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Nuclear Apocalypse at Three Mile Island -- What Happens When Microsoft Turns the Reactor Back on?




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Nuclear Apocalypse at Three Mile Island - What Happens When Microsoft Turns the Reactor Back on?


(Movie guy voice:)

In a world where Eminem has one chance to escape his shitty life, and he hates his mom -- he'll have to earn his freedom - and save the world - by challenging a melting down nuclear reactor to a rap battle. Coming to theaters this summer -- 3 Mile. Rated M for mom’s spaghetti.


Microsoft just announced plans to switch on the three mile island nuclear plant solely to power its own data centers. This signals a major historic first as Microsoft is set to become the only client of a nuclear reactor. In light of this fairly big development, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about that time in the spring of 1979 when the plant tried to murder everyone who lives in Pennsylvania. Let’s talk about what led to the 1979 meltdown, the history of the plant, what it’s been doing with its time since that fateful day in March of 79 (was it like, playing solitaire, or maybe it's been slinging that football for people with no friends, the one with the flat end that comes back to you when it hits a wall), we’ll also find out what Microsoft’s plans are for the reactor now, and what we can learn from this particular nuclear power plant accident and what we can actually do with that information going forward.


Three mile island was colloquially referred to as “TMI,” which coincidentally you’re going to get a lot of in this episode. The three mile island nuclear meltdown or TMI meltdown was the worst commercial nuclear power plant disaster in the history of the U.S. Commercial is an interesting word that gets bandied about when talking about three mile island, and that's because the early days of nuclear reactor energy production was like the wild West, especially after 1954 when private corporations were encouraged to get in on the game, but the early government efforts weren't great either. It's a fascinating history of really awful trial and error with extraordinarily high stakes and often severe consequences. I'm planning a whole episode on that twenty year period of awfulness that will shine a light on the early days of this burgeoning sector -- it’s a time period that you just never really hear about. Probably because it all sits in the shadow of the subject of today's video: three mile island.


Okay, a little background before we dive into the accident. Three mile island is located on the Susquehanna river, outside of Middletown, Pennsylvania, just south of the state capital of Harrisburg. Now, in the 1970s, this was a downtrodden area in the rust-belt that welcomed the new jobs and economic revitalization that TMI could provide. A lot of people were super excited about the prospect of a new technology sector moving into the area along with all the jobs it would bring with it. Totally understandable.


Because the 1970s was also a decade plagued by extraordinary energy shortages and rationing nationwide. American families were feeling the squeeze hard, both in terms of just being able to buy gas when they needed it, and then also figuring out ways to afford that gas when they could find it. It was a chunk of time that really tested the country in a lot of ways. So nuclear energy proliferation was seen as a really great solution to the ongoing economic and energy woes. And here we have companies coming along that wanted to build new tech that would fix both of those problems -- what’s not to love?


And so the first reactor at three mile island, called Unit 1, was built in 1974. The plant was built by General Public Utilities, now called FirstEnergy Corp., and operated by the Metropolitan Edison Company. Keep in mind, this is twenty years after the atomic energy act was amended to grant private corporations permission to start trying their hand at building nuclear reactors. That amendment resulted in a shit ton of fun backyard experiments across that twenty year-time span that caused a bunch of nuclear meltdowns and incidents all over the place. (Image, dad pushing kid on swing: I can build a swing set, I can build a nuclear reactor) It also led to the admission that corporate America just flat out wouldn’t participate in something as risky as the nuclear energy game without being completely backed up and safeguarded by the authority and resources of the U.S. government. What?? Companies that want to reap all the benefits but not do any of the hard work up front. That doesn’t sound familiar at all…. We certainly wouldn’t stand for that kind of one-sided abusive relationship today…. You get it? You get it? You get it? Cuz we do.


In 1974, the same year that unit 1 was switched on at three mile island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. The NRC is an independent agency that’s meant to oversee commercial nuclear power plants, along with other commercial and civilian uses of nuclear material. Because of the public embrace of nuclear power and its commercial viability along with the subsidies and assistance companies were receiving to build plants, the NRC was immediately overwhelmed by the workload placed at its feet. There were some regulators who insisted that the potential for accidents was actually the least concern, but others who were pretty adamant that was only true because the pathways to possible accidents simply weren’t thoroughly researched yet.


