of always-on baseload plants, and he blamed Biden-era policies for shutting down tens of gigawatts of affordable, reliable power, as he characterized them. He said the restarted plant would be on in about 18 months. For new builds, he said several large reactors would be under construction in the U.S. within twelve months and take seven or eight years, while small modular reactors going under construction the next year would take three or four years, alongside power uprates of about 10 percent at existing nuclear, hydro and gas plants, as he laid out the timelines.

Asked about industrial policy, Wright said the government had smothered nuclear power for four or five decades with regulation aimed at bureaucracy and political concerns rather than safety alone, and that early projects would need government credit guarantees or debt to restore a fair playing field, rebuild the supply chain and bring back private capital, with the government out of that business in three to six years, as he estimated it. He also said the administration’s goal is to stop subsidizing wind power, which he called intermittent, and denied that fossil fuels receive meaningful subsidies.

Why it matters

The interview explains the administration’s theory for reviving nuclear power — temporary federal credit to undo decades of regulatory disadvantage — attached to a specific loan, plant and restart timeline.

Scoreboard watch

Wright said the restarted Three Mile Island reactor would be on in about 18 months from November 2025, and that several large reactors would be under construction in the U.S. within twelve months, as he stated those timelines. Both are dated claims recorded here without a verdict.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ - November 19, 2025”, 2025-11-19 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-11-19). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.