Jane Fonda: Nuclear power at Three Mile Island is no climate solution

Nuclear power is slow, expensive — and wildly dangerous, the actor and activist writes. Why would anyone tempt fate by restarting a reactor that suffered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history?

The actor Jane Fonda writes that while some see a planned restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant as a tool to fight climate change, the risk of an accident outweighs any potential benefits.Clem Murray / Staff Photographerby Jane Fonda, For The Inquirer
Published Oct. 2, 2024, 10:06 a.m. ET

The recent news about re-starting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant 75 miles west of Philadelphia hit me hard.

My heart sank as I thought back to The China Syndrome, a nuclear disaster movie I starred in with Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas in 1979. Why, I wondered, would anyone tempt fate by restarting a reactor that suffered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history?

The China Syndrome was about a nuclear power reactor potentially melting down and unleashing a cloud of deadly radioactivity across the surrounding region. Two weeks after the movie hit theaters, real life imitated art with a vengeance.

One of the two reactors at Three Mile Island suffered what investigators termed “a partial meltdown.” As industry officials and federal regulators tried to determine the extent of the damage and whether to evacuate people, a terrifying drama played out on TV screens across Pennsylvania and around the world.

The front page of the Inquirer on March 29, 1979 featuring reports about the accident at Three Mile Island.Inquirer archives

I realize that, today, some people regard nuclear power as a necessary tool in the fight against climate change. As someone who is devoting my life to that fight, I understand the temptation to embrace nuclear power. We absolutely need to phase out oil, gas, and coal — the fossil fuels overheating our planet — and fast. Any means of achieving that goal deserves consideration.

The latest sign of our climate peril came last week as Hurricane Helene, amped by super-hot sea water, battered Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Helene’s destructiveness, however, is also a reminder that climate change can endanger nuclear power facilities.

As the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania has noted, “As temperatures rise and climate hazards, such as drought, sea level rise, and extreme precipitation intensify, nuclear infrastructure is put at risk.”

Earthquakes also imperil nuclear plants, as illustrated by the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. Terrorism is another risk. Last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told the U.N. General Assembly that new intelligence indicates that Russia is contemplating an attack against Ukraine’s nuclear plants — a disaster, Zelensky said, “that must never come.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has stoked fears of a radiation accident at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station.AP

Sheer economics also argue against nuclear power.

Nuclear power is the most expensive electricity in the world. Nuclear plants can only be operated because we, the public, subsidize them lavishly. A study by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that decades of subsidies to nuclear power had “already resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in costs paid by taxpayers and ratepayers.”

In the case of the Three Mile Island facility, the CEO of Constellation Energy, which owns the plant, proudly told the Washington Post that Microsoft has guaranteed to buy all the electricity the plant will produce. If that sounds like the free market at work, read the fine print. The CEO admitted that the Microsoft deal was only possible because of federal subsidies.

The CEO wouldn’t provide specific figures, so let me help him out. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation — authorized $6 billion in subsidies for nuclear power. The Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act of 2021 set aside an additional $6 billion.

Nuclear power is the most expensive electricity in the world.

That $12 billion is just the tip of the iceberg. The most outrageous subsidy is a law known as The Price-Anderson Act, which absolves nuclear companies from legal liability for the vast majority of the costs of a possible accident. Guess who gets to pay instead? We do.

The nuclear industry’s business model has long been: Privatize the profits, socialize the costs. With the Three Mile Island accident, the people of Pennsylvania came dangerously close to having that business model literally blow up in their faces.
 

Ironically enough, the main reason nuclear power is so expensive is also the main reason it isn’t much help against climate change. It’s simply too slow — no nuclear reactor of any kind has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. What’s more, that extra-long construction time translates into massive borrowing costs for the capital needed to finance the plants, boosting their eventual cost.

And yes, that’s true even of the new generation of smaller, modular reactors that Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, is so fond of. Every time I speak in public about the climate crisis, someone asks if the modular reactors can’t be a solution. So I’ve spent time researching the issue, because I think when celebrities presume to speak about public issues, we have an obligation to know the facts.

Jane Fonda writes that while it takes at least a decade to get a nuclear plant online, renewable energy sources can be up and running in a few years.Angela Weiss / MCT

With climate change, we don’t have the kind of time needed to get a nuclear plant licensed, built, and supplying power to the grid. Scientists are clear: humanity has to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial level if we’re to avoid catastrophic destruction and human suffering.

That means, scientists say, that emissions of heat-trapping pollution must fall by half over the next five years. So simply as a matter of timing, nuclear is not a good climate solution.
 

By contrast, solar plants take about four years to get up and running. Wind turbines, about the same. And boosting energy efficiency — designing our buildings and vehicles so they use much less energy but deliver the same comfort and performance— is the fastest, most powerful tool of all for displacing fossil fuels.

The nuclear industry’s business model has long been: Privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

None of these renewable energy sources risk a nuclear meltdown. None guzzle billions of gallons of fresh water like nuclear plants do — water whose supply will become ever more uncertain as climate change unleashes deeper droughts in the years ahead. None burden our descendants with vast amounts of waste that remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, with a $400 million annual bill for disposal that the public must pay.

That radioactivity, by the way, is one reason why it’s simply inaccurate to call nuclear power “clean energy.” It may be non-carbon energy, but anything that stays fatally poisonous for millennia is not clean.

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If people want to support genuine solutions to climate change, I invite them to help the Jane Fonda Climate PAC elect climate champions to local, state, and national offices in November.

