Is the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant still there?

The new Netflix documentary series Meltdown: Three Mile Island is out now and streaming on the platform. For those unfamiliar, the Three Mile Island accident included a partial meltdown of one of the power plant units only a few months after its installation.

At the time, nuclear plants were being sold as progress toward a better, cleaner future. People did not believe that a major accident could happen, but Three Mile Island became the worst commercial nuclear accident on U.S. soil, although, thankfully, no one died due to the accident.

Meltdown is a four-part series that explores the incident, how it happened and the eventual fallout.

Is the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant still running?

Three Mile Island consisted of two units. Unit 1 opened in 1974 and Unit 2 in 1978. Unit 2 was permanently shutdown after the accident in 1979 while Unit 1 continued to operate until 2019 when it was shut down after the plant had been struggling financially for decades. The backlash against the usage of nuclear energy after the accident was tremendous and halted the industry’s growth.

As of 2022, Three Mile Island is no longer in operation and both units are undergoing a decommissioning process that will take several decades to complete.

Is Three Mile Island still radioactive?

Unfortunately, radiation doesn’t just go away. Even Chernobyl still has areas that are permanently sequestered due to radiation.

“TMI is going to remain radioactive for the rest of human history,” says Eric Epstein, a Harrisburg-based nuclear watchdog speaking with Lancaster Online.

As mentioned, decommissioning the nuclear power plant will take decades, likely upwards of 60 years, and even after that, some nuclear waste will likely remain onsite. Both Units are working toward decommissioning, but they are owned by different companies.

EnergySolutions is in charge of the Unit 2 process and hope to be finished by 2037 while Unit 1 was originally owned by Exelon but recently transferred to Constellation Energy. Since Unit 1 was only shutdown a few years ago, the decommissioning process is expected to take until at least 2078.

The island itself will remain a radioactive site for the foreseeable future. But how does that affect residents living nearby? If you watch the docuseries, it’s easy to understand why people were so concerned at the time of the accident, and still are.

Misinformation and companies taking alleged shortcuts during the clean-up efforts made it seem like those involved cared more about the bottomline and making money than peoples’ lives. Reports suggest there were no injuries, deaths or adverse health effects caused by the accident, but some documentary subjects disagree, citing things like rivers full of dead fish and kids coming home covered in lesions one might see from radiation poisoning.

Are there active nuclear power plants in the United States today?

According to the docuseries, only two new reactors have been licensed in the United States since 1979. Each is billions of dollars over budget and has yet to open. Per a report from the U.S. NRC, there are licenses approved for eight more nuclear reactors, but only two (units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia) are currently under construction—which is what I’m guessing the documentary statistic was referring to.

Nuclear power plants generate approximately 18.9% of the electricity in the United States. CNBC reports that there are 93 commercial nuclear reactors operating in the United States at 55 locations in 28 states, with most of the nuclear reactors in the eastern portion of the U.S. Twenty-five reactors are in the process of decommissioning.