In 1976, two years after Unit 1 was built at TMI, four nuclear engineers, one from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and another from General Electric, all resigned in protest of the industry. They insisted that nuclear power as it currently operated was not as safe as was advertised, and they collectively testified to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to voice their growing concerns. Stating in part that "the cumulative effect of all design defects and deficiencies in the design, construction and operations of nuclear power plants makes a nuclear power plant accident, in our opinion, a certain event. The only question is when, and where.”


Spooky segue after foreshadowing to the dreaded Unit 2!!!!! OoOoOooOoooOOOOooooo!!!!!


If that didn’t clue you in, Unit 2 is the one that's gonna make us all a little bit sad.


And this is why this drink is here! One day while I was driving home from somewhere the thought popped in my head that there’s a Long Island iced tea, so is there also a Three Mile Island iced tea? And sure enough, there absolutely is. So that’s what I have right here. There are a bunch of different recipes online, but what they all have in common is a shit ton of alcohol. This one is a modified version of what's officially called a radioactive Three Mile Island iced tea, which has eight different shots of alcohol in it and no mixer. Full disclosure, I did make modifications to it so that I wouldn’t die immediately while filming this video. I’ll put the recipe in the description below so you can get in on this with me because watching this content will make you thirsty for not feeling your feelings anymore.


Like any second child, Unit 2 came with some problems. Now, Unit 1 was built on schedule and went online in 74 without any issues or glitches. Unit 2, however, had been scheduled to switch on and be fully operational by 1976, but instead took two additional years to finish due to various snags causing construction delays. And then after it went online, it actually experienced several unscheduled shutdowns due to glitches in facility operations. If you’re as alarmed as I was to discover the concept of the unscheduled shutdown of a nuclear reactor and the fact that it’s described in such innocuous-sounding language, let me give you a couple of tidbits of info about that.


An unscheduled shutdown is the sad, step-child equivalent of a scheduled shutdown. Scheduled shutdowns happen because the plant needs some kind of maintenance or upkeep, or is in need of refueling. Referred to as scrams, or reactor trips, an unscheduled shutdown happens when something goes very wrong. This could be in the form of environmental factors like a massive snowstorm or flooding, or in the case of Unit 2 at TMI, it was often caused by weird instrument readings or design glitches.


Unbelievably, these glitches and shutdowns happened so often and were so annoying to plant workers that somewhere along the way someone decided to just stop reporting them. The NRC was overwhelmed anyway, so I mean, honestly they were just giving those guys a much needed break. No big deal. The lack of reporting and outright fudging of data was so egregious that in 1983, a federal grand jury indicted the Metropolitan Edison Company for faking reports coming from Unit 2. You can probably guess by now where this is headed, at least partially.


By the time the radiated turds were about to hit the fan, Unit 2 was really ready for it. Its constant weird glitches and random scrams had desensitized workers to the fact that they were operating a highly dangerous, failure-prone Godzilla furnace, and they’d been actually conditioned to ignore any signals that things were awry. The NRC was out of the picture because they didn’t know what was happening, and the regulators there might have wanted to take a second look at things if they’d known the truth about unit 2’s malfunctions. There was no third-party impartial oversight in a pressurizing situation.


This whole pressure cooker leads us to the early morning hours of March 28th, 1979, when Unit 2 would become an actual real-life pressure cooker. At around 4am, alarms begin going off. But, you know, what’s abnormal about that in a work environment where alarms are always going off? You ever put in an order at a fast food place and the claxons sound with a hearty fury of a thousand exploding geese? And nobody except you reacts at all. Definitely not anyone working there. Cuz yeah, that’s just how life behind the counter always is. Loud, loud. Annoying and loud. It just gets tuned out if you actually have to live with it all the time. Nothing is an emergency when everything is an emergency.


