New York to build one of first U.S. nuclear-power plants in generation
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.
The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.
Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
Splitting up the world in areas and then claiming you need to solve a different problem in each is throwing away probably the most cost effective way to get cheaper energy, more grid interconnection and more price mechanisms to shape supply and demand.
They generate 57 Twh right now. That's about 10% of the current production of the entire nation of Canada just for one US state.
I think you are greatly underestimating the scale of the United States compared to Canada.
What's commonly done in these arguments, and you did some of that, is declare that from first principles nuclear is the solution and we aren't only doing it for other reasons. Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries there's never one where a full nuclear roll-out actually makes sense economically.
Ah okay! That's our disconnect. Do go run the numbers on how much natural gas we're burning up here. It's a lot, like seriously a lot. How many batteries will we need to ensure that amount of energy is available for (say) 2 weeks of continuous cloud cover at -10 ~ -40 degrees F? Keep in mind that if it fails, people will die. I don't feel confident enough in my own analysis to share it, but do try it out yourself for an exercise. It's pretty eye-opening.
> Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries
I would love to see this! Can you share some? Do they account for converting Minnesota's heating needs from natural gas?
I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly. As stated earlier, my position is that we should be building both nuclear and renewables. We should build whatever makes sense for the area in question. If renewable+storage can solve all of an area's needs, then that's fantastic and we should absolutely do that.
If I understand right, you are arguing we should not be building any nuclear, even in Minnesota. I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem. I'm asking if you can provide a link to an analysis showing that we can feasibly and cost-effectively solve the Minnesota winter problem without any nuclear power. Can you please link to one?
Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.
> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.
You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:
https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...
"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the system’s super power is utilized."
This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...
If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.
> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.
This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3060mn2m.htm
[2] 1 cf ng = 1039 btu https://www.nrg.com/resources/energy-tools/energy-conversion...
[3] https://www.convertunits.com/from/British+thermal+unit/to/gi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Minn...
(1) Diurnal. You need to store maybe 12 hours of production to get through the night. It's believable that this could be affordable with batteries.
(2) Seasonal. In a place like Minnesota you either need to overbuild solar panels by a factor of 3 or so, or you need a lot of storage, probably not batteries, but maybe some kind of chemical or thermal storage. Casey Handmer would point out that you could use excess energy in the summer for industrial activities but that could be easier said than done because the capital cost of a factory that runs 1/3 of the time is 3x that of one that runs all the time.
(3) Dunkelflaut. Sometimes you have a rough patch of cloudy weather and little wind, so the requirements are worse than (1).
It's rare to see credible analysis of the grid-scale cost of a solar + storage system because of (3) -- you can quote a reasonable price for batteries that will supply power "almost" all the time, but costs rise explosively as you increase "almost". With different requirements for reliability the cost of a storage-based system could be "a bit less" than "nuclear power plants built without bungling" or it could be much more. It also has to vary with your location though people talking about the subject don't seem to talk about that which contributes to people talking past each other. (In upstate NY I could care less about Arizona)
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
The cheapest grid is 90-97% renewable (depending on location) in 2025. As battery prices go down, that number gets higher.
The answer is actually "nothing". We keep gas generators around for the winter months in extreme northern climates.
We don't have to drive fossil fuels down to zero. If we need to run fossil fuel plants 10% of the time, then we've cut 90% of our power-generation CO2. Cutting the remaining 10% is far less important than other greenhouse gas sources (transportation, concrete & steel manufacture, agriculture, etc.)
We already have all of the gas plants we need to do that job. Replacing the with nuclear is unnecessary.
If it turns out that we can build nuclear fast and cheap enough to supplement the existing zero-emission transition, so much the better. But there's no need to prioritize the last dregs of fossil fuels. Just the opposite: whatever gets rid of most of the problem, fastest, is optimal for reducing the harm from climate change.
40deg lat includes a _lot_ of the world.
And Russia? And the northern EU? And many parts of China, Japan, northern US (NYC!? Buffalo?). Northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland? Does everyone who dips below 0 deg F get to burn gas? -10F? If the infra remains in place with that kind of demand, don't you see the costs being low enough that people elsewhere will want to do that rather than transition to carbon-free for the fun of it?
It's hand waved away like this, but did anyone do the analysis as suggested? My guess is the results will not be as easy to wave away as you suggest. But OTOH, maybe heat pumps + overcapacity solar arrays will do it. Who knows?
We could ignore them completely and focus on the most viable areas and have years and years of work to be done. We are not building nearly as fast as we should.
Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
This is not a worthwhile subject to discuss in this context. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
> if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there
with
> we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas
As in: Ignore vs Delay. It's clear in hindsight, but wasn't on first reading.
the point is that it's not a problem that should slow down adoption of renewables everywhere else, we don't need to debate nuclear vs renewables because of cold while non-cold areas are still burning tons of fossil fuels constantly
saying "but what about cold!" only serves to add further fuel to the constant drag created by the fossil fuel industry, they love these arguments because it sows consumer doubt — they go as far as to fund anti-renewable activism under the guise of environmentalism to a similar effect
Yes, if we are forced to make that choice, your logic is sound. But we are not, and nobody ever implied we were.
The sun doesn't rise above 30deg over the horizon, for weeks. (MN > 45deg latitude, and earth tilts away by up to 23.5 deg). It gets below freezing for months, sometimes below zero for weeks. Sometimes below -10F for days (although that's becoming less common).
These are legitimate questions.
We're not going to find common ground, that's OK. Let's just stop circling around each other and/or worrying about it. Cheers.
Wait, what? Who in this discussion suggested it was?
Edit: it's less important to worry about that at the moment.
And yeah, we need to decarbonize ASAP.
By many, many orders of magnitude.
There's enough stuff you could use batteries as a replacement for bricks (and timber) in your (everyone's, worldwide) house construction, and still only be a rounding error in the global resources.
Also more than one chemistry, so while Wikipedia says li-ion batteries use 11.6 kWh per kilogram of lithium, just remember there's also sodium-based batteries and literally oceans full of both sodium and lithium.
And they can be recycled when they wear out, unlike methane, oil, and coal which are burned in the process of making heat; and all of those are extracted at a much higher rate than are battery minerals would need to be even if we didn't recycle at end-of-life when they've been through too many charge-discharge cycles.
> Nuclear is here.
So are renewables, and they're already cheaper.
But also, getting power from a nuclear reactor to your house requires a power grid. And you can also use that power grid to simply… put the e.g. solar panels somewhere else in your country that isn't -40 and covered in snow — or a different country, as demonstrated by e.g. the USA's western connection tying bits of Canada to bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.
I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.
I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.
Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
Most likely outcome of the recent issues, lots more batteries.
There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.
At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
The wind chill would drop below -40 most nights, sometimes significantly lower. Wind power won't help much because they need to shut down at the worst times- either too windy or icy.
As much as I love heat pumps, having thousands upon thousands of homes switching to resistive heating because the pumps can't keep up in the evening is going to get ugly.
District heating won't save you; the metro doesn't actually burn enough stuff to heat the cities and a significant part of the population is in semi or very rural areas that wouldn't benefit anyway.
Edit: that same metro just put together a fund to renovate a few blocks of an underserved area. It's in the millions of dollars. I can't imagine the cost of converting the entire area to district heating; it would surely eclipse the entire government budget. This is the sort of thing that will only happen if you have the kind of fiat power of an imaginary wand.
I found this article very interesting, although it didn't tell me how many kilometres of district heating pipe were laid each decade: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/24/9281
You are incorrect anyway; using the EU's definitions only Madrid and Barcelona are more populous than Copenhagen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_in_...
I mean, for example, in Madrid a neighbourhood has no electricity because is has been taken over by drug gangs. But at the same time it has electricity to grow marihuana. I guess that is a problem Copenhagen does now have.
It wouldn't be impossible to do, but they would need someone else to help fund it.
Giant heat pumps can source heat from seas, rivers, underground reservoirs etc and the latter can even store energy seasonally that might otherwise be curtailed or wasted by e.g. data centers.
Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.
That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.
If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.
An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
> In the figure above, what was previously a defined peak in natural gas generation each evening has eroded into a plateau in 2024. That is because batteries are assisting with the predictable, but large, swings in solar output each day. These rapid ramps have been largely managed by natural gas units to date, but now batteries are taking on much of that responsibility.
That's not even looking at solutions like pumped water, thermal storage, and others which have barely started ramping up to scale.
These are all being built and used in Northern Europe. There's no magic here - just solid engineering and financing.
Which is the topic of this recent study (though they limit themselves to solar and battery):
I'm sure that capacity is only growing going forward.
Most nuclear plants can't do that, they need to run 24/7. Some can, but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way.
Fair. What do you suggest instead?
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
There's just no motivation for them to take the excess energy by throttling their own.
When you're running you more create wear-and-tear and increase the depreciation rate: this can be costed. There's also probably increased staffing costs during higher levels of operations; also costable.
