New York to Build One of First U.S. Nuclear-Power Plants in Generation

Gov. Kathy Hochul said in an interview that she has directed the state’s public electric utility to add at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear-power generation to its aging fleet of reactors. A gigawatt is roughly enough to power about a million homes.

“I’m going to lean into making sure that every company that wants to come to New York and everyone who wants to live here will never have to worry about reliability and affordability when it comes to their utility costs,” she said.

The New York Power Authority—created nearly a century ago by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to manage hydropower production on behalf of the public—will find a site in upstate New York and determine the reactor’s design. The utility may pursue the project alone or in partnership with private entities, Hochul said.

The project could help jump-start a new era of U.S. nuclear-reactor construction. The nuclear industry has struggled for more than three decades to do much more than manage existing plants because of safety concerns, huge cost overruns and permitting processes that move at a glacial pace.

The project will also offer a practical assessment of the executive orders Trump signed in May that aim to accelerate development of nuclear-power projects. Trump’s orders outlined plans to overhaul the U.S. nuclear regulator, fast-track licenses for new projects, boost domestic fuel supplies and use federal lands for reactors for the military or large data centers for artificial intelligence.

Hochul, who has made energy projects a priority since becoming governor in 2021, said she can’t recall a conversation she has had with Trump that didn’t include her advocating for changes to the federal permitting process for nuclear plants. She and the president last month had discussions that resulted in Trump lifting his stop-work order on a big offshore wind project and the revival of two left-for-dead natural-gas pipeline projects.

Hochul said she even suggested that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency turn its focus to streamlining operations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Why does it take a decade?” she said. “That’s why no one is doing it; the barriers are too high.”

Only five new commercial reactors have come online in the U.S. since 1991, which hasn’t been enough to offset plant retirements.

Nuclear-generation capacity is down more than 4% from its 2012 peak while other means of producing electricity have boomed, including with solar panels and natural-gas fueled turbines. Federal energy forecasters expect nuclear capacity to decline further, though there is interest in extending operating licenses for older plants. Nuclear plants currently produce about 19% of the country’s electricity.

Among notable retirements was the Indian Point nuclear plant roughly 40 miles upriver from Manhattan, which was closed in 2021 because of environmental concerns and its proximity to so many people down the Hudson River.

Concern over catastrophic accidents flared up following the 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

A consequence of closing Indian Point, which satisfied about 25% of the electricity needs of New York City, is that the state suddenly had to burn more fossil fuels to keep the lights on. That lifted greenhouse-gas emissions as most other energy policies in the city and the state were aimed at reducing air pollution.

“There was no Plan B,” Hochul said.

Since then, however, nuclear power has experienced a sharp reversal in popularity, emerging as an unlikely winner in the political fight between supporters of fossil fuels and those in favor of renewables. Technology companies building power-hungry artificial-intelligence data centers have been particularly gung-ho about nuclear power.

Despite the risks and radioactive waste involved, supporters point to nuclear plants’ ability to produce a round-the-clock flow of electricity without greenhouse-gas emissions.

Besides the need for emissions-free baseload power to pair with intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, Hochul said she was emboldened by Trump’s push to speed up the federal permitting process.

Meanwhile, she said, local support for Microsoft’s plan to restart the undamaged reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power plant, suggests that concerns around nuclear safety have eased and confidence in the technology has improved since a partial core meltdown in 1979 set back the industry by decades.

“That is a place now where the community around it has overcome that traumatic experience,” she said. “That’s a real signal to the rest of the country that the time has come.”

Potential sites under review for the new plant include the grounds of New York’s three operating plants, all owned or majority-owned by Constellation Energy. The facility could be one large reactor or a collection of smaller ones, Hochul said.

Constellation and New York are already working together on a federal grant that could help with early work toward adding one or more reactors at the Nine Mile Point Clean Energy Center in Oswego.

New York is making arrangements with Canadian officials to study efforts in Ontario to build four small modular reactors. Smaller reactors that could be built in a factory setting, one after the next, could in theory drive down costs and overcome one of the industry’s stumbling blocks.

New York officials are also scrutinizing the problems that plagued development of the two newest U.S. reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Construction began in 2009, and they wound up costing more than $30 billion when they were completed in 2023 and 2024, which was more than twice the initial estimates.

Source: Wall Street Journal