Despite alarming some nuclear safety advocates, owner Constellation Energy is preparing to restart Three Mile Island’s mothballed Unit 1 reactor, with recent tests showing the plant is readying itself for a restart. Unit 1, which was shut down in 2019, sits next to the old Unit 2, which partially melted 45 years ago. The company recently told investors it is considering restarting the plant, but the process is expected to take years.
“We found that the plant is in pretty good condition,” Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez said in an interview. “We believe it’s technically possible to restart it.”
Until recently, the nuclear power industry was busy shuttering plants, many of which collapsed because they couldn’t economically compete with natural gas and heavily subsidized wind and solar power. But Three Mile Island is part of a new wave of activity at idled plants as technology companies, manufacturers and energy regulators struggle to find enough emissions-free electricity to keep up with surging demand.
Meanwhile, the owners of the mothballed Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan are planning to restart it by the end of next year, and energy company NextEra is considering whether to restart a nuclear plant in Iowa. Meanwhile, owners of operating nuclear plants are backing away from retirement plans and instead drafting regulatory applications to keep them operating, in some cases for as long as 80 years.
The change is being driven in part by clean energy subsidies promoted by the Biden administration. But states are also trying to get in on the nuclear boom. Across the country, numerous bills have been introduced to incentivize the nuclear industry. Illinois, West Virginia and Connecticut are among six states that have lifted moratoriums on new nuclear plant construction.
“We’re in a completely different environment than we were a few years ago,” said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group.
Nuclear power remains a gamble. Safety concerns, supply chain issues and engineering challenges have left projects behind schedule and over budget. At the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia, the first new nuclear reactor in the United States since 2016 recently began operating seven years late and nearly $20 billion over budget. Plans to build a similar reactor in South Carolina fell through.
But energy companies now see the economics of nuclear power plants becoming increasingly favorable. Data centers, which power innovations in artificial intelligence and other technologies, are projected to consume 9% of the U.S. electricity supply by 2030, triple current electricity demand, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. A manufacturing boom and interest in electric vehicles are driving further demand. That’s sparking a frenzied search by technology companies for zero-emissions power.
NextEra CEO John Ketchum said discussions with tech companies have led him to consider restarting the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which was Iowa’s only nuclear power plant until it was closed in 2020 due to financial difficulties. “If we can do it safely and on budget, we’d consider it,” Ketchum told Bloomberg last month. He said the tech companies approaching him are looking to build data center campuses that require as much power as the city of Miami.
“We are always striving to meet our customers’ needs and the best use of our assets, including the Duane Arnold Energy Center,” NextEra said in a statement.
Twelve nuclear plants have been closed in the United States in the past decade, and most will probably never be restarted, according to Patrick White, research director at the Alliance for Nuclear Innovation think tank. The reactors have been dismantled and other infrastructure has been carted away or left to decay.
But White said elsewhere, equipment could still function if regulators approve the power. That’s the gamble in Michigan, where the previous owner of the Palisades Generating Station near Grand Rapids closed the plant in 2022, citing too high costs of generating electricity. The plant was sold to Holtec, a decommissioning company that bought the plant with a plan to manage its retirement after 50 years of operation. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has asked the new owner whether the plant could be revived.
“We said, ‘We’re going to keep the plant in a position where we can reverse any actions we take,'” said Patrick O’Brien, Holtec’s director of government relations and public affairs. Now, Holtec hopes the plant will start generating electricity again by the end of next year.
Not everyone is rooting for Holtec. The Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club called the plan to subsidize the reopening of Palisades with $1.5 billion in federal and state funds “reckless and too expensive,” arguing that the plant’s energy prices would far exceed those of wind turbines or solar panels. Many environmentalists argue that there is still no plan for disposal of radioactive waste from the nuclear facility, and that if regulators approve the life extension, even more radioactive waste will end up being stored at the nuclear facility.
