The mechanism: Most nuclear plants in America are owned by regulated utilities that get paid a guaranteed return by state commissions no matter what happens in the wholesale market. Talen Energy's Susquehanna plant is not one of them. It's a merchant asset selling into PJM Interconnection's competitive capacity auction and directly into corporate power-purchase deals — meaning every dollar Talen earns is a function of two things regulators control: how PJM prices capacity, and how FERC lets Talen sell power behind the meter to data centers without first running it through the public grid. On December 18, 2025, FERC unanimously ordered PJM to build clear rules for exactly this kind of co-location arrangement, creating new transmission-service tiers and forcing a compliance filing (PJM submitted its response February 23, 2026, targeting a July 31, 2026 effective date). That ruling — not an appropriations bill or a loan guarantee — is what determines whether Talen can keep routing Susquehanna's output straight to a hyperscaler campus at a premium, or whether it gets forced back through PJM's queue like everyone else.