Three Mile Island: Nuclear name change and social media strategies show power of AI energy push
'When I say 'nuclear', you say 'energy',' Grace Stanke, the 2023 Miss America winner-turned-nuclear energy engineer and advocate, shouted to the crowd at the site of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also took part in the rally with 400 in attendance, many of them Constellation Energy employees.
'This restart will safely take advantage of existing infrastructure while creating thousands of energy jobs and strengthening Pennsylvania's legacy as a national energy leader,' the Democratic Governor said.
Initially named Three Mile Island Unit 1, (TMI1), the reactor, which is shut down, now goes by the name Crane Clean Energy Centre.
This name change followed last year's announcement by Constellation Energy and Microsoft of a two-decade power purchase agreement, under which the plant will resume operations to fill a potential energy grid gap created by power-hungry AI data centres.
That announcement raised eyebrows in part because Three Mile Island played a large role in creating a stigma around nuclear energy that has lingered in the US for many years.
In 1979, the core of the plant's Unit 2 reactor was partially exposed, leading to a temporary evacuation of the nearby area and a lengthy clean-up.
Debate and studies continue into the potential health effects stemming from the accident. A recent Netflix documentary also reignited interest and controversy about Three Mile Island (TMI).
Constellation touched on the 1979 accident in its announcement of the Microsoft deal with Microsoft, attempting to make clear the damaged reactor was not going to be part of the new project.
'The Unit 1 reactor is located adjacent to TMI Unit 2, which shut down in 1979 and is in the process of being decommissioned by its owner, Energy Solutions,' the Constellation said. 'TMI Unit 1 is a fully independent facility, and its long-term operation was not impacted by the Unit 2 accident.'
Yet despite the recent rally held by Constellation, and even amid several polls showing nuclear energy receiving more support in recent years, not everybody is on board with the project.
'The name change is not about remembering, it's about forgetting,' said Eric Epstein, director of Three Mile Island Alert, a grass roots safe energy organisation founded in 1977, two years before the Unit 2 accident.
Mr Epstein, who unsuccessfully filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to oppose the name change, has not backed down from his critiques of Constellation's partnership with Microsoft, and for that matter, the much touted nuclear renaissance driven by AI energy demands.
'The name change is intended to honour Chris Crane, the former CEO of Exelon, who presided over a massive nuclear corruption scheme resulting in a $200 million fine,' he said.
The name change is an 'attempt to establish a fictional narrative divorced from past misdeeds,' he told The National.
As well as Mr Epstein's concerns about nuclear waste storage, the lingering clean-up at Unit 2 and fears about potential over-running costs that might burden taxpayers, he has alleged that Pennsylvanians will not be benefiting from the electricity generated once Crane Energy Centre goes online.
'The partnership between data centres and nuclear power plants has the potential to meet the needs of data centres, but does nothing to address the energy needs of businesses, consumers and farmers,' he recently told the Pennsylvania public utility commission.
Yet in terms of nationwide public sentiment, Mr Epstein might be fighting an uphill battle.
According to Pew Research polling last month, about 59 per cent of US citizens now support nuclear energy as a way to meet the country's energy demands.
Other US technology companies have joined in the push for nuclear energy to plug the electricity gap potentially posed by AI technology.
Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, recently teamed up with Constellation for a 20-year power purchase agreement to revive a nuclear plant in Illinois.
'Nuclear energy from the project will be used to support Meta's operations in the region,' Meta said. 'We're building AI technologies that are transforming the global economy and the way people connect … our data centres enable these innovations.'
As for the Crane Energy Centre in Pennsylvania, Constellation says the plant, originally set to reopen in 2028, is ahead of schedule with some of its regulatory processes, and may be online as early as 2027.
Meanwhile, some still warn the AI tech bubble could burst, meaning many of these deals could be risky. For now, however, the AI investments, data centres and overall infrastructure in need of energy show no sign of slowing down.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
3 hours ago
- The National
Could we learn to read the minds of people trapped in vegetative states?
Twenty years ago groundbreaking research showed that a woman in a vegetative state was actually conscious – and since then these findings have been repeated in many more patients. Yet in the past two decades progress in treating individuals occupying this twilight zone of wakefulness without obvious awareness has remained slow. 'I think this is one of the most difficult areas of clinical medicine that exists today, for lots of reasons,' says Prof Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, the medical school of Cornell University in New York. 'Personally I think one of the reasons is that it makes people very uncomfortable, because we haven't yet shown very clearly how to help people who are in this condition.' But could brain-computer interfaces, which translate a person's thoughts into an output in a computer, change all this? In the coming years patients could, says Prof Schiff, be 'put into a situation where they're able to have their intentions of mind and thought read directly from neuronal activity'. Work by Prof Adrian Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Western University in Canada, has been pivotal in helping to improve the understanding of people in a vegetative state. Breakthrough discovery In 1997, while a research fellow at the University of Cambridge in the UK, Prof Owen began using scanners to analyse the brains of patients. When shown pictures of friends and family, Kate Bainbridge, a patient at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge who was in a vegetative state at the time, showed activity in the fusiform gyrus, part of the brain linked to facial recognition. 'I was really excited about this – the fact you had a patient who was completely non-responsive but her brain was activating to familiar faces,' Prof Owen says. 'It really blew my mind. I thought, 'What does it mean?' Is she really there or is her brain on some kind of autopilot where it can recognise faces? It initiated this fascination in this question of whether any of these patients were more than they appeared to be.' Each time a suitable patient came into Addenbrooke's Hospital, which is the major trauma centre for the east of England, Prof Owen would carry out tests – and many patients showed brain activity in response to speech or faces. After seeing several dozen individuals, Prof Owen and his colleagues sought to confirm that the patients were actually conscious. 