Three Mile Island Update

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Courtesy: Exelon

Exelon's Three Mile Island plant is scheduled to prematurely close in September 2019. The company has been lobbying for help from the state to keep it open.

Nuclear energy’s legacy

Courtesy: Exelon

Exelon’s Three Mile Island plant is scheduled to prematurely close in September 2019. The company has been lobbying for help from the state to keep it open.

• There’s a buyer lined up for Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Marie Cusick reports. The new owner will handle dismantling the facility, a process that will take years.

• PA Post, StateImpact, WITF and PennLive teamed up on a project last spring marking 40 years since TMI’s partial meltdown, considered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. My contribution to the series was a story about a nuclear plant’s legacy in Zion, Ill., 25 years after it closed. In short, the local economy’s never recovered and nuclear waste stranded on the former plant site limits the lakefront property’s potential reuse.

• City leaders had wooed a medical cannabis dispensary to another part of town, which was a big deal for a local government perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. Then, a lawsuit over licensing put those plans on hold. Since my visit in March, Illinois legalized recreational marijuana —  but the licensing case remains tied up in court with no clear timeline for a resolution, Zion officials told me recently.

Best of the rest

Brett Sholtis / Transforming Health

Martha Stringer holds a photo of her daughter, Kim, from when she was in high school. Kim is 27 now.

• Transforming Health reporter Brett Sholtis recently told the story of a family’s struggle to get mental health treatment for their daughter from a system set up to protect people from being committed against their will. Since that first story dropped, the daughter, who has refused treatment, was court-ordered into 20 days of treatment. Brett talked about how that’s going on an episode of The Why, which also delves into the problems with Pennsylvania’s mental health policies.

• A Northumberland County school district is on its way to having its own police force, WITF’s Rachel McDevitt reports. Approval for money to start the small department comes after months of debate over school security — including whether to arm teachers — in Pennsylvania and nationwide.

• Todd Carmichael, the outspoken CEO of Philadephia-based La Colombe coffee, took to the pages of the Inquirer this weekend to declare that capitalism is in danger because too much wealth is being accumulated by too few. Stressing that he is a big believer in capitalism, Carmichael writes that only one 2020 presidential candidate is prepared to correct the economy’s course — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Read his piece here.

• A 20-year-old man died after jumping from a rock cliff into the Susquehanna River Saturday afternoon — one of two cliff-diving fatalities in Pennsylvania last weekend, PennLive’s Jan Murphy reports.