In Philadelphia, my political action committee has endorsed Nikil Saval in Pennsylvania Senate District 1 and Andre Carroll in Pennsylvania House of Delegates District 201. You’ll find a complete list of our candidates, in Pennsylvania and across the US, here: https://janepac.com/?home#endorsements.

All of our candidates shun campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. They work to accelerate deployment of solar, wind, and other genuinely clean energy sources. And they oppose nuclear.

Like two people trying to get through a narrow doorway at the same time, there isn’t room for both nuclear and renewables in our energy future. It’s an obvious choice, no?

Jane Fonda is a veteran political activist, two-time Academy Award-winning actor, and the principal of the Jane Fonda Climate PAC.

JF
Jane Fonda, For The Inquirer

Drake: No amount of money is worth turning Wyoming into a nuclear waste dump

Reactor operators Brian Bowers (left) and Bryan Bricking, in the control room of Three Mile Island reactor in 2017.
TMI reactor 2 is still shut down after the partial nuclear meltdown accident in 1979.
Reactor 1, this unit was shut down in 2019.Clem Murray / Staff Photographer

by Andrew Seidman
Updated Sept. 20, 2024, 12:51 p.m. ET |  Published Sept. 20, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET

Five years after a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania closed amid financial troubles, its owner wants to bring it back online.

Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Corp. said Friday that it has signed a 20-year agreement with Microsoft under which the technology company will purchase power from Three Mile Island Unit 1. That reactor is located at an independent facility from Unit 2, which closed in 1979 after experiencing a partial meltdown.

Constellation said it would spend $1.6 billion to restart Unit 1 — and won’t seek “a penny in grant money” from the state or federal governments — which the company said “operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades.” Federal regulators would need to approve a restart, though it already has support from Gov. Josh Shapiro. The company said it expects the reactor to come online by 2028.

“I think policymakers have recognized that a strategy that is dependent just on wind, solar, batteries isn’t going to fully get us there and meet the needs of the system from a reliability standpoint,” Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s president and CEO, said in an interview.

The Three Mile Island power plant complex in Middletown, Pa. Unit 2, on the left, infamously shut down in 1979 after an accident. Unit 1, on the right, was shut down in 2019.Clem Murray / Staff Photographer

For Microsoft, buying energy from the renewed plant, dubbed the Crane Clean Energy Center, will “help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy,” according to a news release. Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization, operates the electric grid in 13 states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The plan to reopen Three Mile Island is likely to face some opposition from groups critical of the nuclear industry. “We will challenge this proposal at every venue that is available for us,” said Eric Epstein, a former chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a nonprofit that says it promotes “safe-energy alternatives to nuclear power.”

“This is another chapter in a nightmare that won’t end,” he said.

Exelon Generation pulled the plug on 837-megawatt Unit 1 in 2019 after state lawmakers declined to support legislation that would have directed hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from Pennsylvania electric customers to the state’s nuclear industry. Exelon at the time said it couldn’t compete in markets dominated by low-cost natural gas. Constellation’s predecessor company split from Exelon in 2022.

Dominguez said multiple factors have contributed to a changing landscape for the nuclear industry since the Three Mile Island reactor closed five years ago. In addition to reliability questions with regard to wind and solar, he pointed to incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the pandemic. “We saw this effort … to bring in and onshore a lot of critical supply,” he said.

Constellation said in a regulatory filing Friday that its investment would be eligible for federal nuclear production and clean energy tax credits.

A study commissioned by the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council — which supports the restart and represents more than 115 local unions — estimated that the project would create 3,400 jobs, including 600 direct jobs at the plant in Londonderry Township, south of Harrisburg.

The study projected that over 20 years, the Crane Clean Energy Center — named after the late Exelon CEO Chris Crane — would generate $3.6 billion in state and federal tax revenues and reduce carbon emissions by an average of 3 million metric tons per year, “offsetting about 10% of Pennsylvania’s passenger vehicle emissions.”

Thomas Webler, senior research fellow at the Social and Environmental Research Institute, challenged the projected offset of auto emissions in Pennsylvania because the restart won’t be powering electric vehicle chargers. Pennsylvania emitted 258 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, according to state data.

Shapiro, a first-term Democrat, said in a statement that the facility “will safely utilize existing infrastructure to sustain and expand nuclear power in the commonwealth while creating thousands of energy jobs and strengthening Pennsylvania’s legacy as a national energy leader.”

Pennsylvania has five nuclear power plants, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. Constellation, which is publicly traded, owns Limerick Generating Station in Montgomery County and Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in York County.

Restarting Unit 1 would require approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and permits from state and local agencies, according to Constellation. The company said it also plans to seek a license renewal “that will extend plant operations to at least 2054.”

Dominguez, the CEO, said the plant remains in “pretty good condition,” though the company needed to replace the main transformer. Other tasks include ordering key components, hiring staff, and connecting the plant to PJM, he said.

Asked about potential safety concerns, Dominguez said TMI “will always be remembered by some people as the industry’s point of greatest failure in the United States.”

“But for those of us who worked and have worked in the industry for decades, Three Mile Island represents something very different,” he said. “It represents the place where we learned hard lessons and the birthplace of the resolve, the new processes, new equipment, new designs through construction activities that ultimately transformed the industry.”

Epstein, the antinuclear power activist, said the focus at the site should be on cleanup.

Ninety-nine percent of TMI 2 reactor’s fuel has been moved to Idaho since the 1979 accident. But officials say removing the last 1% of fuel is challenging. “First things first, remove the waste from the island, and clean up TMI 2,” Epstein said.