'Rather than being something automatic, it had to be something that came from the will of the person,' he said. In work carried out two decades ago using functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, the brain of a vegetative state patient lit up in one region when she was asked to imagine playing tennis, and in another region when she was asked to pretend that she was walking around her home. The results tallied with findings from healthy volunteers, indicating that the patient could understand and act upon the instructions she had been given. 'It's fascinating that 20 years later, imagining playing tennis is still the gold standard,' says Prof Owen, who is the author of the book Into the Grey Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death. 'We've done it in different ways and so have other people, but no one has improved on it. It still seems to be the most straightforward way of determining if someone is aware or not.' A 2024 paper, whose authors include Prof Schiff and Prof Owen, analysed findings from 353 patients to confirm earlier results that about a quarter of people regarded as being in a vegetative state are actually aware. Someone may end up in a vegetative state for a variety of reasons, such as a stroke, a cardiac arrest − which can cause a loss of oxygen to the brain − or asphyxiation, perhaps from a swimming pool accident, from being buried under snow in an avalanche or from a failed hanging attempt. Being in a vegetative state is not the same as being brain dead, because, as the UK's National Health Service notes, with the vegetative state the brain stem is functioning and the person usually breathes unaided. While awake, people in a vegetative state typically cannot interact with their surroundings. The brain imaging work, however, opened up the possibility of having interactions with those 25 per cent or so of patients who show awareness: they might be asked to think of playing tennis to answer yes to a question, or to think of walking round their home to answer no. A lifeline for loved ones The realisation that some of patients may actually be conscious has been, Prof Owen says, 'amazing' for their relatives. 'It's really changed the way families treat patients. You can see that every day,' he says. 'Because these patients are largely inanimate and don't really do anything, I think there was a time when they were treated more like objects than people. 'But they much more get treated like people now, certainly by the families that we interact with.' While families may treat vegetative state patients differently, and nurses may, Prof Owen says, talk to them as if they are conscious, medical care has not moved on significantly. Tests, such as the one about playing tennis versus walking round the house, have yet to be standardised so that they can be used routinely by clinicians to find out which patients are conscious. Turning to technology Key to further progress could be brain-computer interfaces, which allow the brain to communicate directly with an external device. While a decade ago these might have let a person to control a mouse over a keyboard, today they can enable a patient to talk just by thinking in a certain way. Prof Schiff, the senior author of the 2024 study, describes the field as being 'just pre-tipping point'. 'For the last 10 years it's been obvious to me that we have tools to try, in the form of brain-computer interface technologies, that could work in some people,' he says. 'We're trying to partner with people to do that, trying to get the resources to do that. It's going to be complicated, it's probably going to fail a lot and it's going to be costly.' He predicts that, five years from now, some vegetative state patients will have been able to express themselves through a brain-computer interface, providing testimony that could spur further progress. 'They will be able to advocate for others who are not yet able to do that,' he says. 'It may take more than one or two people. It may take a while. This takes a long time for people to get their minds around. This is not an easy space to navigate.' Just as this area of medicine may be poised for a breakthrough in clinical practice, the original work led by Prof Owen continues to captivate observers. 'There's interest in making a movie now, which is quite exciting,' Prof Owen says. 'There is a script being circulated and financing in place, so I think a movie will appear in the next couple of years, which is quite exciting. 'It's such a fascinating story – a fascinating science story, but I think the fact people continue to be interested in it shows it's a really interesting human-interest story as well.'
The National
4 hours ago
- The National
UN nuclear inspectors leave Iran
The UN nuclear watchdog said its inspectors left I ran on Friday after Tehran suspended co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency following Israeli and US strikes on its nuclear sites last month. 'An IAEA team of inspectors today safely departed from Iran to return to the agency headquarters in Vienna, after staying in Tehran throughout the recent military conflict,' the agency said in a post on X. 'IAEA director general Rafael Grossi reiterated the crucial importance of the IAEA discussing with Iran modalities for resuming its indispensable monitoring and verification activities in Iran as soon as possible,' it added. Iran officially suspended its co-operation with the IAEA on Wednesday, when President Masoud Pezeshkian approved a law passed by parliament on June 25, the day after a ceasefire ended a 12-day aerial war with Israel. The law aims to 'ensure full support for the inherent rights of the Islamic Republic of Iran' under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with a particular focus on uranium enrichment, according to Iranian media. Diplomats who spoke to Reuters said the number of IAEA inspectors in Iran was reduced to a handful after the start of the war. Some also expressed concern about the inspectors' safety since the end of the conflict, given fierce criticism of the agency by Iranian officials and media, the agency reported. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday that Iran's future dealings with the IAEA would only be through its Supreme National Security Council, while also reiterating the country's commitment to remain a party to the non-proliferation treaty.
Zawya
4 hours ago
- Zawya
Morocco: His Majesty (HM) the King Congratulates United States (U.S.) President on National Day
On His own behalf and on behalf of the Moroccan people, HM the King extends His warmest congratulations and best wishes for good health and happiness to President Trump, and to the American friendly people for further progress and prosperity, under his wise leadership. The Sovereign takes this opportunity to reiterate how much He values the historical ties between the Kingdom of Morocco and the United States of America, which are rooted in close friendship, constructive cooperation, and mutual esteem. "Our shared commitment to developing our relations has enabled us to give fresh momentum to our strategic partnership, thus paving the way for closer cooperation in various areas of common interest, and promoting stability and development at the regional and the international levels." In this message, the Sovereign reaffirms His unwavering desire to continue working with the American President to further deepen and expand the special relationship between the Kingdom of Morocco and the United States of America. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Kingdom of Morocco - Ministry of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation and Moroccan Expatriates.