Depending on the prices offered to the hydro-plant, it may or may not be profitable to run.
Even my lawnmower runs more efficiently and has less wear at full throttle. It says right in the manual to run it at full throttle all the time.
If nuclear can't supply peak power needs, then you need batteries or something else to do that. And if you're using batteries, it's a lot cheaper to charge them with solar than with nuclear.
If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper than running Solar/Wind when the weather is perfect and backup/storage when not, then why should we scale solar/wind up that much to begin with?
It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive. Running nuclear intermittently is more than 20x as expensive.
Not according to the Ontario Energy Board, which sets wholesale rates; see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...
At the end of the day it's still electrical rate payers paying the bill. (Just like ratepayers are paying for the failed experiment of McGuinty's Energy Green Act: what's the cost of that?)
As it stands all current nuclear refurbishments are being done with commercial rates, as is dealing with nuclear waste (per the NFWA).
[0]https://www.vie-publique.fr/en-bref/291910-energie-un-nouvel...
If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is the cleanest and least ecologicially destructive (by far).
Scale is what will nail you... every time.
In units of Walmart parking lots please :)
(Answer: 10)
From the pictures I've seen, I assumed those were areas rather than volumes?
To put it another way, how high do you stack the batteries?
In 2024, the USA used 30,000TWh.
In December of 2024, we used about 2,500TWh.
The entire planet's production capacity of batteries in 2024 would store enough energy to power the USA for 70 minutes. Being generous, this would occupy 3.5 million cubic meters, or (conveniently) 3.5 empire state buildings. For an hour of electricity.
We need about four hours worth of batteries by 2050 or so, and production capacity is increasing 50% per year.
> least ecologicially destructive (by far)
On average. The long tail doesn't look so great.
As long as you don't care about proliferation danger (by militarizing staff and the site), you can reprocess and burn spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors/reprocessors.
Nuclear is high-variance in the ecological damage: 99.25% are basically fine, and those other three are (1) Three Mile Island; (2) Fukushima, more an embarrassing mistake than anything else, as the deaths and environmental damage due to the plant was far less than deaths and environmental damage due to the tsunami that also damaged the plant; and (3) Chernobyl.
It is simultaneously true that (1) even including Chernobyl, the amortised cost of handling nuclear disasters does not add much to the cost of the electricity; and (2) the cost of handling the disaster probably played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The two Western designs built in the last generation are the EPR and the AP1000. The EPR is so unconstructable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to put the nails in the coffin of nuclear power. The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China. If it wasn't for problems of war and peace the rational thing to do might be ask the Russians to come in and built a VVER.
GE is pushing the BWRX300 which might get some cost reductions because it doesn't need a steam generator, but the small size doesn't help the economics and the cost numbers they are talking about are amazingly low.
As for simpler construction it has to be proven. The AP1000 was a "modular reactor" in that they tried to make it out of large modules that could be built in a factory and stuck together on site. The factories struggled to make those modules and when they arrived they often needed major rework. The ACP100 was recently completed in China
https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...
and press releases boasted that it was one of the most complex construction projects of all time -- what I wanted to hear was "this is one of the most simple construction projects of all time!"
https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/chinese-s...
I'm also hopeful there's a resurgence of interest in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
Molten salt, HTGR and LMFBR designs could all be coupled to a supercritical-CO2 powerset which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an LWR. The steam generators for a PWR are larger than the reactor vessel itself, but a higher temperature reactor could miniaturize them [1].
You still see old literature that claims the LMFBR has a higher capital cost than the LWR but a lot of that comes from the expensive powerset and heat exchangers which have to be doubled to prevent a water-sodium reaction in the primary loop.
So yeah, 4th generation reactors could be a revolution but they are not a bird in the hand and it won't be a matter of "we'll write a check to build a 1 GW reactor" whether you are New York State or Google, it will be matter of "we'll build a test reactor" and it could be another 15 years at least before we get to the TRL 7 stage.
[1] https://www.precisionmicro.com/understanding-printed-circuit...
Let's hope not. At least not for the first few new nuclear plants.
There is a lot of operating experience with 'traditional' designs and lessons learned over the decade. There are also new lessons learned with the Vogtle AP1000s. Any new construction (in the US) should be AP1000s to take advantage of those lessons.
Once people are familiar nuclear again then perhaps look at different designs. But you should learn to crawl and walk before trying to run.
(A lot of nuclear construction is the civil works, and is the same for any type of design, and getting that down to cookie cutter output would help any different designs as well.)
Going smaller and build lots more brings costs down tremendously. Combined with breeder reactors plus reprocessing to deal with waste.
