The commission will start accepting public comment and requests for public hearings this week.
Liz Fulton grew up in Middletown, where the cooling towers of the former Three Mile Island nuclear power plant were visible from her Dauphin County school.
She recalled visiting as a student and being given a tiny piece of plastic the size of the uranium fuel pellets that powered the reactor until it was retired for economic reasons in 2019.
Now living in Conoy Township, Lancaster County – which is about five miles down the Susquehanna River from the plant – Fulton told federal regulators she was troubled after learning the Unit 1 reactor, rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, would be only the second commercial nuclear plant in the United States to return to service after being mothballed.
“I’m not arguing against the economics, against the clean energy, against nuclear in general,” Fulton said Thursday at a community meeting held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is tasked with ensuring the plant is safe to restart.
“I’m concerned about being a guinea pig, about my family, about my neighbors, about the residents nearby, being guinea pigs for this second restart of a nuclear power plant,” she said.
The project would supply all of the plant’s 835 megawatts of electricity to Microsoft under a 20-year purchase agreement. The power would supply the software giant’s artificial intelligence data centers located elsewhere. It’s backed by a $1 billion U.S. Department of Energy loan.
Fulton was among only a handful of people voicing worry or opposition to owner Constellation Energy’s goal of having the plant back online by next year.
Others, including union laborers, local elected officials and business owners said they’re counting on more than 600 permanent employees returning to work at the plant, their wages filtering out to support the economies of Dauphin, Lancaster and York counties.
“Local jobs like this are what keeps our guys going,” said Keith Toner, business manager for the Laborers International Union Local 1180, whose members are working both on restarting Unit 1 and dismantling Unit 2, which was damaged in 1979 in what remains the worst commercial nuclear energy accident in the nation’s history.
Some spoke on behalf of organizations promoting nuclear energy.
Matteo Riordan of Landenberg, Chester County, is a college student pursuing a career in the field and addressed concerns about storage of spent nuclear fuel pellets.
Riordan, who said he’s a member of Generation Atomic, a youth-focused nuclear advocacy group, asserted that waste from nuclear energy is safer than ash from a coal-fired power plant.
“In reality, nuclear waste is a solid pellet, not a green goo, contaminating the environment, and it’s stored in engineered dry casks on the site of nuclear power plants across the United States,” he said, adding that the containers are designed to withstand earthquakes and even missile strikes.
Eric Epstein, a long-time nuclear power watchdog, described the indefinite storage of more than 700 tons of radioactive waste on Three Mile Island as the “boogeyman that nobody wants to talk to.”
The meeting at Penn State Harrisburg was to brief the community on the NRC’s oversight of plant owner Constellation Energy’s work to bring the plant back online by next year. and ensure people are aware of their opportunities to participate in the process.
“The underlying goal is to maintain as much transparency and as much openness as we can about how things are going and to engage with the community,” NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell said.
This week, the NRC will publish a public notice on Constellation’s application for amendments to its “license bundle.” After the notice is published in the Federal Register on or about Feb. 24, members of the public will have 30 days to comment and 60 days to request a hearing.
If requested, a hearing would be held before a panel of three administrative law judges, whom Burnell said have significant technical expertise. The judges would first review requests to determine whether the requesters have standing to intervene in the licensing process (typically residents within 50 miles have standing) and whether their concerns are within the NRC’s jurisdiction.
The panel would then hear evidence to determine whether it is appropriate to grant Constellation’s request or whether there are shortcomings to be resolved. The NRC hears appeals of the panel’s decisions, and any final action the commission takes can be appealed in federal court.
NRC staff members tasked with managing the license review also discussed their work.
Constellation has submitted its package of licensing actions and amendments to restore the plant’s licenses to operational status and the NRC staff is engaged in a detailed technical review.
This summer, the commission will assign resident inspectors who will live locally and be at the site day-to-day during the return to operational status and beyond, said Erin Carfang, a branch chief in the NRC’s Department of Reactor Safety.
“They’re going to be there for the long term, monitoring the station, just like every other operating facility in the country,” she said.
The inspectors are tasked with validating the work Constellation is doing to restore the plant’s systems. The facility’s preparations for fire protection, aging management processes, physical security and emergency preparedness will also undergo scrutiny by teams with expertise in those areas, Carfang said.
Constellation representatives told reporters before the meeting that most of the plant’s major systems were found to be in operable condition after five years of being dormant. The two main transformers require replacement and are on order with delivery slated for this summer, Constellation spokesperson Dave Marcheskie said.
Marcheski said the plant is fully staffed to return to operations, with rigorous training underway for its required complement of about 60 licensed operators, who will staff the plant’s control room.
Source: Pennsylvania Star Capital