As jarring as the closure of the Three Mile Island One nuclear power station is to longtime Harrisburg-area residents, a cadre of them told Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials Tuesday they’d like the plant’s planned decommissioning to take a faster track.
It’s known in NRC lingo as DECON, and it can allow for the deconstruction, clean-up and re-use of closed nuclear plants in less than a decade, as opposed to the six decade-plus track Three Mile Island Unit One’s owners, Exelon Generation, has started planning for.
Several longtime TMI watchdogs, born of the notorious 1979 partial meltdown at the adjacent Three Mile Island Two reactor, said the desire for speed is partly a matter of good riddance, and a world-weary resignation that past promises about the troubled plant have not panned out.
“How many dog and pony shows can you (the NRC) bring to Harrisburg over the last 40 years?” asked longtime TMI activist Gene Stilp, bemoaning the fact that under the current safe storage plan the island would be a nuclear waste dump long past the lifetimes of any current residents.
Stilp called on Exelon, and elected officials who fought for TMI’s economic preservation over the last two years, to put the decommissioning on a faster track to preserve more of the region’s existing nuclear-related jobs in the short term and allow for a faster rehabilitation of the site.
“You could start getting jobs for clean-up right now,” Stilp said. “Get retrained in some fashion and set up things for that. But you could actually have jobs right now and start on that. Not just monitoring the site… Start providing jobs right now, by starting the clean-up right now.
“This bargain with the devil to store it (spent nuclear fuel) on the Susquehanna River is an abomination to the river, an abomination to the citizens who live here…. and it provides more terrorist targets in a big way.”
NRC officials noted Tuesday it is ultimately the licensee’s decision whether to put a plant into safe storage or rapid decontamination.
Exelon’s current timeline calls for the site to spend most of the next 60 years in a “dormancy” stage, in which most activity will center around storage of spent fuel, and a wait for residual contamination levels to naturally break down until major reactor buildings and components can be dismantled.
Exelon, however, has recently changed paths with other retired nuclear plants – including one in New Jersey this year……..
There are other ways to join the TMI decommissioning conversation. Written comments on the report can be submitted through Oct. 9 either:
- online to the NRC using Docket ID NRC-2019-0142 on the Regulations.gov website;
- or via mail to: Office of Administration, Mail Stop: TWFN-7-A60M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington D.C. 20555-0001, ATTN: Program Management, Announcements and Editing Staff. https://www.pennlive.com/news/2019/07/three-mile-island-neighbors-79-accident-survivors-call-for-faster-clean-up-of-closing-nuclear-reactor.html
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