As I’ve written previously, New York State under Gov. Kathy Hochul is pursuing a nation-leading new deployment of nuclear power: 1 GW of new nuclear to be developed by the New York Power Authority and 4 GW more from the private sector. Together with the existing 3 GW of nuclear plants, the fleet is being called the “Nuclear Reliability Backbone” by the state’s plans.
This past summer the state’s Public Services Commissioned released the Advanced Nuclear Policy Options Paper to lay out the planning assumptions and potential pathways by which the state could financially and economically see the new fleet deployed. Public comments on the paper were due at the end of September, which presented a forum for various stakeholders to register their thoughts.
Two of those public comments reveal a frustrating tension for those of us on the political left who believe in growth, decarbonization, and clean reindustrialization: the state’s socialist legislators and the state’s labor unions working in infrastructure and motivated by climate concerns are at odds over new nuclear.
The Opponents’ Critique
“We write to oppose the use of any taxpayer or ratepayer subsidies to support the construction of new nuclear power plants in New York.” So begins the letter from thirty-six state legislators, all of them Democrats and all but three of them representing New York City and other downstate districts.
The majority of the argument revolves around cost and the particular over-budget and long-delayed fiasco of Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia. “If construction of new nuclear generation in New York follows anything like a similar path to the most recent precedent in the United States, it will not only lead to unacceptable cost burdens for ratepayers and taxpayers, but will also arrive over a decade later than needed to address current near-term generation capacity needs.”
Though contemporary progressive foes of nuclear focus primarily on the cost and the long construction timeline, which sounds more pragmatic and serious to the layperson, the letter also resorts to 1970s era progressivism on risk and waste:
In addition to being very expensive and taking a very long time to build, nuclear power is toxic and dangerous, generating massive quantities of hazardous waste and radioactive pollution while threatening catastrophic accidents. 84 years after the world’s first nuclear reactor was built in the U.S., there is still no solution for safe long-term disposal of the intensely radioactive and long-lived nuclear waste that reactors produce. All that waste will remain a danger to New Yorkers, our environment, and our drinking water for many generations into the future.
Meanwhile, Texas shows the way, they argue: “over just the past four years the state of Texas has built 30Gw of solar and 6GW of storage for roughly the same cost.” Now if only New York would follow Texas’s lead on copious open land, substantially higher average solar irradiance, abundant natural gas pipelines and market-based gas power to keep prices low, and no pesky statewide labor agreements, the state might be a libertarian energy success story!
As a final bitter note for Public Power Review readers, the letter cites the antinuclear screed from the late Dr. Joseph Romm which I meticulously debunked earlier this year.
The Letter’s Signatories
Though in this post I'm taking particular note of the letter’s socialist signatories, a full three-quarters of them are regular Democrats.
Led by Manhattan’s Sen. Liz Krueger, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon of Brooklyn, the signatories mostly represent New York City and Downstate; only three could be deemed Upstate politicians. They include also the Chair of the Senate Energy Committee, the Chair of the Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions, and the Chair of the Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee. Here is a Claude-prepared spreadsheet of the signatories of the letter, categorized by political affiliation, region, and committee assignments.
All nine of the state legislature’s elected democratic socialists joined the letter: Jabari Brisport, Kristen Gonzalez, Julia Salazar, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Emily Gallagher, Marcela Mitaynes, Diana Moreno, Sarahana Shrestha, and Claire Valdez.
What’s frustratingly new here is that the whole slate of socialist legislators has joined the opposition to nuclear power, growing beyond the two or three of them who’ve already aligned themselves with the state’s antinuclear environmental nonprofits. Assembly Members Gallagher and Shrestha, for example, are cosponsors of a bill that would impose a full moratorium on new nuclear plants in the state, while the Senate version is cosponsored entirely by regular Democrats, including Sen. Kevin Parker, the Energy Committee Chair who has himself been a political target of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a signatory of the present letter.
The Labor Unions Chime In
Naturally, as I wrote last year for Jacobin, the state’s labor unions are ardent supporters of Gov Hochul's plans for new (public power-led!) nuclear.