You'd have to miltarize all staff to deal with profilieration risks and then license out delivery to private corps (utility companies).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not.
Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 started a supply chain in the US. Especially Unit 3, which is one of the reasons it was so expensive: a lot of things had to be learned. Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3 because a bit of a workflow was developed.
Any future US AP1000 units should be better than Vogtle—if people don't try to re-invent the wheel and use the same trail used in that project.
Besides, the EPR is very powerful and can produce clean, constant and pilotable electricity at the largest scale for a very low footprint. No other tech currently matches nuclear, especially for uses that require high and predictable loads, such as AI or smelting.
If you are gonna blow $10 Billion on a 10 year nightmare project, just buy a ton of solar, wind, and batteries to get 2GW in 5 years.
isn't green energy worth higher energy costs?
The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
$22B, is enough to build the largest solar plant in the US 10 times over (total 5GW). Or about 7 of the largest wind farm (total 10.5GW). Or 33 of the largest battery storage plant. With $2B left over for logistics.
And $14B left over for anything else because the total cost was $36B!
The current state of nuclear doesn't make sense anyway you cut it.
And Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3. Because with Unit 3 they had to learn everything about building a nuclear power plant from scratch (from a practical, steel-toed boots on the ground perspective).
Now that there's (a) an actual supply chain (brought up from scratch), and (b) people with a workflow on how to build AP1000s, future units will decrease costs over time. During the 1990s and into the 2000s Japan was bringing up nuclear plants in 4-5 years like clockwork:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Turns economies of scale work as well for 900MW power plants as for $9 widgets.
The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle and what they did wrong (and right):
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW_iLk...
In 2025 the cheapest 24/7 energy grid is 90% green, up to 97% green in sunny locations.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Sure, maybe, right now some of these kinds of criticisms apply, but we're talking about a technology that's barely been given much room to develop seriously in most cases. In others, where it has been allowed a bit more leeway for development, it's shown itself to be remarkably useful. For example, in the reactors aboard military vessels, or with RTGs.
These sorts of of criticisms such as above seem absurd, especially when you imagine there were indeed people saying roughly similar things about technologies like solar power back in the 70s, or powered flight close to the turn of the 20th century.
It's foolish to shun the entire scope of a technology if its present state of development is the only one you know anything about. This applies so especially to nuclear power, which so very obviously has considerably more potential, without even going into more exotic territories like sustainable fusion energy.
tl;dr it was commissioned, constructed, and closed due to local safety concerns in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.
Interesting excerpt from the wiki:
In 2004, the Long Island Power Authority erected two 100-foot, 50 kW wind turbines at the Shoreham Energy Center site,[18] as part of a renewable-energy program.[19][20] At a ceremony, chairman Kessel stated, "We stand in the shadow of a modern-day Stonehenge, a multibillion-dollar monument to a failed energy policy, to formally commission the operation of a renewable energy technology that will harness the power of the wind for the benefit of Long Island's environment." The turbines generate 200 MWh per year, or 1/35,000th of the energy the nuclear plant would have produced.[21]
This is rich considering that NYPA’s current customers are exclusively government entities. I found this out when researching why I pay among the highest cost per KWh in the country despite having the largest non profit publicly owned power utility in the country.
And for that matter, if you are worried about CO2 emissions, you could make that be part of the requirements.
Gas is a bit more expensive than the ideal green model, but cheaper on average. It also can be built anywhere on a comparatively small land parcel, and can provide easily scalable energy 24/7/365.
What they should not do however is to simply look at potential generation capacity and have that be the only important criteria. Voters has clearly demonstrated that they will vote for politicians that can promise stable grid and stable pricing, rather than having those being controlled by the market.
Love it or hate it, the AI hype has at least lit a fire on nuclear power. If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
When the AI winter comes, it’s not going to mean the energy devoted to AI applications decreases, it’ll mean the perception of rapid future expansion in profits fueling VC interest in AI goes away. It’s not like we cut back the aggregate energy cohsumption of systems running, say, rule-based expert systems during the last AI winter.
But what happens to the AI in the nuclear winter?
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2017/01/09/cuomos-deal...
But no worries, looks like this time around the nuclear side has figured out that they need to pay their protection of money: https://nypost.com/2025/06/16/us-news/andrew-cuomo-hit-with-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
"New York City's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity have increased from approximately 500 to 900 tons of CO2 per MWh from 2019 to 2022 as a result of the closure."
I suspect much of the perception of nuclear being too dangerous comes from the fossil fuel energy lobby.