Eight hundred ninety megawatts of new nuclear capacity, and not one new reactor to build.
What happened
Robert Walton, senior editor at Utility Dive, reported on October 6 that Constellation Energy and Google have signed a 20 year power purchase agreement that puts 890 megawatts of nuclear capacity onto the PJM grid without anyone breaking ground on a new reactor. The capacity comes from uprates at 11 Constellation reactors across six sites in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and Constellation is committing more than $4.3 billion to the work.
An uprate is a plain idea wearing a technical name. Crews go into a plant that is already licensed and already staffed, and they replace or rebuild the equipment that caps how much electricity the reactor can turn out: turbine blades, generators, pumps, feedwater heaters, instrumentation. The unit then runs at a higher approved output. No new site, no new corridor, no new reactor vessel. It is a very large maintenance job with a federal licensing file attached.
A Constellation spokesman told Nuclear Newswire, the American Nuclear Society's news service, that the units sit at Braidwood, Byron, LaSalle and Quad Cities in Illinois, at Limerick in Pennsylvania, and at Salem in New Jersey, where PSEG Nuclear operates the plant and Constellation holds a 43 percent stake. The first uprate is expected to be delivered by 2028.
Why it counts
Start with the payroll, because the companies did. In their joint announcement, Google and Constellation said the agreement sustains about 4,400 existing jobs and creates roughly 7,200 construction jobs while the work is underway.
Those construction jobs are craft jobs, and craft jobs on a nuclear site have a particular shape. Uprate work is outage work: boilermakers, pipefitters, millwrights, electricians, iron workers, insulators and riggers moving onto a site for a defined window, working a schedule measured in hours, then packing out and moving to the next unit. Around them are the planners, schedulers, quality inspectors and radiation protection technicians who keep an outage on time. Eleven units over several years is not one hiring spike. It is a rolling book of work, and a rolling book of work is the thing a training director can build an apprentice class around.
The 4,400 deserves as much attention as the 7,200. Sustaining existing jobs is the least dramatic line in any announcement and usually the most consequential one in a plant town. Those are operators, security officers, maintenance crews and engineers whose careers at these plants are measured in decades. A capacity commitment that runs 20 years is a retention plan whether or not anyone calls it one.
Then there is the reason the buyer showed up. Google is contracting for this power because it is building, and the buildout is the point: data center demand is what converts a capital plan into a work order with a start date. Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of energy and power, framed the deal as meeting the company's growth "responsibly" and as a way to strengthen a grid that serves 67 million people. Load growth of that size is the reason an uprate program of this size pencils at all.
"Preserving and expanding the output of the existing nuclear fleet and developing new clean generation is critical." Joe Dominguez, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Constellation
The numbers
890 megawatts of new capacity, spread across 11 reactors at six sites in three states. More than $4.3 billion of Constellation investment. A 20 year term on the nuclear agreement, with the first uprate expected by 2028. About 4,400 jobs sustained and about 7,200 construction jobs during the build.
Alongside it, a separate 15 year agreement covers another 2,700 megawatts from Constellation's existing PJM fleet, and a five-year technology agreement puts Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise to work on speed-to-power, generation optimization and protection of critical infrastructure, including the operational technology networks that run the plants.
What comes next
Licensing comes first. Uprates go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as license amendment requests, unit by unit, and the commission's own list of expected applications shows Constellation filing over the next several years, including one slated for the fourth quarter of 2028. Nothing gets installed before that paperwork clears, which is worth remembering when timelines slip: the decision sits with a federal regulator, not with the buyer and not with the plant owner.
Then scheduling. Uprate work has to fit inside refueling outages, so the hiring windows will track the outage calendar at each of the six sites rather than arriving all at once. For anyone watching the trades, the signals to follow are travel craft calls, apprentice intake at the locals near Braidwood, Byron, LaSalle, Quad Cities, Limerick and Salem, and the staffing notices Constellation's outage contractors put out ahead of each window.
Market rules are the third thread. Constellation described the Google deal as a direct response to PJM's Bring Your Own Power proposal, the framework meant to let large new loads bring their own supply with them. PJM is roughly 6.8 gigawatts short of the new capacity it says it needs, per Utility Dive, and the rules that decide how new supply counts toward that gap sit with PJM and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
And this is not the only one. A week before the Google agreement, Constellation announced a roughly $3 billion expansion at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland under a 20-year agreement with Amazon, expected online between 2030 and 2032. Two deals, two sets of craft crews, two more sets of plant communities with work on the books.
The Bottom Line
Getting 890 megawatts out of reactors that already exist is an engineering story, and a good one. The story worth following is the payroll underneath it: 7,200 construction jobs moving site to site, 4,400 jobs held steady across six plant towns in three states, and a decade of scheduled work that a training director can actually plan against. The uprate is the vehicle. The workforce is the cargo.
Sources: Robert Walton, "Constellation, Google strike 890-MW nuclear deal in PJM," Utility Dive, October 6, 2026; "Google and Constellation Announce Landmark Agreement to Bring 890 MW of New Nuclear Capacity to PJM Grid," Google and Constellation, October 6, 2026; "Google, Constellation reach 11-unit uprate plan; Constellation to invest $4.3 billion," Nuclear Newswire, American Nuclear Society, October 6, 2026.
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