Thursday, October 1, 2026
That’s the amount of money the New York State Public Service Commission — its members appointed by the governor — has just approved for you as an electricity ratepayer, and every other ratepayer in the state, including all businesses and nonprofits, 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 the state’s 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 1 plant in upstate Oswego, which began operating in 1969, and the second-oldest as well, 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 that, experts determined, internal parts, especially metals, would become so embrittled by radioactivity that the plants wouldn’t be safe to operate.
Now our $33 billion would be used in the coming two decades to keep Nine Mile Point 1, which has operated for 57 years, and R. E. Ginna, running for 56 years, going far longer. Driving a 57-year-old car, how confident would you be of its mechanical ability?
If there were an accident at any one of these plants, upstate isn’t that far from Long Island, because the radioactivity would blow in the wind. A check of Google says the plants are in the range of 200 air miles.
But Gov. Kathy Hochul is 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 put it last year, “I’m embracing” nuclear power.
As she said in her State of the State address in January, Hochul wants to have five gigawatts of new nuclear power in New York — the equivalent of five large power plants.
She is pushing for “advanced” nuclear 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,” the UCS’s report concluded. “Unfortunately, most ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors are anything but.”
Still, 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. Meanwhile, Hochul also keeps insisting that nuclear power is “zero-emission” and thus an antidote to climate change. But the nuclear-fuel cycle — the mining, milling and enrichment of nuclear fuel — is heavily carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants also emit a radioactive form of carbon, Carbon-14.
And the governor is fond of old nuclear plants, too, like the four upstate plants the $33 billion bailout would keep running.
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 [Public Service Commission] 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.
Karl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
