Activists protest restart of nuclear plant
Rally opposes plans to reopen Three Mile Island
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By John Finnerty
Capitolwire.com
Anti-nuclear activists held a rally in the Capitol rotunda to commemorate the 46th anniversary of the Three Mile Island partial meltdown and protest plans to reopen the facility.
TMI Unit 1 closed in 2019 as a result of changing economic conditions, but Constellation Energy announced plans last September to restart the mothballed reactor solely to power Microsoft data centers.
Eric Epstein of TMI Alert said that the activists plan to pursue legal challenges at the state, regional and federal level to try to stop the reopening.
"We've heard this tune before. The nuclear industry always makes assurances, confident predictions and guarantees," he said.
Activists said the evacuation plans proposed for the facility are inadequate and unrealistic since the evacuation zone is only 10-miles around the nuclear power plant. In reality, in 1979, more than 100,000 people in the Harrisburg area fled for safety.
At a legislative hearing earlier this month, PEMA Director Randy Padfield said emergency planners intend to use a "keyhole" evacuation model, defined by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as evacuating people from the most dangerous areas first.
This puts the emphasis on evacuating residents living in a higher-risk zone and minimizing evacuation time to avoid prolonged exposure to radiation. Sensor technology deployed by the state Department of Environmental Protection would be used to detect any off-site radiation from the plant, said Padfield. Weather patterns for the next 24 hours and wind direction would be consulted.
"Really it's those people that are in the critical path of any downwind contamination if it would occur and we would have a release from the plant," he said. "They are the ones we want to get evacuated first."
Gene Stilp, executive director of No TMI Restart, set up a display of toy hospital beds, buses and trucks, along with a miniature state Capitol, to demonstrate all the sectors of the community that would be impacted if a meltdown event reoccurred at the site.
Rep. Thomas Mehaffie, R-Dauphin, who spoke to reporters after the rally said that he supports the reopening of the nuclear power plant as a means to create jobs and help address the need for power, particularly to meet the demand being created by power-hungry data centers.
"The demands are going up. AI, all these new data centers that are coming to our area, we have to provide that power some way, somehow. So this is another thing that's going to happen," he said, "So opening up Three Mile Island Unit 1 is a really good thing," he said, adding that he believes the reopened power plant will be safer than the original.
"They're basically rebuilding it," he said.