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 (AI) 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 AI.

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........

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