NRC to hold meetings on Three Mile Island’s potential restart

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold two public meetings on July 31 and Aug. 6 to discuss the potential restart of Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly known as Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, in Middletown, Pa.

The July 31 meeting will be held in-person at Capitol Union Building, on the Penn State Harrisburg campus, in Middletown, Pa. from 6-8 p.m Eastern Time. The Aug. 6 meeting will be a webinar held on Microsoft Teams from 4-6 p.m. 

The two meetings will discuss the recent activities of the NRC’s Crane Clean Energy Center Restart Panel. The panel, formed earlier this year, is tasked with reviewing, inspecting and confirming if the plant is able to return to operating again.

Crane Clean Energy Center’s unit 1, which is separate from Unit 2 which shut down in 1979 after a partial core meltdown, was shut down in 2019 for economic reasons. Constellation Energy intended to decommission the plant, however, late last year the company announced plans to restart it.

Along with plans to restart, Constellation also requested the name of the plant to be changed from Three Mile Island to Crane Clean Energy Center, naming it after Christopher Crane, former president and CEO of Exelon, who died in April 2024. NRC approved the name change on May 13.

This is only the second time a nuclear company has sought to restart a permanently shut down U.S. nuclear plant, according to the NRC. The Crane Clean Energy Center is a 2,568 megawatt pressurized water reactor.