Transcript of Three Mile Island Is Reopening. Some Climate Scientists are Thrilled.

The United Nations General Assembly is happening here in New York City this week, which means heads of state from around the world are here to talk about a bunch of pressing issues. I invite all leaders' nations to continue supporting our joint efforts for a just and peaceful future. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is going to present President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with a plan to defeat Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his trip as his military ramps up its deadly assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But there's another major event happening in New York alongside the UN stuff. Climate Week, NYC.

We've taken the most ambitious climate action in history. We've moved to rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one. Today, my country is finally on track to cut emissions and in half by 2030.

This is an annual event that encourages global climate action, and where major players come to talk about possible solutions to Earth's most existential crisis. But one of the fixes that's getting a lot of buzz recently is also one of the most divisive dating back decades. My guest is CNN Climate reporter, Ellen Nilsson. She has the story of how nuclear energy is attempting a clean energy comeback. From CNN, This is One Thing. I'm David Reind. So, Ella, is nuclear power back in style? Because I feel like I've been hearing about it a lot recently.

Yeah, you definitely have been. Nuclear power was starting to fade from our collective consciousness, I feel like, after various plant meltdowns.

This is the first time an incident or accident like this has happened in Pennsylvania, which has five nuclear reactor units involving three power companies, which of course, includes Three Mile Island.

In the US, the most recent meltdown was a long time ago, it was the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania. Within days, schools reopened and families came home. On Three Mile Island, workers eventually found out half the reactor core had melted.

It took years to clean it up, and it will be years more, if ever, before nuclear power's reputation fully recovers from what happened at Three Mile Island.

Three Mile Island closed in 2019, and it's among a pretty large number of aging nuclear plants that shut down. But just last week, we learned that Three Mile Island is actually going to reopen in the next few years, and we'll be selling its power to Microsoft to help power AI and data centers. So The project still has regulatory hurdles to clear, and it's going to be an unprecedented thing in the US, but it's a snapshot about how a lot of players, tech companies especially, are embracing it as a way to generate lots of power with no climate pollution.

Well, so before we go any further, I need you to explain this to me, and it's as simple as you possibly can. How does nuclear energy work?

I feel like we think of nuclear energy as really complex, but it's actually pretty simple.

It's really a little bit of a example.

Nuclear energy works by splitting atoms to create heat, which then is basically used to generate electricity by steam, turbines. That's essentially what it is.

And of course, the upside here is that there are no greenhouse gasses emitted, right?

Correct. Nuclear does not emit any CO₂ or methane, the kinds of greenhouse gasses that are dramatically warming the planet. It does, however, create nuclear waste, which is something that the US still needs to figure out how it's going to deal with.

Wait, yeah. Tell me about that. Are you saying that there's still a bunch of nuclear waste just sitting around at Three Mile Island and other sites around the US?

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. That is currently how we deal with nuclear waste. It is just sitting at about 75 sites all over the US, and these sites are power plants that have either shut down or are still going. I will say I feel like the general American population thinks this nuclear waste as green goo in barrels, Homer Simpson-esque. However, the way that it is currently stored around the country, nuclear waste is essentially metal rods that have radiation in them, and they are essentially put into these huge concrete casks that stop the radiation from getting out into the air and the environment. And so these things are being stored safely and can be transported safely. But it still, I would say, looms very large in the American imagination as something that is bad and dangerous.

Right. I mean, we saw in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island incident, there was a lot of concern from the community that even though the government was telling them, yes, this is all safe, there's no actual problems to your health, I think there are still people to this day who feel like there's been adverse effects.

Yeah, and there are lots of different places all over the country. Nevada was supposed to be the host site of Yucca Mountain, which was supposed to be the deep geologic formation that was going to store all of America's nuclear waste.

Energy Department officials hope 70,000 tons of the most lethal atomic leftovers can be safely stored deep within the mountain for 10,000 years. Putting that in perspective, 10,000 years ago, man was just learning to use stone tools.

That has never actually been done because public opposition was so fierce to it that it stopped the projects in its tracks.

But the powers in the capital, Carson City, have been fighting back in court to block Washington at every turn, calling the Uckermoutensite perilous, refusing to issue environmental permits. It seems like the government just slapped it up here and said, This is where it's going to go.