Okay, so Unit 2 had a bad case of the gremlins. We’ve established that it was very glitchy, which is not what you want to see in your friendly neighborhood nuclear reactor, honestly. In reality, what began happening at 4am is that for reasons we still don’t fully understand today, feedwater pumps that carry cooling water to the steam generators randomly shut off. And I kid you not, but the backup feedwater pumps had been accidentally turned off just days before. They’d been running tests recently and someone had to manually open and close those valves, so after shutting the backup pumps down for the last time, they just forgot to open that up again and just left it like that. Oops. No one working at the time of the accident knew that, so they were all operating under the assumption that the backup pumps had switched on like they were supposed to when the main pumps failed, and they were working fine and there was water flowing to the steam generators. You might be thinking, but wouldn’t there be some kind of indication on the instrument panel that the backup pumps weren’t working correctly? Well, and I shit you not even more, but the backup pumps had a history of just coming on by themselves sometimes, so workers had grown accustomed to just ignoring the readings about them.


No cooling water reaching the steam generators meant that all the heat and pressure produced inside the reactor core was just building and building. Fortunately, workers did notice this increase in pressure and that part was monitored correctly by the plant’s instruments, so they opened a relief valve to vent the building pressure inside. Sounds good, all fixed. Our three mile island episode is over now. Roll credits.


Yeah, no, don’t do that, it’s not over. So, that relief valve was designed to close after a while when pressure levels lowered beneath acceptable thresholds again, but unbeknownst to workers, and I continue to shit you not some more, but the relief valve actually got stuck in the open position and couldn’t close again. And because the instruments at Unit 2 sucked a whole lot and just didn’t work sometimes, there were no indications that the valve didn’t shut. They all thought it had. Everyone carried on as if it was closed and everything was going just fine in the valve department. For several hours. Spoiler alert; this is going to be a problem.


So to recap, at this point, workers thought that cooling water was flowing to the steam generators from the backup pumps even though it wasn’t, and they also thought that the relief valve had shut after it vented the excess pressure from the core. Now, they were dealing with a loss of coolant that they couldn’t identify the source of. Because what was happening was that the coolant water that should normally fill the whole reactor core vessel was being boiled away as radioactive steam. And guess what? Some of that horrible sky porridge was escaping through the stuck open pressure relief valve.


The way the reactor was designed, there was also no way to visibly see how much water was in the core. You couldn’t just look with your eyes and confirm the readings if they were feeding you the wrong information, which would have been an especially important design decision in a reactor where all the readings were always wrong. Except there actually were no readings that could be wrong in this case, because there were no instruments that measured coolant water levels in the core. Water was just always supposed to be in there, filled all the way to the top of the vessel, so nobody thought there was even a need to measure that. Except now that coolant was all being boiled away and there was no way to know that.


The open valve was causing pressure to lower at the same time that readings indicated that water levels were rising. This was not a situation that workers were trained for. Water and pressure either rose together or fell together, so it was like, uh…shrug? To stop the plummeting pressure levels, they turned off the reactor coolant pumps, which cut water that circulated through the pressure vessel housing the core. Someone was supposed to check some gauges before they did this, but that person later admitted that they didn’t check all of them. And with the existing water being boiled off into an airborne toxic event, it wasn’t long until the reactor core was exposed.


One thing you guys should know about that situation: it’s bad.


Okay, so the core was overheating at this point and that led to now partially exposed fuel rods to react with the growing levels of steam and the reactor fuel began to melt. At its peak, the core reached a temperature of 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit, or freedom heat.


Nobody figured out they needed to check the water levels in the pressure vessel until 7am, three hours after the accident began. By then, half the reactor core had melted. You don't need that. I don't think you need that. Oh, you do? It's super important? It's where all the uranium dioxide fuel pellets live and melting is a bad condition for uranium powered nuclear fuel to be in? Hmm.


At 7am, someone got the bright idea to check coolant water levels in the core vessel, and they were like, holy butt crackers.


They turned the pumps back on, but ya know, it was way too late. And they were able to manually shut that stuck open pressure release valve. I haven't heard about the fellow whose job that had to be, but I do wonder what must have been going through their mind when they went off to slam down the lid on a gigantic radioactive steam-billowing tea kettle with their bare hands.


