Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania invented the newest siting pattern: park the data center next to the reactor. The AWS campus at Talen's Susquehanna plant buys gigawatt-scale nuclear power behind the meter, and the Three Mile Island restart (for Microsoft) extended the logic from siting to resurrection.

The water angle is specific: nuclear plants evaporate cooling water too (that's the Mid scenario's indirect term), but an existing plant's water draw was already in the basin's books: the marginal water of reactor-adjacent compute is genuinely low. New gas peakers built for data centers, the path argued about around Homer City's conversion, are the higher-water counterfactual.

Between nuclear deals, shale-gas power and Philadelphia-corridor colocation growth, Pennsylvania is the cleanest test of whether 'follow the existing generation' beats 'build new' on every environmental term at once.