SHIPPINGPORT, Pa. — The last time that I stood on these grounds along the Ohio River in Beaver County was 1976, 19 years after the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States opened here.
My Perry High School physics teacher, David Burrows, had loaded a handful of us into a van for a field trip to the atomic station and to the coal-fired Bruce Mansfield plant next door.
What Mr. Burrows and I both still remember is the climb — 20 flights up metal bar-grating stairs to the top of a cavernous industrial cathedral built to house Mansfield’s multi-story steam boilers — and the black mountains of coal heaped along the riverbank, waiting to be fed into them.
We were all working-class kids. Our fathers were firefighters, cops, steelworkers, and mechanical engineers. When Burrows took us there, he told us we could be anyone who worked there: a welder, electrician, engineer, chemist, plumber, or programmer.
“That was the point,” he said in a conversation this week, “I wanted you to see your possibilities.”
Today I’m back on the same ground, a few days after Aligned Data Centers officially broke ground on a 2-gigawatt artificial-intelligence campus called Project Phoenix, and built on the footprint where part of Bruce Mansfield used to stand.
The name is not subtle, and neither is the transformation. A 660-acre industrial site that once held Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant, the 2,490-megawatt FirstEnergy behemoth that went dark in 2019, is now being rebuilt as a three-building, $10 billion complex designed to feed the country’s insatiable appetite for artificial intelligence.
For most of the second half of the 20th century, Shippingport was where America came to figure out how to make electricity at an industrial scale. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear plant, went online in 1957 and operated until 1982 as part of Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which was designed to pivot the perception of nuclear technology away from military might to civilian development.
Bruce Mansfield came online a decade later. At its peak, it was the largest coal plant in the commonwealth, moving barges of coal up the Ohio and shipping electrons out to the PJM grid that keeps the eastern seaboard lit.
When Mansfield closed in 2019, it left behind exactly what Mr. Burrows had walked us through in 1976: 660 acres of riverfront, 6,000 feet of developed waterfront, barge terminals, CSX rail, and the skeletons of buildings sized for a different century.
Frontier Group of Companies bought the site in 2022 and renamed it the Shippingport Industrial Park, betting that the lonely sentinels of an old power plant would be worth more than the plant itself.
It also left behind a borough that had been quietly hollowing out for a generation. Shippingport counted 441 residents in 1950, 235 as recently as 2000, and just 154 today; roughly a third smaller than at the turn of the century and closer to half its mid-century peak.
That is what a decommissioned nuclear plant and a shuttered coal plant look like on a census sheet: fewer paychecks, fewer children in the school, higher property taxes, and fewer lights on at night along the same river that once powered the region.
SALENA ZITO: STEELERS AND FAITH
Last Thursday, Aligned, a Dallas-based operator of hyperscale data centers, announced that Project Phoenix will rise on the Mansfield footprint as a three-facility, 2-gigawatt campus. Just to understand the enormity of it, two gigawatts is roughly the output of the coal plant it replaces, now dedicated entirely to running the graphics processors and cooling systems that train and serve modern AI models.
The company projects 3,000 construction jobs, 640 permanent operations careers, and thousands more in the regional supply chain.
Case in point: the local mom-and-pop gas station on the way to the development entrance, at the corner of Green Garden and Frankfort roads, had a brisk flow of construction workers heading into the convenience store.
The data center will not draw its power from the local grid. Rather, a dedicated on-site generation source at the neighboring former Shippingport Power Station is now being rebuilt as a natural gas energy campus. It will feed the servers directly and eventually send surplus electricity back to PJM, Aligned says.
Cooling will run on a closed-loop system that recycles deionized water, giving the campus a water footprint the company compares to that of a standard commercial office building.
Shippingport Mayor John Erickson framed the moment in the language of continuity rather than disruption.
“For decades, Shippingport has been defined by powering the country as the birthplace of commercial nuclear energy,” he said. “Project Phoenix honors that legacy, opening a new chapter by taking a historic site and rebuilding it into a modern engine of innovation.”
Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap called it “a legacy reimagined” in the same statement.
None of this is landing in a neutral country. It is landing in one where the debate over artificial intelligence has turned political, cultural, and increasingly fearful.
A Quinnipiac University poll released this past March found that 55% of Americans now believe AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives, up 11 points in a single year. Eighty percent said that they were concerned about AI. Seventy percent believed it would cut the number of jobs available to human beings. And the number most relevant to places such as Appalachian Pennsylvania: Sixty-five percent said they would oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community.
SALENA ZITO: A PENNSYLVANIA FIELD WHISPERS THE NAMES OF THE FALLEN
That opposition is not theoretical. In Archbald, in Conshohocken, in Wilkes-Barre, in Hampden Township outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvanians have packed municipal meeting rooms to fight data-center proposals over noise, water, air quality, property values, and the fear that their power bills will subsidize somebody else’s chatbot.
A statewide Quinnipiac survey found 68% of Pennsylvanians would oppose a data center in their community, including 81% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and, notably, 53% of Republicans. This is one of the few things that polls the same way across the aisle right now.
And yet Shippingport, a borough of 154 people that has watched its tax base evaporate twice in one lifetime, is not Archbald. The mayor is on the podium. The building trades are counting jobs. The county is counting revenue. When your town has already lost the nuclear plant and the coal plant, a two-gigawatt anything looks less like an imposition and more like a lifeline.
Both of those reactions are real. And people — actual complicated people and not the caricatures that the loudest voices on either side reduce them to — are perfectly capable of holding both views at once.
A pipefitter can be grateful for six years of union work on the Mansfield site and still worry, on the drive home, about what happens to his nephew’s first job if the models keep getting better.
A grandmother in Shippingport can welcome the tax revenue that keeps her borough solvent and still ask hard questions about the hum of a gas turbine three blocks from her kitchen window. No subject this big can be flattened into a slogan.
This one demands nuance, and nuance is precisely what our political vocabulary has spent two decades unlearning how to speak.
That is the harder story sitting on top of the groundbreaking. The infrastructure being poured here is going to arrive faster than the political infrastructure meant to govern it.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) has responded with a voluntary GRID framework and a Ratepayer Protection Pledge. State Sen. Katie Muth has introduced a three-year moratorium on hyperscale builds. PJM is trying to figure out in real time how to keep the grid stable while data-center load doubles.
Municipalities — most of them running on part-time councils and volunteer solicitors — are being asked to referee zoning fights with multi-billion-dollar counterparties whose lawyers know the ordinances better than the councils do.
Our political structure is atrophied for exactly this kind of work. It is built for two speeds: campaign season and gridlock. And for two settings: for and against.
It is not built for a decadelong negotiation between a small borough and a hyperscaler over water, noise, transmission lines, tax abatements, workforce agreements, and what “community benefit” actually means when the community is 154 people.
It is not built for a citizenry that is, correctly, both hopeful and skeptical at the same time.
Three generations of American energy history have now been staged on this same stretch of riverbank: atoms in the 1950s, coal from the 1970s through the 2010s, and now gas turbines feeding silicon in the 2020s.
AI DATA CENTERS AREN’T THE VILLAIN
Each time, the same argument was made that this was the future, that the jobs would come, that the river and the rail and the workforce were what made it possible. Each time, the argument was partly right and partly wrong, and the town lived with both.
Mr. Burrows walked us up those twenty flights of stairs in 1976 to make a point about scale. He encouraged us to go into the trades. He encouraged us to go into the sciences. He pushed to imagine the possibilities. Whatever gets built here next will be measured in a different unit. But the climb, if there still is one, will start from the same ground, and it will demand more of us, not less, than the politics we currently have.