North Philly Notes

This week in North Philly Notes, Allen Dieterich-Ward, author of Cradle of Conservation, revisits the Three Mile Island meltdown and the rise of Clean Coal.

As he picked up the telephone just before 8:00 on the morning of March 28, 1979, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh had no idea the call would help define his legacy and change the course of history. There had been an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, located on the Susquehanna River just ten miles downstream from Harrisburg. Soon the initials “TMI” would become a stand-in for nuclear energy’s dangers, as a simple stuck cooling-system valve eventually resulted in one of the site’s two reactors overheating, causing the worst commercial nuclear power accident in U.S. history. Amid the confusion that ensued over the following five days, pregnant women and children were advised to evacuate the area and nearby schools were closed, even as the plant’s operator, Metropolitan Edison and state and federal officials emphasized the relatively small amount of radiation escaping from the facility. 

While the impact on the environment and public health were ultimately modest compared to other disasters, the accident at TMI had enormous economic and political consequences as activists emphasized the dangers of nuclear power just as trust in scientists, industrial corporations, and government officials was waning. Advocates of “atoms for peace” had depicted nuclear energy as a safe and air-pollution-free improvement on the nineteenth-century technology of burning coal to power steam turbines. As the danger of potential meltdown and questions about storing radioactive waste haunted the nuclear industry after TMI, mining companies and their allies instead cast coal as the responsible solution to the nation’s energy needs. Thornburg “made coal development a major priority” and the state spent $23.6 million to enlarge and modernize coal export facilities in Philadelphia as well as millions more on upgrades to transportation infrastructure. “I believe that Pennsylvania can and should become the energy capital of the northeast,” he declared in 1980.  

Coal-fired electrical generation faced headwinds from federal environmental regulations, however, beginning with the passage of the Clean Air Act  in 1970. Seeking to meet ambient air quality standards in the cheapest way possible, many power plant operators simply built taller exhaust chimneys to disperse pollutants over a broader area. Pennsylvania thus found itself in the awkward position of being both a source and a recipient of environmental and public health problems from power plant emissions, including acid rain. The solution to this riddle was “Clean Coal” – a catch-all term that gained renewed currency as federal and state governments invested enormous sums in the grail-like search for a pollution-free way to generate electricity from the dirtiest of fossil fuels. The vision of Clean Coal provided political cover for Democrats and environmentally moderate Republicans such as Thornburgh by maintaining at least a rhetorical commitment to environmental protection while avoiding alienating miners and their allies in other industrial sectors. 

Technology initially concentrated primarily on decreasing sulfur emissions, the main cause of acid rain and the focus of a cap-and-trade system imposed by amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990.  However, as the effects of climate change became increasingly apparent, carbon capture was added to the growing list of Clean Coal’s goals and, by the early 2000s, proponents could point to “integrated coal gasification combined cycle” power plants that promised a new generation of efficient coal energy production even as nuclear energy remained under a cloud of suspicion and no new reactors came online between 1996 and 2016. In his first campaign for president, Barack Obama embraced clean coal technology that could make America energy independent. “This is America,” he declared in a September 2008 rally. “We figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You can’t tell me we can’t figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work.”    

Of course, this did not happen. Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom, enabled by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the state’s subterranean shale formations, undercut the very need for clean coal.  Soon the Obama administration realized it could meet short-term goals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by simply encouraging the ongoing to shift to natural gas (a set of policy decisions branded a “war on coal” by his political opponents). By 2015, there were more than 70,000 active gas wells in the state, placing it second only to Texas, and energy executives were referring to Pennsylvania as “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Between 2015 and 2022, nearly 4,700 megawatts of the state’s coal-fired electrical generating capacity retired, dropping coal to less than ten percent of total production as natural gas rose to account for more than fifty percent. 

The burning of natural gas produced far less climate-warming carbon dioxide than coal but advocates for wind, solar, and nuclear energy pointed out that these methods caused no emissions at all.  However, with state and federal attempts to meaningfully regulate carbon dioxide emissions thwarted by a series of Republican-backed lawsuits, in 2019 the same market dynamics that undermined coal caused the shuttering of TMI’s second, functioning reactor. The more recent announcement that TMI may be restarted thanks to a deal with Microsoft to power its energy data centers, and technology-neutral tax subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, can thus be seen within the long trajectory of the search for power without pollution. It further points to the ebb and flow of how our society calculates environmental and public health risks – at least for now, the existential threat of climate change seems to be overshadowing the equally existential threat of nuclear meltdown just as thirty years ago, the TMI disaster tipped the scales in favor of coal. Whether and for how long this is the case remains to be seen, as the history of energy production, including the return of natural gas, certainly suggests new technologies as well as new threats can remake the marketplace in unanticipated ways.

Filed under: american studies, environment, health, History, political science | Tagged: activism, carbon dioxide, Clean Coal, climate change, coal, Dick Thornburgh, energy, environment, fossil fuels, fracking, meltdown, natural gas, nuclear, nuclear power, Pennsylvania, pollution, power plant, Public Health, radioactive waste, science, technology, The Clean Air Act, Three Mile Island | Leave a comment »