By Rodger Morrow, Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business
Listen to a podcast discussion about this article.
Facebook Meets the Ohio River
For most of its life, Beaver County has been reasonably certain about what does and does not belong along the Ohio River.
Steel mills? Yes.
Power plants? Also yes.
Facebook? Less obvious—unless Mark Zuckerberg plans to start liking pictures of blast furnaces and coal barges.
And yet, here we are.
The Deal
Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced a 20-year, 6.6- gigawatt nuclear power agreement with Vistra, the Dallas-based energy firm that owns the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station. The deal also includes two Ohio nuclear plants—Perry and Davis-Besse—both acquired by Vistra in 2024.
Why Nuclear, Why Now
At first glance, the partnership seems about as intuitive as pairing a TikTok influencer with a hard hat. But then you remember one inconvenient detail: artificial intelligence consumes electricity the way Beaver County once consumed steel—vastly, continuously, and with very little patience for brownouts.
Meta’s sprawling AI data centers require power that is reliable, carbon-free, and measured in the sort of numbers usually reserved for national grids. Nuclear fits that bill nicely.
Beaver Valley’s Role
Beaver Valley, which first went online in 1976 and currently generates up to 1.8 gigawatts from its two reactors, now stands to expand its capacity through “uprates”—engineering upgrades that squeeze more output from existing infrastructure, pending approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Vistra says the Meta agreement will draw power from Beaver Valley and the two Ohio plants, all feeding into the PJM Interconnection grid. Meta, for its part, called the expansions “the largest nuclear uprates supported by a corporate customer in the U.S.”
Jobs, Grid Power, and New Reactors
In a statement, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the projects will create thousands of skilled jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania, extend the life of three nuclear plants, add new energy to the grid, and accelerate new reactor technologies.
To that end, Meta also signed separate agreements with TerraPower and Oklo to help develop new nuclear projects in Ohio.
The Future, Quietly Humming
For Beaver County, the symbolism is hard to miss. A facility built in 1953 and replaced with an adjacent facility during the Ford administration may soon help power algorithms, data centers, and machines that can write emails, diagnose illnesses, and occasionally hallucinate entire legal briefs.
It turns out the future doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it hums quietly behind a containment dome, in the same neighborhood it’s been since 1954.
