TMI accident anniversary marked amid renewed nuclear controversy

• 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.

 Tim Lambert / WITF

Protesters gather for a vigil outside the north gate of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County.

From The Context, PA Post’s weekday email newsletter:

Pa.’s nuke debate

Tim Lambert / WITF

Protesters gather for a vigil outside the north gate of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County early Thursday morning on the 40th anniversary of the incident there.

• Most Pennsylvanians support nuclear energy, but are divided on whether the commonwealth should prop up the industry, according to a poll conducted by F&M in partnership with PA Post. Reid Frazier breaks it down in this StateImpact Pennsylvania story.

• There’s a group firmly in the “against” camp that protests outside Three Mile Island on March 28, the day Unit 2 almost melted down in 1979. WITF’s Tim Lambert was out before sunrise to get that story yesterday.

• Residents recount their uncertainty, confusion and fear as they grappled with whether to stay home amid risk of radiation, or evacuate after the accident in ‘I remember TMI’, an oral history pulled together by StateImpact Pennsylvania. Listen here.

Best of the rest

Screenshot of archived state House livestream

State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz delivers an invocation March 25.

• You might have heard about controversy at the state capitol over Rep. Stephanie Borowicz’s invocation this week. PA Post’s Ed Mahon follows up with a profile of the freshman Republican from Clinton County.

• The commonwealth is dedicating $15 million to help people in recovery from opioid abuse afford housing. Transforming Health’s Brett Sholtis focused on one agency getting some of the money to illustrate how the program’s going to work. His post is here. Meanwhile, Purdue Pharmaceuticals reached a $270 million settlement with the state of Oklahoma for a lawsuit over the company’s part in the opioid crisis. It’s the first case to be resolved of more than 1,600 similar suits brought by government agencies throughout the country, the New York Times reports.

• The nationwide ban on bump stocks took effect this week. Bobby Allyn talked to one Pennsylvanian who’s among the many gun owners testing the law for this Keystone Crossroads story.