Later on, one of the workers would report that there were so many alarms going off all at once that it was as if the instrument panel had lit up like a Christmas tree. At one point, the alarm that signaled radiation contamination inside the control room went off, so everybody rushed to throw on full protective gear, and was running around all morning in those big floppy radiation condoms.


It might be a good idea at this point to talk about what happens in a nuclear meltdown. What, in fact, is actually melting? And why is that bad? Like, melted chocolate is awesome. I'm pretty into that. At one point I was learning how to make these really awesome edible dessert bowls by dripping melted chocolate over the end of a balloon. It did not go well. Which is a cool coincidence, because neither does melting uranium fuel pellets.


A meltdown is an unofficial term that refers to the core of the reactor either partially or fully melting. Like actually melting. In a pressurized water reactor, which three mile island and most of the world’s reactors are, coolant water is heated by nuclear fission in the core, and ultimately that heated water creates steam that turns turbines, and those turbines create the electricity. Lots of electricity generation is ultimately just turbines in the end. It’s turbines, all the way down. Turbines, turbines, turbines. You make some steam, you spin a thing, you get to run your leaf blower or whatever. Is nuclear fission a little overkill to make steam to run a leaf blower? I don’t know, but it’s kind of awesome. If for some reason the water situation is awry, there isn’t enough coolant to keep the core where the fuel rods are from overheating, because that part of the reactor is literally designed to just get really hot, that’s the whole point, to heat the water and make steam. It can spiral out of control if the water isn’t there, or the coolant water pumps aren’t pushing fresh water to the steam generators. In that case, it’s peanut butter reactor meltaway time.


The major concern with a meltdown in the beginning of the nuclear power sector was the concept of the China syndrome. It’s a horribly middle school racism kind of name that isn’t even remotely geographically accurate. The country on the other side of the world from the U.S. is the f*cking ocean. You know, since the earth is over seventy percent water. But the thinking was that if a reactor core melted down, all of that superheated radioactive sludge would just tunnel all the way through the earth and out the other side to China, which is again, not what's on the other side. I also don’t know how literal anyone thought that was, since the Earth itself has like, stuff in the way of that happening, like a big molten core and stuff, but sure, any kind of tunneling anywhere that’s done by radioactive sludge is kind of bad.


This idea got picked up by pop culture and became widespread throughout the early nuclear age, so much so that a major movie called the China Syndrome came out in 1979 starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas. The film was a major success and made a ton of money. Jack Lemmon won a thing for it and it was nominated for four academy awards. But the most notable fact about this movie is that it came out just twelve days before the meltdown at three mile island.


I actually saw the China Syndrome at the summer movie series in Bryant Park over a decade ago now, and while I can’t say I remember much about it, honestly, the one thing I do remember is that at one point in the film they say the name of the movie, like when they’re describing the actual thinking behind the radioactive tunneling idea and say it at the end of this dramatic explanation -- “the China Syndrome,” and everyone in the audience just goes “OooOooooooooo!!! The China Syndrome!!!! They said it!!!!”


Okay, so three mile island is melting down and the public is keyed up over a big blockbuster thriller about a nuclear reactor meltdown. It's a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Fortunately slash unfortunately, depending on how you look at corporate responsibility and accountability, they just didn’t tell anyone for several days so nobody really knew they needed to panic, so they didn’t. The leading theory is that eventually some bits and pieces of radio chatter were intercepted and that began stoking the flames of rumor about the accident, and soon there was mounting pressure and mass confusion, and a public revolt was indeed on its way. At one point, emergency sirens in Harrisburg were triggered, and that amplified the growing pandemonium even more. (image: what’s that noise? lol)


The nuclear regulatory commission arrived on the scene and were like “what in blue blazes have you guys been doing?” They evaluated the evidence on the ground and advised then Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh to declare an evacuation, and he kind of did, but he waited a ton of time to do it, and part of that was Metropolitan Edison’s fault, too, because of their complete lack of transparency with state and local officials. But days after the accident Thornburgh suggested a limited recommended evacuation, where he was like, “hey, if you’re a tiny child or if you’re a person who’s pregnant with a tiny child, you might want to think about getting out of here, but you also don’t have to so don’t even worry about it.” No surprise, in the week after the accident, 140k residents were like, “f*ck this, I’m going to Ohio.” I don’t know if they actually went to Ohio when they left, but it makes sense to evacuate there since no one wants to be in Ohio any other time. But joke’s on them, since one of the most expensive nuclear reactors ever built is actually outside of Cleveland.


