THREE MILE ISLAND

On an island in the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania, a few miles south of Harrisburg, stand four cooling towers that became a symbol of American nuclear energy. On March 28, 1979, Unit 2 at Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown, the worst accident in the history of American commercial nuclear power. For several days nobody knew how bad it would get. The governor advised pregnant women and young children near the plant to leave, and many thousands more left on their own. The amount of radiation released was officially small. The fear it caused wasn’t, and residents still argue about what it did to their health. The accident changed nuclear power in this country for a generation.

Unit 2 never ran again. Unit 1 kept operating for another forty years and shut down in 2019 because it was losing money. Now it’s renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center and is scheduled to restart in 2027, this time to power Microsoft’s data centers.

The towers still dominate the river valley, enormous and quiet, with houses, farms, and fishing spots sitting in their shadow. It’s a landscape of waiting. People live alongside something that once nearly broke and that money is about to bring back to life. Photographing Three Mile Island means photographing that unease: an ordinary American riverside, and the huge concrete forms that remind everyone what happened here and what’s coming next.