Four Years After New York Shuttered a Nuclear Plant, Gov. Hochul Announces Plans for a New One

It has only been four years since New York, under the guidance of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Today, New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, announced plans to build a new plant, though the details are still pretty thin.

New York is planning to build a nuclear power plant capable of producing enough electricity for as many as 1 million homes in an as-yet-unnamed upstate location, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Monday.

Ms. Hochul said the plant, which would produce half as much power as the Indian Point complex north of New York City that was shut down four years ago, would help avert the “rolling blackouts” that have plagued some other states. She did not say how much the project would cost or how long it would take to complete but said that New York would seek investment from the private sector.

The governor said that safety would be “at the forefront” of the state’s planning and that the new plant would meet rigorous environmental standards.

“This is not your grandparents’ nuclear reactor. You’re not going to see this in a movie starring Jane Fonda,” she said, referring to “China Syndrome,” the 1979 movie about a nuclear meltdown.

Indian Point’s closure never made a lot of sense. As many critics of the plan noted years ago, shutting down the plant would necessarily mean building new gas powered plants to replace it, something that New York’s liberals supposedly cared about.

So far, most of the electricity produced by the nuclear plant, known as Indian Point, has been replaced by power generated by plants that burn natural gas and emit more pollution. And that trade-off will become more pronounced once Indian Point’s last reactor shuts down on April 30.

“It’s topsy-turvy,” said Isuru Seneviratne, a clean-energy investor who is a member of the steering committee of Nuclear New York, which has lobbied to keep Indian Point running. The pronuclear group calculated that each of Indian Point’s reactors had been producing more power than all of the wind turbines and solar panels in the state combined…

“This is one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of energy in New York,” said Robert Bryce, an author who has been a constant critic of the shutdown. “It’s a catastrophically wrong decision.”

The power produced by Indian Point was about 1/4 of the electricity used by New York City. Since it was shut down, that power has been replaced by electricity from three newly built natural gas plants.

The people behind the push to get rid of Indian Point included Andrew Cuomo and an environmentalist group called Riverkeeper who complained the plant was killing too many fish. They also got a boost from Rory Kennedy and RFK Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — Cuomo’s former brother-in-law — and the activist group Riverkeeper (for which Kennedy served as a staff or board member for 33 years) has agitated for decades to shut down Indian Point. To make the case, Kennedy’s thrown just about every scare-mongering worst-case scenario at the wall, regardless of its plausibility or scientific merit…

HBO released a documentary directed by Kennedy’s sister, Rory, in 2004 called “Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable.” As you might expect, it’s a one-sided narrative where the pro-nuclear voice is barely acknowledged, but a pre-senatorial Al Franken is interviewed as an anti-nuclear “expert,” as is RFK Jr. 

But what’s most striking about the doc is that it’s almost exclusively about Indian Point’s vulnerability as a terror target. 

Vox did a report about this three years ago (see below) which noted that it was really the fear of some kind of terror attack or meltdown that drove the push to shut down Indian Point. It’s a fear that was almost certainly unwarranted but scaring people away from nuclear power is something the left has been doing for a long time. As Gov. Hochul pointed out, they’ve been so successful that many people still think about a movie released in 1979 (The China Syndrome) when you mention the topic. 

My guess is that the plan for a new nuclear plant won’t go anywhere. The same environmental groups will resist it and drive the costs up to a point that it’s doesn’t make financial sense. It would have been a lot smarter to allow Indian Point to continue operating until 2035 than to start over on a new plant.