Fun family history fact but my grandparents were on their way to the annual farm show in Harrisburg during the evacuation, and they could not figure out for the life of them why all the cars were lined up on the other side of the road going the opposite direction and they were the only car on the road into Harrisburg.


At this point, some of the greatest minds in nuclear physics and engineering are pouring over the conditions at three mile island, and in the middle of all this intense scrutiny and math magic analysis someone says, “hey wait a minute, from what I’m seeing, and I don’t know about you guys, are you seeing this? Are you seeing this? but I mean, maybe it’s just me here, but there very well could be a gigantic cloud of superheated hydrogen gas building at the top of the pressure vessel just waiting to explode and irradiate everything in the known world to death.” This was obviously really bad, and the thought was that the growing hydrogen gas cloud would mix with oxygen and create a potential explosion that would spray highly radioactive gas and particulate matter for miles and miles in every direction and cause absolute catastrophic devastation. Some people were also worried about whether or not any radioactive coolant water or other runoff was finding its way into the Susquehanna, which would ultimately flow onward into the Chesapeake Bay and become a very big public health and ecological disaster. On top of that, everyone was also incredibly concerned about the radioactive steam they knew had already escaped through the pressure relief valve that had been stuck open for hours as the reactor was melting down.


The debate about the damage the plant could still do raged on for days up until the moment President Jimmy Carter arrived on ground at the power plant. Now, President Carter had been a naval nuclear engineer himself, so he was actually no stranger to what was happening here and probably a great deal more helpful to the conversation and potential solutions than many officials who tour disaster areas nowadays. They mostly do this solely for publicity photos that grant them the appearance that they’re actually doing anything at all. In a lot of cases, it is actually an enormous logistical hindrance to have a president or other official onsite during a disaster scenario due to things like Secret Service protection and travel, so please stop insisting that people visit things. Like, what does anyone think that’s going to accomplish? Do you think people need to see something in person to know it’s bad? Demanding that the administration interrupt the current Hurricane Helene and now hurricane Milton cleanup, for instance, is only going to waste time and resources and put lives at risk. It’s just dumb. Don’t be dumb. Think with your brain.


Necessary disclaimer here, but I’m not a nuclear engineer by trade, so I apologize for any errors, mistakes, or omissions I’ve made in the process or the science, and if you found anything I’ve said to be untrue or misleading in that regard then please feel free to bring your own clarification in the comments. I’d definitely appreciate it and I’d truly be ecstatic if those watching this video could learn more about the subject from that discussion.


Okay, so what sort of disastrous nuclear wraith-making apocalypse came from all the terrifying possibilities poised to launch from the infected bowels of three mile island’s unit 2? In terms of health effects? Well, like, nothing, actually. Nobody died. Nobody tripped and pulled up a toenail. Nobody got a sunburn, or even some dry skin. Now I actually didn’t know that, even growing up in Pennsylvania, because all you ever hear about are these dark, shadowy undertones of spooky scariness coming out of the mouths or side-eye glances of anyone mentioning three mile island.


And yeah, it was the worst commercial nuclear power plant disaster in the history of the U.S. And lots and lots and lots of serious problems and outright malfeasance took place, which we’ll talk about, but none of it manifested in any negative public health outcomes. Measurements taken from the immediate vicinity after the meltdown was halted found that radiation dosage was just one millirem above background for the area. To give a little context, a chest x-ray confers a six millirem dose of radiation. The effects were negligible, but certainly widespread. Researchers found elevated radiation levels at a distance of sixteen miles surrounding the plant. But even now, after decades of combing through data from health outcomes of Pennsylvania residents, no evidence was ever found that three mile island caused cancer rates to rise or put anyone in danger of other conditions or diseases. Which is a bummer, because this channel is all about the awful things that people do to each other. So while we don’t have any horrible physical consequences or nuke-worshipping Fallout cultists popping up as a result of the accident at TMI’s unit 2, there are plenty of other kinds of awful things to talk about here. Plus, there’s the whole Microsoft takeover that we’re going to get into, and that has some truly awful implications for the future in a different way, as well.


