The pending reopening of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island has drawn star power in opposition.
Actress/activist Jane Fonda wrote a lengthy opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer against the partnership between Microsoft and Constellation Energy to restart a portion of the idle facility. The Middletown, Pennsylvania, site is well-known for the nuclear accident that happened there in 1979.
"My heart sank as I thought back to 'The China Syndrome,' a nuclear disaster movie I starred in … in 1979. Why … would anyone tempt fate?" she wrote in the piece.
Fonda calls nuclear energy costly, dangerous, water-hungry, and too slow to develop to address the world's overheating quickly enough.
For Microsoft's part, the company claims the air-pollution-free energy will be used to offset massive electricity demand at data centers, if the project gains regulatory approval, per a news release on the agreement. And Constellation is planning to invest $1.6 billion toward refurbishing and modernizing the recently closed reactor ahead of a planned 2028 restart.
Goldman Sachs estimates that artificial intelligence will increase data center power consumption by 160% within the decade. The centers already consume up to 2% of the world's energy, according to the firm's report.
Oceanographer and climate expert Joellen Russell is a professor at the University of Arizona. She has noticed the impact of the planet's warming firsthand in The Grand Canyon State. Heat records were still being marked in October, when the mercury hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix, as noted by NBC.
She welcomes nuclear energy to help curb the production of heat-trapping fumes. Reactors are already a solid part of the state's energy mix, second to natural gas, per government data.
In an online call with The Cool Down in September, Russell said location is a key factor for plant placement and that Arizona has been a good home for nuclear power.
"It isn't the best spot if you have major flooding. It isn't the best spot if you have major hazardous storms. But for a place like us, it makes a lot of sense," she said.
Conversely, Fonda echoes some of the concerns cited by physicist Amory Lovins during a recent online meeting with The Cool Down. He is the co-founder of RMI, a nonprofit working on clean-energy solutions. Lovins said that solar and wind are "the cheapest way to build power facilities" to meet demand, adding that nuclear costs are increasing.
Regardless, innovations are regularly being reported. Experts at Westinghouse are among researchers developing small modular reactors, or SMRs, which can operate in a wider variety of locations than traditional nuclear plants. While likely a distant prospect, fusion reaction breakthroughs are also being announced.
Unlike fission — the type of powerful reactions used at Three Mile and the nation's 54 operating plants — fusion creates no long-lasting radioactive waste. However, researchers have yet to develop a way to control the reactions sustainably and ensure the process can produce more energy than the energy added.
Fonda's opinion doesn't address fusion, but she's against SMRs. She wrote in the Inquirer that, like nuclear generally, they take far too long to develop compared to other renewables.
The actress also takes issue with taxpayer-provided subsidies that support nuclear projects, despite their ability to reduce heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere by replacing fossil fuel usage. The government does also make funding programs, tax breaks, and other incentives readily available for a variety of cleaner projects as officials encourage the reduction of ruinous air pollution. There's even a government-backed hydrogen testing operation in Texas, for example.
When it comes to nuclear power, the Union of Concerned Scientists — whose director of nuclear power safety, Edwin Lyman, is generally against SMRs and has expressed concern about "taking our aging reactors into uncharted territory" — might have a sensible middle ground that would imply a reactivation of Three Mile would be acceptable if the investment from Microsoft and Constellation means it's modernized and handled very carefully.
"We believe that a well-regulated nuclear industry is in everyone's best interest — especially the industry itself," the group wrote in an article on its website.
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