SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Has Hochul Been "Hoodwinked In The Hothouse"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It took decades to stop the plan of the now defunct Long Island Lighting Company to build seven to eleven nuclear power plants in Suffolk County. Then New York Governor Mario Cuomo allied himself with grassroots anti-nuclear organizations and the Suffolk County Legislature in the battle.

But now New York has a different governor, Kathy Hochul.

The national journal Politico signaled Hochul’s interest in nuclear power in an article in May headlined “New York policymakers thaw on nuclear energy.” The piece started: “Gov. Kathy Hochul has cracked the door open to the potential for new, small nuclear power plants as a way for the state to try to meet its ambitious climate goals.” It told of this happening “at a private dinner with environmentalists April 29, according to two attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the private conversations.”

This month, at what Hochul organized as a “Future Energy Economy Summit” held in Syracuse, this state push for nuclear power in New York more than thawed.

As the headline at syracuse.com, the website of Syracuse’s Post-Standard newspaper, said in its coverage of the conference: “Hochul’s energy team opens the door to a long dismissed option: new nukes.”

At the conference, Hochul spoke of “splitting the atom” as an energy source.

Released was a 29-page “Draft Blueprint for Consideration of Advanced Nuclear Technologies” done by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It asserted that “a growing and innovative group of advanced nuclear energy technologies has recently emerged as a potential source of carbon-free power.”

In the wake of the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the nuclear industry has been trying to latch on to climate change as a new reason for nuclear power with the claim that it is “carbon-free.” In fact, it isn’t. The nuclear fuel chain including mining, milling and fuel enrichment is carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants themselves emit carbon, Carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon.

And the nuclear industry is claiming “advanced” versions of nuclear plants have arrived, “new and improved” plants—words commonly used to peddle “new and improved” detergents and similar products.

As explains Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, these plants, notably what are being called “small modular reactors,” are not new and not improved but were “things that were tried 50 and 60 years ago” and didn’t succeed then. Now, he says, with governments prepared to spend “bundles of money…trillions of dollars” to combat climate change, the nuclear industry is wheeling out these old designs to “try to rescue itself from a very rapid decline.” 

These plants “are just as prone to failure as large reactors,” says Dr. Edwards. “Any nuclear power plant is “a warehouse of radioactive poisons and anything that blows these poisons out into the environment constitutes a disastrous accident.” That can happen “if you’re small, that can happen when you’re big.” Meanwhile, he says, safe, clean, green renewable energy is here with its costs having plummeted. “Renewables are now about four times cheaper than nuclear” with solar and wind systems far quicker to build, thus having a “rapid payback” to challenge climate change and swiftly. 

Or as physicist Dr. M.V. Ramana, formerly at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, in his new book Nuclear Is Not The Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, writes: “The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury to expand nuclear power. Meanwhile, even a limited expansion would aggravate a range of environmental and ecological risks. Further, nuclear energy is deeply” involved in “creating the conditions for nuclear annihilation. Expanding nuclear power would leave us in the worst of both worlds.”

And as says Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, instrumental in development in New York of plans to expand renewable energy and the state reaching a goal of 70% of its electricity from  renewables by 2030—which Hochul is doubting so purportedly nuclear is needed—achieving that goal “is a matter of social and political willpower. It is not a question of technology or economics.”  He is director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and author of the 2023 book No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air.

Or as Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, in a chapter he writes in Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Solutions to Climate Change, says: “Dirty energy companies want people to believe that nuclear power is necessary to reduce greenhouse gases and avert the climate crisis. This could not be further from the truth. Nuclear power is not a climate solution: it is too dirty, too dangerous, too expensive and too slow….The uranium fuel chain and nuclear disasters make the dangers of climate change worse, and the nuclear industry actively blocks renewable energy and other solutions to end fossil fuels. We can and must phase out nuclear power along with fossil fuels, to repair environmental injustices and protect generations to come.”

But Hochul has been “hoodwinked in the hothouse.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury and the author of six books.