An environmental watchdog group wants Pennsylvania’s environmental protection office to pressure an interstate regulator to step in on water use at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, according to a request the group sent this week.
Three Mile Island Alert asked the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Wednesday to petition the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), an interstate water quality regulator, to adjust water withdrawal limits at Three Mile Island to “comport with the actual needs of Exelon and TMI-2 Solutions,” according to an email from watchdog chair Eric Epstein.
TMI-2 Solutions, an EnergySolutions subsidiary, is decommissioning Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) after purchasing it from FirstEnergy in 2019. Exelon owns Unit 1.
DEP should also ask the companies to “provide the amount of groundwater and surface water” required to deactivate and decommission the Dauphin County, Pa. plant’s Units 1 and 2 reactors as well as a plan for disposing of radioactive water waste associated with decommissioning, Epstein said.
A spokesperson for DEP declined to comment on Epstein’s request.
The watchdog has been sounding the alarm about water use at Three Mile Island for several months. Epstein last week filed a public records request with Pennsylvania’s public service commission, which has been investigating the issue since July. A spokesperson for the commission declined to comment on the status of the investigation at the time.
The SRBC also conducted its own investigation into water use at TMI-2, but a spokesperson told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing in July that it hadn’t uncovered any evidence of illegality.
Three Mile Island Alert first claimed back in February that TMI-2’s sale to EnergySolutions from FirstEnergy didn’t include water quality certifications from interstate regulators required by the Clean Water Act. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees such transactions, has repeatedly rejected agency-level petitions from the watchdog on those grounds.
Epstein has said that he plans to challenge the sale in federal court, but at deadline Thursday he had yet to file suit.
TMI-2 has been offline since 1979, when a partial core meltdown caused one of the worst radiological releases in U.S. history.