There are also concerns that in the rush to revive and extend the lives of nuclear plants, regulators are being pressured to ignore potential safety risks in the plants’ revival equipment, some of which date back to before the Carter administration. Nuclear plants were previously expected to last about 60 years, but Dominguez said most parts, other than the reactor vessel and cement, have been replaced and updated.
Nuclear safety advocates fought As the nuclear energy industry lobbys hard for faster approvals, Congress recently passed a bill that would expand the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s mission to oversee safety to include protecting the industry’s financial health.
“The United States is leading its aging reactors into uncharted territory,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Increasing the risk of a Fukushima accident in the United States at the expense of nuclear safety is unlikely to be a winning strategy for boosting public confidence in nuclear technology.” Radioactive releases at Japanese nuclear plants after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami prompted a review of nuclear power on a similar scale to the one that followed the Three Mile Island accident.
But the industry has found itself at less odds with environmental groups than in the past, as large-scale wind and solar projects face cost overruns and delays, and concerns grow that alternatives to nuclear power will be heavily polluting gas- and coal-fired plants.
“This is something that was unexpected,” O’Brien said on a panel at a recent industry conference in Las Vegas, adding that Holtec was also receiving questions about a New York plant that closed in 2021 and a Massachusetts plant that closed in 2019. “It’s not just Palisades. We’re decommissioning other plants right now, and people are asking, ‘Can you reopen Indian Point? Can you reopen Pilgrim?’ Maybe. Probably not. We dismantled the reactors. But does that mean we can’t build new reactors? I don’t think so.”
Holtec is one of many companies racing to develop smaller, more agile reactors that the industry has been trying to bring to market for years amid tough regulatory and technological headwinds. If ultimately successful, the sites of older, operating or decommissioned power plants are the natural places to build the reactors, O’Brien said.
Some New York experts lamented the 2021 closure of the Indian Point Generating Station near New York City after years of pressure from environmentalists. The state couldn’t secure enough clean energy to make up for the electricity the plant produced, forcing New York to turn to gas-fired power. Emissions soared, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.
“It would be pretty devastating to see this ‘always on’, emission-free electricity suddenly disappear from your grid,” said Ben Furnas, former climate director for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and now executive director of Cornell University’s 2030 Project, which explores solutions to global warming. “This should serve as a lesson for other places.”
Constellation Energy CEO Dominguez stressed that no decisions have been made about restarting Three Mile Island, but This is a major blunder that will undermine the country’s climate goals and energy security.
“We have a lot of confidence in the reactor,” Dominguez said. Other components are in “very good condition.” He said he believes all the construction and permitting needed to restore power could be completed within about three years of deciding to restart the plant. Initial tests are focusing on the steam generators connected to Unit 1.
But critics say the history of Three Mile Island cannot be ignored. A loss of coolant caused a partial meltdown at the No. 2 reactor, and equipment failure and operator error put two million people at risk of radiation exposure. The reactor’s fuel and remains of the damaged core were transported to Idaho National Laboratory.
Although the Department of Energy has assured that “there were no injuries, deaths or direct health effects as a result of the accident,” the findings are disputed by many in the area who believe they were exposed to more radiation than the government has acknowledged.
“It was like a war zone,” recalled Royalton Borough President Jim Fry, who was a police officer at the time of the incident in 1979. “Nobody told us what was going on. It was a scary time.”
But like many in his town, his fears about the plant have faded as it continues to operate safely – it operated for 45 years before being shut down in 2019 – and now Fry says he would welcome its restart, and that most people in town think “it’s been decided.”
Not everyone behind the plant is willing to give it another chance. If Constellation goes ahead with its plans, it would face a battle with nuclear safety activists like Three Mile Island Alert founder Eric Epstein, who say restarting the plant would be a dangerous waste of money.
“How many more times will the nuclear industry seek taxpayer bailouts to rebuild the broken nuclear wheel?” he said.