A lot of awfulness really was identified in the aftermath of the meltdown. The NRC’s explanation from an informational rundown about the accident on their website has this to say: “A combination of equipment malfunctions, design-related problems and worker errors led to TMI-2’s partial meltdown and very small off site releases of radioactivity.” Sooooo….. equipment malfunctions, design-related problems, worker errors -- human error then, lol. All of those things amount to human error. The equipment didn’t maintain itself, the plant sure as shit didn’t design itself either. People screwed up in a variety of ways across a broad length of time in order for this failure to manifest.


Existing systems weren't followed properly, as with the gauge-checking miscreant who didn't follow procedure and the whole thing where plant workers were completely faking their reports to the NRC to avoid any regulatory oversight and potential loss of income if all the glitchy reactor tech was found out about. The failure of Metropolitan Edison was in its similar lack of transparency with government officials, and had the hydrogen gas explosion occurred it's very easy to assume they might have been held criminally liable. If you've seen any videos on this channel, you know that I personally believe corporate malfeasance to be a legally mandated feature, not a bug. Losing money is not an option, losing lives is simply the cost of doing business.


Even though there were no casualties, the accident at three mile island still brought about enormous changes across numerous sectors including emergency response systems, nuclear plant operator training, engineering, radiation protection, and more. The NRC also tightened its regulatory authority over the nuclear energy sector so they would never be in the dark about reactor operations again.


TMI was a major factor that led to the U.S. divesting itself of nuclear energy production. Protests followed in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and the falling economic prospects of future nuclear reactors caused plans for dozens of plants to be canceled. Unit 2 never reopened, it took 14 years to fully clean up and it wasn't finished until 1993. All the melted fuel sludge that'll be radioactive for bazillions of years is buried in concrete at the Idaho national laboratory. And it cost one billion dollars to repair all the damage.


A lot of people probably aren’t aware that Unit 1 never permanently shut down, but was brought back online in 1985 and operated all the way up until 2019. It’s been involved in a lengthy decommissioning process ever since. This planned decommissioning was going to take sixty years and cost a billion dollars. All that's changed now because we're going back to the island!!!!


We have to go back!!!!


We built a big dinosaur island and we need to make sure we keep inventing thinner and thinner excuses to go back and make more sequels. Wait it's a whole world now? What?


One thing that may surprise you if you've managed to watch this far is that this is actually not an anti-nuclear power video. Nuclear energy production is actually an important part of the green energy portfolio. And we're going to need to shift to it more quickly in order to save ourselves from the climate change crisis and utter extinction. For more on that, see my three part series on climate change which I'll link to down in the digeridoo.


We're now well past Wild West times in terms of nuclear power. Current technology is making nuclear energy generation exceedingly safe. In the U.S., there are currently 93 functioning generation 2 reactors that have each been made incrementally safer over time through new developments and retrofitting. Even better than that though, there are plans to launch generation 3 and 4 nuclear reactors over the next decade. These new reactors, called small modular reactors or SMRs, have been designed from the ground up for better safety features and improved emergency fail-safes, especially for environmental hazards like major storms and earthquakes.


Microsoft restarting the plant to power AI data centers:

This brings us to Microsoft's announcement that its unholy capitalist clerics are about to resurrect the entombed uranium beast of three mile island. This isn’t even the only reactor set to reopen in the coming years. Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is also slated to be brought back online. But it is the only reactor poised to have just one client, and that client is a gigantic, globe-spanning technocorp.