So there are a lot of different communities around the country that are still really fearful about nuclear waste and what a nuclear meltdown might mean for our community.

Well, okay. With all that said, then, why is nuclear being talked about more as a possible solution to the climate crisis?

Nuclear is a really good way to generate the electricity that we are going to need, not just for AI and data centers, although that's certainly a big piece of it. But in order to really decarbonize the US, we are going to be driving electric cars. There's a big push for people to electrify our homes. We are going to need a lot of electricity and clean electricity in order to really bring US emissions down. Currently, the US gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and nuclear has some major pros. It can stay on at all times. It's really reliable, it's easily dispatchable, but there's a push for more nuclear and different kinds of nuclear.

Yeah, we've been willing to go back to the basics and do what people have always said should be done, which is to cool the plant with metal instead of water.

Bill Gates, I don't know if you've heard of. Heard of him, yes. Yeah, I heard of Bill Gates. He's investing in this big project in next generation small of small modular nuclear reactors in Wyoming.

And that means that this problem of high pressure and extra heat when you shut down is completely solved. And so the complexity that's meant that nuclear has gotten more complex and more expensive as it's gone from first to third generation, we change that utterly.

It won't be operational until at least 2030, but it's a really interesting look at the future. The US is racing currently to make fuel for this next generation of nuclear reactors, in part by melting down old nuclear warheads from our stockpile.

It's like weapons into energy.

Yes, literally old weapons into the energy of the future. The problem is in the US, we and other countries have been reliant for decades on Russia for our enriched uranium. That's ending soon because Congress recently passed a ban on importing Russian uranium into the US. But we need to now enrich it at other facilities, really start this supply chain from scratch. Then we've just been talking about nuclear fission, which is just the standard nuclear energy that has been powering reactors for years. There's also nuclear fusion, which is this Holy Grail energy of the future, which could really give us a limitless supply of energy. There are fears that China could be eclipsing the US in nuclear fusion development, and that'll be a hugely important technology to be the first country to get right. The private sector won't be enough to back the widespread investment that's needed on nuclear. So people are looking to the government to really get this going.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask. Do we know, in terms of the government, what a future President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump feel about expanding nuclear energy in the ways that you're talking Yeah.

Democrats and Republicans are both pretty into nuclear energy. It's like one of the rare bipartisan clean energy forms in the US.

On the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that there.

Trump isn't as opposed to nuclear as he is to other forms of energy like wind. He bashes a lot.

Starting on day one, we will end Kamala's war on American energy, and we will drill, baby, drill. We're going to drill, baby, drill.

That's going to bring down- He doesn't really love solar. But the important but here is that Trump wants to slash government funding in general and got a lot of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, which could be a big problem for nuclear. The young people of America care deeply about this issue. I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. The bottom line is the US needs a president and an administration to keep federal investment at current levels, at least, or even invest more when it comes to nuclear energy.

Is that just because it's so darn expensive?

It's really expensive, but also with things like Fusion, I mean, these are technologies that are still pretty nascent, and they just need a lot more development and a lot more work to get right and get to to a commercial level, basically. Essentially, Three Mile Island restarting is pretty unchartered, unprecedented territory for the US, and we're going to see just how difficult it is for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve everything that needs to get approved for this project to go forward. Also, federal regulations in general have been thrown into an unusual level of chaos after the Supreme Court's recent ruling earlier this year that could impact all regulatory agencies. Right.

This is that Chevron case. We talked about it on the show earlier, and basically, if I remember correctly, it was the idea that it's going to make it a lot harder for federal agencies to implement regulations and rules that govern all this stuff.

Yeah. To be clear, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn't really looking to promise promulgate new rules like the EPA, but it still, like I said, is pretty unchartered territory, restarting a plant that has been totally mothballed and closed. We'll see if there are forces on the right or the left that really want to fight it being reopened. But it is definitely something to watch in the legal space, as well as just the regular complex hurdles that this plant will need to get across to reopen.

Ella, thank you.

Thanks so much for having me.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paula Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, James Andres, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We've got another episode coming on Sunday. And in the meantime, as always, if you like the show, just leave a rating and a review or tell a friend. Every little bit helps. I'll talk to you later.