$33 billion—That’s the amount of money the New York Public Service Commission—its members appointed by the governor—has just approved for you as an electric ratepayer, and every other ratepayer in the state, including all businesses and nonprofit institutions, to pay from 2029 to 2049 to bail out four nuclear power plants upstate.
The $33 billion would be included as a charge in the bills electric utilities send to all New York ratepayers.
In 2017, the PSC approved a $7.6 billion, 12-year bailout of the plants, which their owners had wanted to shut down because they said they were not economical.
They include the oldest nuclear power plant of the 94 now operating in the United States: the Nine Mile Point Station Unit 1 in upstate Oswego, which began operating in 1969, and the second-oldest nuclear plant running in the nation, the R.E. Ginna plant, near Rochester.
Nuclear power plants, when they were first introduced in the U.S. in the 1950s, were licensed for 40 years. After 40 years, it was determined that internal parts, especially metals, would become so embrittled by radioactivity that the plants would not be safe to operate.
Now, our money, to the tune of $33 billion, would be used in the coming two decades to keep Nine Mile Point 1, having run in 2026 for 57 years, and Ginna, running for 56 years, operating far longer.
If there is an accident at any of these plants, upstate is not that far from Suffolk County, as radioactivity would blow in the wind. A check on Google says they are in the range of 200 air miles, and a little more depending on what part of Suffolk.
Consider taking a drive in a 57-year-old automobile upstate, or anywhere. How confident would you be in its mechanical ability?
But Hochul is totally enamored of nuclear power. She seemingly believes that the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima disasters never happened. She has been calling for New York State to become the “center” of a nuclear revival in the U.S.
As she said in her “State of the State” address last month, in 2025, “I took the bold step of greenlighting the first nuclear power project in a generation…. We set a goal of building one gigawatt of nuclear power,” the equivalent of one large nuclear power plant. She went on that for 2026, it’s “go big” on nuclear power. “So I’ve decided to raise the bar to five gigawatts. That’s more nuclear energy than has been built anywhere in the United States in the last 30 years.”
She is pushing particularly so-called “advanced” nuclear power plants—even though, as a comprehensive analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other studies have found, they are not “advanced.”
“If nuclear power is to play an expanded role in helping address climate change, newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer and more secure than current-generation reactors. Unfortunately, most ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors are anything but,” concluded its report.
“Not So Advanced: Hype vs. Reality for Nuclear Technology” was the headline of a piece from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But, as Hochul declared recently, “This is not your grandmothers’ and your grandfathers’ nuclear. This is advanced. This is state-of-the-art. This is safe.”
In fact, the “advanced” nuclear power plants being promoted today are decades-old designs that didn’t work then and are now being wheeled out as new-and-improved nuclear power plants.
Meanwhile, Hochul also keeps insisting that nuclear power is “zero-emission” and thus an antidote to climate change. But the nuclear fuel cycle—mining, milling, and enrichment of nuclear fuel—is heavily carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants also emit carbon, a radioactive form of carbon, Carbon-14.
She is fond of old nuclear plants, too, like the four upstate plants the $33 billion bailout would keep running. “They’re all up on Lake Ontario, and one is actually the oldest operating nuclear facility in the United States, going strong and safe since 1969,” Hochul claims.
Of the bailout and Hochul’s push for nuclear power, Laura Shindell, the New York State director of the organization Food & Water Watch, says: “It’s outrageous that New Yorkers will once again be forced to bail out this toxic, money-burning industry with billions and billions more in the coming years. Despite decades of evidence that nuclear power is both inherently dangerous and cost-foolish, Governor Hochul insists on throwing good money after bad, with everyday families footing the bill. We’re fed up with the governor’s repeated failure to deliver on promises of clean, affordable energy for this state. She claims she cares about affordability, and then approves this rate increase.”
Says Avni Pravni-Buck, deputy director of Alliance for a Green Economy: “Governor Hochul and her Public Service Commission have locked New Yorkers into an expensive and inefficient scheme to enrich Constellation Energy, while taking New York further away from our renewable energy and climate goals. Every dollar spent on Constellation’s reactors is a dollar that could have gone to building renewable energy and storage, which is cheaper, cleaner, and better for our electricity grid. We’re dismayed to hear that electric ratepayers will now be footing a $33 billion bailout for the upstate nuclear reactors, without any forward-looking plan to transition to renewable resources…”
Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, says: “New York’s nuclear bailout program has always been a classic ‘bridge-to-nowhere’—forcing households and businesses to fork over pots of gold, only to leave us with an ever-growing pile of radioactive waste. Since 2017, we have been charged over $4 billion to prop up old, uneconomical nuclear power plants—12 times more than we have spent on incentives for renewable energy. The bailout program was supposed to be expensive but temporary, a $7 billion ‘bridge to renewable energy.’ Here we are years down the road, and the PSC has decided not only to make the bailout basically permanent, but to dramatically increase the cost to $33 billion over an extra 20 years. New York needs to pull the plug on it.”
A true green energy path is before us. This is not it.