Colby Cosh: It was hard to love Three Mile Island, but will it be harder to live without?

To people involved in the production, transmission and selling of electric power, the map of North America does not consist of provinces or states. It’s made up of ISOs and RTOs — regulated grid operators who keep the lights on in their various fiefs, some of which are enormous. There is no such thing as California on this map: only CAISO. Ontario is not Ontario: it’s IESO. The largest of these realms, as big as a France-and-a-half, is the majestic PJM Interconnection.

I did say “where they exist” about nuclear plants, and this brings us to the actual news in this column: the surviving power unit at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., was shut down for good on Sept. 20 after 45 years of service to customers through the PJM grid. When Three Mile Island is mentioned we remember the industrial accident that destroyed Unit 2, causing a partial meltdown of its radioactive core, in 1979.

The U.S. has not had any new nuke plants go critical since TMI Unit 2 went kaflooey. Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, they are increasingly being talked about as part of a solution to the climate crisis. I didn’t want to write “alleged climate crisis” there, but talk is about all that is happening. .

NOTE: a copyeditor may or may not have sweated over today's column, straightening out whether it was Unit 1 or Unit 2 that farted radioactive iodine over Pennsylvania in 1979 because the nitwit writer couldn’t keep it straight

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