Nancy D. Campbell, Ph.D., is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a 2026-2027 Consortium Research Fellow.
What are the histories of “data center fever”—an industrial and infrastructural process with tremendous social, political, and economic consequences for present and future lives?
My Consortium Research Fellowship project was motivated by the question of how nuclear power and dozens of data centers came to be planted on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River in remote and rural Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. This township is being remodeled by a speculative frenzy anchored by Talen Energy’s Susquehanna Steam Electric Station—built by Pennsylvania Power & Light (PP&L) in Beach Haven, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s and 80s. The nuclear plant has become the fulcrum for a massive rural land grab by Amazon Web Services (AWS); QTS Data Centers, a Blackstone private equity-backed firm; and an undisclosed data center developer. Together these corporations have purchased more than 7,000 acres surrounding this aging power infrastructure on the banks of the river.
As a Consortium Research Fellow, I documented the speculative economies that converge to make this landscape attractive prey for a wave of predatory accumulation that is sweeping Pennsylvania. I visited the Linda Hall Library (January 24-31, 2026) in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Hagley Archives (February 15-27, 2026) in Wilmington, Delaware. Stranded in significant snowstorms at both sites, I gratefully received cheerful and efficient support from archivists and library and museum staff who went out of their way to give me access to their collections despite the weather thanks to the Consortium’s cultivation of research partners.
The Engineering Societies Papers at the Linda Hall Library include papers from the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This vast collection helped me grasp technical knowledges needed to finance and mine anthracite coal—materials that are inaccessible in northeastern Pennsylvania. The Linda Hall Library holds a fine collection on the emergence, growth, and professionalization of nuclear engineering—and relevant social, technical, and political controversies attendant to the global expansion of civilian nuclear power.
The Hagley Museum and Archives in Wilmington, Delaware, holds PP&L’s records and those of its 978 predecessors, which were absorbed when it incorporated in 1920. One of those is my focus—the Harwood Electric Company of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an anthracite mine-mouth plant built in 1907 to burn sludgy, finely ground “waste coal” or “culm.” Harwood’s high-voltage transmission lines brought power across the Susquehanna to Berwick and Beach Haven in 1910 and a decade later Harwood became one of PP&L’s two most important generators in 1920. Brought into being by a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, PP&L began its life as a holding company and it became an enduring “public utility” despite being the product of a financial model that helped bring on the Great Depression.
PP&L was part of a nationwide movement to centralize, consolidate, financialize, and professionalize management and technical capacities in the electric power industry. For that project to succeed, sufficient capital for continual expansion had to be secured from individual investors. Owning stock, PP&L maintained in its earliest prospectus, was not gambling or speculation. Materials at the Hagley show how intensively PP&L instructed its employees and customers on the differences between speculation versus investment—and the company’s careful construction of its relationship with anthracite mining communities. By 1936, PP&L could claim to be the largest single consumer of anthracite in the world.
PP&L’s precocious “fuel crisis”—its concerns about running out of anthracite—sharpened in the 1950s just as Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign for civilian nuclear power heated up. P&L’s first foray into nuclear power was the Pennsylvania Advanced Reactor Project, a partnership with Westinghouse and Oak Ridge on an aqueous homogenous reactor design that competed with the light water reactor. Although PP&L pulled the plug on the project in the late 1950s, and made little of this failed project public, they housed the documentation at the Hagley. Few recall much of this experiment. During this time, a holding company quietly amassed 1,200 acres of Salem Township land in the 1950s for PP&L, which began a corporate public relations campaign to make nuclear power seem fun, simple to understand, and cozy as boiling water to heat a tea kettle on the hearth. Early lantern slides made a graphic point: superimposed over a massive pyramid of dark black culm is a tiny teaspoonful of glowing nuclear material. Nuclear fuel was the fuel of the future; anthracite was the fuel of the past.
Why plant nuclear power in Salem Township? When Jack K. Busby, President of PP&L, announced that a nuclear plant was going to be built in Beach Haven, he enthused to the Berwick Kiwanis Club on May 2, 1967, that the Susquehanna River was such an “invaluable resource” that he suspected there was “no other place you can select where you can find a combination of people, water, land, and electric power in this favorable configuration.” The land was relatively flat, already cleared for farming, and lay 500 feet above the flood-prone river that hugged it on two sides. Deep wells at Bell Bend provided plenty of water. Early in 1974, PP&L broke ground for the SSEP; Bechtel built two units that went online in 1981 and 1983—during the moratorium following the 1979 accident 60 miles downstream at Three Mile Island.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, PP&L mounted a no-holds-barred campaign for social acceptance of nuclear power in Luzerne and neighboring counties. There was archival evidence of local resistance to nuclear power in PP&L’s Corporate Communications department folders. The department saved all correspondence, including point-by-point refutations from executives to local activists, on whom it maintained files of home addresses and phone numbers. The company coordinated with national organizations designed to promote electric lighting and heating, the Atomic Industrial Forum, and electrical industry lobbies, including Reddy Kilowatt, the lightning stick cartoon character created to promote “public utilities.”
In 2014 PP&L and electricity generator Riverstone combined to create Talen Energy Corporation, then the country’s third-largest investor-owned independent power producer. PP&L CFO Paul Farr, who became Talen’s president, explained that the name “Talen” combined “talent, energy, enthusiasm and an aggressive nature.” Talen formed Cumulus Growth, divided into Cumulus Coin, a cryptocurrency mining concern, and Cumulus Data, which created the flagship Susquehanna Hyperscale Data Center Campus (SHC). This effort attracted Amazon Web Services to this financialized frontier, on which it plans to build Small Modular Nuclear Reactors to begin commercial reprocessing of spent fuel rods sitting onsite since the early 1980s. A second data center installer, QTS, then purchased an arc of land surrounding AWS and the nuclear plant, and edging close to Talen Energy’s Moxie Freedom Energy Center, on a natural gas pipeline just over the hill from the nuclear plant. A few weeks before this project wrapped up, a third developer was seeking to purchase close to 4,000 acres from former land and home owners seeking to decamp from Salem Township.
As this speculative frenzy unfolds, most of Beach Haven has evaporated. While energy history is the global history of industrial and development capital formation, it is also a local, even parochial, living history of ever-contested meanings of energy, governance, and community. Northeastern Pennsylvania offers a unique window into conflicts over rural space during energy transition and/or energy addition. My research has also taken me to local archives such as the Luzerne County Historical Society in Wilkes-Barre, the Shickshinny Historical Society, and the Berwick Historical Society. As Beach Haven no longer has a records repository, post office, or zip code, all documentation is housed elsewhere, including in current and archival local newspapers such as the Bloomsburg-Berwick-Danville Press-Enterprise, the Hazleton Plain Speaker (now the Standard-Speaker), and the Wilkes-Barre-Scranton papers. Journalists have been invaluable partners as archivists of the present who document these dynamics in real time. I am grateful to the Consortium for supporting travel to archives and intellectual community.
