‘Feels like a charade’: Residents push back on feds over restart of Three Mile Island nuclear reactor

• By Jaxon White / LNP | LancasterOnline

Gene Stilp during a hearing on July 31, 2025.jpeg

MIDDLETOWN — Five officials charged with ensuring the restart of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island meets federal safety and environmental standards faced harsh criticism from residents opposed to the project on Thursday night.

During a more than hour-long public meeting on Penn State Harrisburg’s campus, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials emphasized their commitment to ensuring the security and safety of residents near the Crane Clean Energy Center — formerly Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 reactor, which was renamed by owner Constellation Energy Corporation earlier this year.

“If challenges arise, we are the folks that bring the resources to bear, that bring the right technical experts to the table,” said Jamie Pelton, co-chair of the NRC Crane Restart Panel, “to make sure that as we’re conducting the reviews, conducting inspections, that we’ve got the right experts in place to ensure safety is the number one priority.”

But for some of the more than 120 people in attendance, the officials’ assurances weren’t enough to soothe their deep-rooted unease and skepticism of the project.

Many expressed fears over potential radiation leaks, lack of faith in government agencies’ emergency preparedness, and concerns over long-term nuclear waste management.

Middletown native Matt Krajsa told the panel he felt like the plant’s restart “is a done deal” and that residents cannot meaningfully sway the commission’s choice to provide the required government licenses to restart the reactor.

“It’s energy, it’s Microsoft, it’s profits — like always — and it certainly feels like a charade,” Krajsa said, referencing Microsoft’s 20-year agreement to purchase the 835 megawatts expected to be produced annually by the reactor.

Krajsa was born in 1980, one year after the infamous partial meltdown of Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 reactor. He said his mother, a two-time cancer survivor, was part of a federal government study evaluating the accident’s impact on local cancer rates.

Ray McKinley, one of three co-chairs of the NRC’s Crane Restart Panel, noted the government-led studies did not find significant evidence that the accident increased cancer rates in the region.

Still, memories and personal anecdotes surrounding the incident, considered the country’s worst commercial nuclear power accident in history, stole much of the spotlight during the meeting.

The officials said they are working to coordinate Constellation’s revitalization of the Crane Clean Energy Center with the ongoing decommissioning of Unit 2, owned by a separate company, Energy Solutions.

Gene Stilp, a longtime Dauphin County activist opposed to the restart, raised concerns to the panel about the evacuation radius if there were an accident at the restarted facility.

“Evacuation here is impossible,” Stilp, wearing a blazer that read “NO T.M.I. RESTART” across his back, said. “How do you evacuate the Children’s Cancer Center at Hershey?… How do you evacuate the 600 beds at Hershey Medical Center? It is impossible.”

Panelists responded by saying the NRC does not oversee evacuation plans put in place by the local and state officials. That responsibility falls onto the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The involvement of FEMA worried Elizabethtown resident Dave Allard, who said he retired from the Bureau of Radiation Protection just three years ago. Allard pointed to President Donald Trump’s recent layoff of FEMA staffers to tell the panel that the agency may be ill-prepared to address an issue on Three Mile Island.

Thursday night was the first of two NRC public meetings to hear public comment on the project. The second is a digital webinar scheduled from 4 to 6 p.m. on August 6.

STEP-BY-STEP

After purchasing Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 in 1999, Constellation closed it in 2019 for what its officials say were purely financial reasons.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has placed extra demand on electrical grids, and companies have turned to nuclear energy as a way to power the data centers needed to house the physical components of the technology.

That fact that the power generated by the Crane Clean Energy Center is slated to power data centers — not the neighboring homes — was heavily scrutinized by multiple speakers.

But the NRC officials made it clear that it is not their responsibility to influence what Constellation chooses to do with the electricity it generates at the plant.

Constellation’s project is the second instance of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission overseeing a former decommissioned site being brought back to operational standards. The first was the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which the NRC fully greenlit last week.

For similar approval, Constellation would need an exemption to current federal regulations and a host of other licensing approvals from the NRC, according to Licensing Project Manager Justin Poole.

Poole said Constellation has submitted its exemption application and several other applications; however, the NRC has not yet approved any of Constellation’s requests, except for the renaming of Unit 1.

Later this year, after Constellation’s last application is filed, the NRC will open the door for the public to request a legal hearing that could pull the plug on restarting the facility.

The legal case would be heard by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, according to Scott Burnell, a public affairs officer at NRC. Its three panelists would determine whether the case has any legal standing and issue a ruling, which could be appealed to the NRC’s five politically appointed members. The NRC ruling could then be appealed to federal court.

In 2022, the NRC denied Oklo Power’s application to build its Aurora compact fast reactor in Idaho. Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation Andrea Veil cited “information gaps in (Oklo’s) description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components.”

READ: 20 years after pay raise scandal, reformers say Harrisburg still lacks transparency and integrity

ECONOMIC UPSWING

Constellation estimates that roughly 3,400 direct or indirect jobs will be created from the plant’s restart, and it will raise more than $3.6 billion in local, state and federal tax revenue.

Leaders of trade organizations and Ellen Willenbecher, vice president of Middletown Borough Council, touted those statistics to say they welcomed the reopening of the facility.

And Democratic state Rep. Justin Fleming, of Harrisburg, said he had “faith” in the plant’s safety system. From 2004 to 2007, Fleming worked for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

“The emergency procedures that we had in place in case of an emergency worked and worked well,” Fleming told the audience.

Yet, not every official who spoke seemed fully confident in the plant. One of those was Democratic Sen. James Malone, whose northern Lancaster County district has portions within the 10-mile-radius emergency planning zone designated by Constellation.

“Three Mile Island Unit 1 will be among a small handful of commercial reactors globally that were shut down and then reopened,” Malone said. “That should warrant extra caution and guarantees to neighbors that this will be done with safety as a number one priority.”