The current owner of TMI is Constellation Energy. Constellation Energy is the largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S. They control 20% of the sector. Constellation has agreed to pay $1.6 billion to perform repairs and maintenance on Unit 1 to get it fully operational once again, and they estimate that process will be finished by 2028. At that point, the NRC will evaluate and have approval authority over Unit 1 before it’s allowed to fire up again. The announcement to resurrect three mile island comes at a time when artificial intelligence or AI is becoming prolific across the private and corporate landscape and causing all kinds of fever and fervor from all ends of the spectrum. At some point I'm going to make a fun video breaking down the realities of AI and its current usage and potential usage and consequences. For now we'll just say that it's become a super convenient corporate scapegoat to scale back on labor costs and give executives with no formal training in any field at all the ability to pretend that they're an artist, or a hacker, or even just competent at sending basic emails.


Okay, there’s new tech available that makes nuclear plants much safer these days, so that’s not really the issue for me. This move is mostly stupid because, once again, progress is only made when a gigantic corporation feels like it makes sense for them, when it'll finally make a nice little difference in their bottom line. And a plant operator is willing to invest billions into revitalizing old equipment instead of just building newer, safer, but more expensive equipment, all because that giant corporation is going to make them rich with its business. Cool. Super cool. So let’s definitely not do the green new deal to create vital jobs and clean infrastructure, let’s do it to bolster a corporate movement that’s working hard to put people out of jobs. And let’s not actually use the safest and most effective tech around, but let’s retrofit older plants and cut costs. Sounds about right. This is all par for the course now while America is hijacked by corporate interests.


Case in point. This one idiot called Andre supposedly works on “energy policy” and does so at a super-partisan think tank called the Commonwealth Foundation. He was asked about the Microsoft Three Mile Island Deal, and he told NPR that self-serving shitty corpo types are somehow actually going to be the ones to finally save the world with affordable clean energy. “The Microsoft deal is making the reactor viable again,” he said. He claims it’s just proof of the market at work.


Andre the Giant (idiot) goes on to say that, and I quote, “Refiring the closed reactor through private investment demonstrates that Pennsylvania does not need subsidies for nuclear power. The market will deliver reliable, affordable, and clean power far better than government central planning, and here is a case study demonstrating it.” Sure yeah dude, despite generations of evidence that corporate interests and your so-called free market lobbyists have fought tooth and nail against green energy initiatives so they could avoid spending money on switching to that clean energy infrastructure and keep making a killing while burning fossil fuels that are cooking our whole planet alive, they are also somehow way better than the government at implementing those initiatives. Initiatives that your government central planning bogeyman has had to force them to abide by, one painful court case and regulatory push at a time over fifty f*cking years. That makes sense, Andre. You are clearly making objectively accurate points with no bias included there. These people are just completely morally bankrupt. And we cannot give them any credit for any of the progress they have fought extremely hard to bring to a screeching halt. These people are the elementary school bullies who grow up to work the mines and now pretend they were actually Bill Gates’s best friends back in the day when they were slamming his head against the Merry-Go-Round. The only thing they live for is material wealth and power, and a way to feel validated inside to erase whatever dark void exists there instead of loving relationships. What I - and I hope - other people like me live for is making sure people can breathe air. Crazy.


So what can we do? These people and the companies they work for need to be regulated, and we need to make sure that happens. The NRC is great, but it's still captured by the market forces that allow corporations to get away with simply not pursuing the best options available.


So yes, we should be pursuing nuclear power because it's a phenomenal energy producer and can make a big difference in clean infrastructure and help to eliminate fossil fuels faster. But we should insist that the plants actually be safe and utilize the best available tech to ensure that reality. If Constellation Energy wants to operate Unit 1 at Three Mile Island to make Bill Gates money, then they need to do it optimally and safely.


To that end, the NRC has made resources available for the public to look over. I’ll put that link below. You’ll find that you and all of us have the ability to submit our input and steer the process of Unit 1’s refiring. Make sure to read the associate documents and review the proposal, and give your honest input with the facts you have available. Let’s make sure we live in a safe and sane, reasonable world, avoiding one small disaster at a time. Let’s do some f*cking good about Three Mile Island.




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