Lancaster County to get Pa. funds for Three Mile Island emergency planning
Constellation Energy Corp. hopes to restart Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 reactor, to supply Microsoft data centers with low-carbon energy.SUZETTE WENGER | Staff Photographer
With the Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear reactor slated to reopen next year, Lancaster County is set to receive additional state funding for nuclear emergency response planning.
The Board of Commissioners on Wednesday is set to approve a $36,500 grant from the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency to help cover the salary of a response manager who is updating the county’s response plans to a nuclear disaster for the Lancaster County Emergency Management Division.
The Lancaster County Salary Board approved the creation of the radiological planner position in October.
The plans include “everything from how we communicate and notify people, as well as to how we’re going to evacuate people, so we have somebody specifically focused on rebuilding all of that from the ground up,” Department of Public Safety Director Brian Pasquale said.
In 2024, Constellation Energy announced plans to reopen Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island facility and gave it a new name — Crane Clean Energy Center. The sole customer for the facility’s 835 megawatts of expected output is Microsoft, which has signed a 20-year agreement to buy power for its growing network of data centers.
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In December, Constellation Chief Executive Joe Dominguez said he expects the facility to be operational in the summer of 2027, a year earlier than initially planned. He said its opening will come at a pivotal time to “power this important revolution in AI.”
Unit 2 has remained closed since its partial meltdown in 1979, and its owner, Energy Solutions, in the process of decommissioning the reactor.
Unit 1 remained in operation until 2019, when Constellation closed it, citing cost concerns.
On Monday, Lancaster County’s emergency preparedness team held its first tabletop exercise related to the reopening of the Three Mile Island site, Pasquale said at Tuesday’s commissioners work session.
Tabletop exercises are a planning tool to game out specific real-world scenarios to put plans and procedures to the test in a low-stakes environment.
The PEMA dollars for the county comes from the Radiological Emergency Response Program, funded by fees assessed to nuclear operators.