But this time, Climate Jobs New York has come out in full support too. Representing 2.6 million working people, they’re the state’s coalition of labor unions “united around a shared goal of combating climate change while reversing income inequality.”
In their own public comment letter on the advanced nuclear docket, they write:
At the outset, CJNY want to be clear that if New York is to establish a carbon-free energy sector, it must rely on nuclear power. There is no other clean firm, or baseload power that can supply industrial operations at scale. Solar, wind and battery storage are essential to our energy supply in the state, but they cannot provide all of the baseload power that our state depends on. For this reason, among others, nuclear must be a key part of New York’s energy future.
Their comments lay out various arguments for why new nuclear is essential for the state. But the point of their letter, of course, is to request policy provisions around labor agreements and conditions on any nuclear projects.
Also weighing in with a public comment in favor of the nuclear proposal is the New York State IBEW Utility Labor Council:
The Nuclear Reliability Backbone is not simply a generation policy. It is a long-term reliability, economic-development, and workforce strategy. The utility workers who operate, maintain, and restore New York’s electric system must be directly involved in its planning and implementation.
Readers may be familiar with them from my previous reporting on the state’s nuclear plans.
The Central and Northern New York Building & Construction Trades Council also commented, urges the PSC to “adopt a policy framework that provides the long-term certainty needed to bring advanced nuclear projects to construction, and to ensure that the region already doing this work can keep doing it.”
As one union in that council, the International Union of Elevator Constructors Local 62 sees new nuclear as a “resurgence of Upstate New York to the forefront of our Nations future. Good things are around the corner, and a project like this would be one of the cornerstones of such progress.”
UA Local #81 Plumbers & Steamfitters urges the PSC to “move the Nuclear Reliability Backbone forward, and to recognize Oswego County’s experience, infrastructure, and workforce as the state selects sites for new advanced nuclear development.”
Steamfitters Local 638 “commends the Administration and the Commission for acting to support the development of advanced nuclear energy as part of an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach to safely and reliably meeting the State’s growing energy needs, advancing its clean energy goals, and delivering high-quality union jobs for New Yorkers.”
A final union comment to take note of comes from Andrew Paul Fultz, President of Boilermakers Local Lodge No. 5, whose “members perform critical work [at the state’s existing plants], including the safe disassembly and reassembly of the reactor pressure vessel, as well as maintenance on other systems essential to power generation and the safe cooling of the reactor.” Fultz’s comment on behalf of his union is worth quoting at length, in my opinion, with emphasis added by me:
I graduated from the Local 5 Apprenticeship Program while spending much of my career servicing New York’s nuclear fleet. I later spent four years working on the construction of AP1000 nuclear units at Vogtle Units 3 and 4. I went to Georgia in 2014 with the belief that it was imperative to develop the skills and experience necessary to build the next generation of nuclear power plants. This year, I ran for and was elected President of Local Lodge No. 5. A central part of my campaign was preparing our organization to help lead New York through a nuclear renaissance. I have been actively recruiting and training members for this moment since 2019. I am personally committed to ensuring the success of new nuclear development so that our communities, our members, and future generations of New Yorkers can benefit from the jobs, economic growth, and reliable energy these projects will provide.
The Two Other New York Socialists
Notably, the legislators’ public comment against new nuclear does not include the two most well-known New York socialists in office: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have demonstrated at least lukewarm support for nuclear power.
Mamdani, you might recall, expressed support for new nuclear power in an anodyne comment during one of the mayoral debates in the lead-up to the election. Check out my writeup on that, with supportive comments from yet more unions, in my article in Heatmap from Election Day. Since then, however, he's been totally silent on the issue.
And in 2023 Ocasio-Cortez, one should not forget, visited the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to demonstrate that nuclear power was nonetheless safe.
Mamdani has made waves for embracing the abundance vision as a democratic socialist. Now can he steer his fellow New Yorkers City socialists into a more pragmatic and responsible position on the state’s energy future?