The case against restarting Three Mile Island’s Unit-1

The proposed restart of Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 reactor seems to have been cooked up in the dark. It has been met with unabashed enthusiasm by Gov. Josh Shapiro and many members of the Pennsylvania Legislature.

If it were to go through, the proposed restart of Three Mile Island would have only one client: Microsoft. The relationship would be exclusive and mostly benefit Microsoft’s data centers outside Pennsylvania. This sweetheart deal offered by Microsoft, although high on federal subsidies, is short on details.

The federal government is in a mad rush to throw money at a nuclear power industry whose projects are consistently behind schedule and over budget. Federal agencies have already committed billions to bring new and existing nuclear technologies to market. Three Mile Island would be the second nuclear facility — joining the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan — to be restarted with an assist from the federal government.

According to the publication Utility Dive, Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that Constellation Energy — which owns TMI Unit 1 — will sell power to Microsoft for $98 per megawatt-hour, compared to market power prices of around $50 per megawatt-hour. Utility Dive also noted that Constellation expects that the unit’s output will receive a roughly $30 per megawatt-hour clean energy tax credit.

Constellation is a spinoff of Exelon, which previously owned TMI Unit 1. Before the reactor was shut down in 2019, Exelon complained that it couldn’t compete in the marketplace and sought what was essentially a state bailout. The company was right: TMI Unit 1 had lost $300 million over eight years, according to PennLive.

The Price-Anderson Act, passed by Congress in 1957, is a taxpayer-supported insurance program for Constellation and other nuclear power companies. As the Congressional Research Service reported in January, that legislation “established accident liability limits for the nuclear industry and a mechanism to ensure that damage compensation to the public would be readily available within those limits.”

That’s great for Constellation. But will the people who live near Three Mile Island be able to purchase homeowners’ insurance in the event of another accident at the plant? If nuclear energy is so safe, why can’t community residents get insurance to protect their families, farms and other property?

Pennsylvanians have been told that nuclear power deserves a second chance because it is now environmentally friendly, because it’s not coal, and because without nuclear energy, the lights will go out on cold, windless nights. But how does exporting TMI Unit 1’s energy to data centers keep the lights on in our communities?

Folks need to be aware of the nuclear lobby’s fearmongering, and weigh the great Faustian bargain: electricity for the moment, and radioactive waste forever.

Three Mile Island Unit 1 is being rechristened as the Crane Clean Energy Center, but radioactive waste packaged in green gift wrapping is no less lethal.

Three Mile Island is a high-level radioactive waste site that is out of room. As LNP | LancasterOnline reported in 2020, “While most of the highly radioactive fuel was removed from Unit 2 by the mid-1990s,” the decommissioning of the unit was expected to cost at least $1 billion, paid for with ratepayer funds set aside for that purpose.

Will Constellation reimburse ratepayers now that they are parachuting out of decommissioning?

If TMI Unit 1 operates for 20 years, the length of the Microsoft contract, Pennsylvanians will be asked to babysit more tons of radioactive trash with no forwarding address. This waste remains hazardous for thousands of years.

Constellation has a financial incentive to keep the waste on the island. The nuclear industry sued the U.S. Department of Energy when the federal government failed to meet a 1998 deadline for providing a permanent geologic repository for nuclear waste. So now, that federal agency pays Constellation to keep the waste on Three Mile Island.

Rather than commit to find a solution, Constellation wants to create more waste and an additional huge taxpayer burden to keep the radioactive waste on site. If Microsoft executives want the power, they — or Constellation — should take out the trash.

This deal also fails to factor in the impact on water supplies. Data centers and nuclear power plants are water-intensive. Southern York County’s Peach Bottom nuclear plant, which is partly owned by Constellation, and Three Mile Island both draw vast amounts of water from the Susquehanna River. We need to view water as a precious resource — not as a nuclear subsidy.

There is yet another issue to consider: The production of nuclear power creates more terrorist targets and more toxic waste, but fewer resources to upgrade Pennsylvania’s energy grid. Given the diversity of our state’s energy portfolio, we should refrain from putting our thumb on the nuclear scale.

As PennLive reported, Constellation will also need permission from PJM Interconnection, which monitors the energy grid in 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, to put the nuclear power back onto the grid. The interconnection queue has been closed to new applications since 2021.

As Utility Dive reported, Gov. Shapiro is pressuring PJM to put TMI at the front of the queue, insisting that the mothballed plant is “shovel-ready.”

This would be yet another advantage granted to nuclear power, while other forms of clean energy — such as solar and wind — wait in line.

First things first. Is it too much to ask to the nuclear industry to clean up the mess it made at Three Mile Island 45 years ago?

Eric Epstein was formerly the coordinator of the Susquehanna Valley Alliance, based in Lancaster, and former chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, based in Harrisburg. He is an independent nuclear watchdog.