There is no role for nuclear in NY's future energy mix

Last week, the New York Climate Action Council approved its final Scoping Plan with recommendations on implementing the state's ambitious climate law. It includes continued reliance on current nuclear power plants plus the prospect of "advanced" reactors as a potential part of our future energy mix.

That's a mistake. New York cannot rely on nuclear to reach its climate goals.

Nuclear power is neither clean nor renewable. It’s not a climate strategy and should have no role in our low-carbon energy future.

This month, nuclear fusion took a step forward by generating a little more energy than it used in a lab, but that’s an utterly different technology and it’s in its infancy. Experts say fusion will take decades to become a real energy source, and longer to become commercial, if ever.

We have renewable and energy storage tools ready to deploy today, and can't wait for new magic technologies or continue to rely on the existing dirty, dangerous nuclear fission industry.

Those who fought to close the Shoreham nuclear plant in 1986 (including my organization) are familiar with the costs, risks, and negative impacts of the nuclear industry. It opened against public outcry in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, ran for just four days, then closed for good. Long Island ratepayers were saddled with massive debt from the fiasco and are still paying it off. 

On 9/11, one of the planes that knocked down the Twin Towers deliberately buzzed the Indian Point nuclear plant, underscoring nuclear plants’ security problems. At the time, the National Research Council rated the risk of a terrorist attack on U.S. nuclear plants as “high” and civil society called for stronger security measures, including air defense, no-fly zones, and security cordons. None of that happened.

Indian Point finally shut down last year, leaving the question of what to do with the over 4,000 highly radioactive spent fuel rods packed into overcrowded, leaking, deteriorating fuel pools.

Times have changed since 1986 and 2001, but the nuclear industry hasn’t. It’s still massively expensive, risky, dirty, fraught with unsolved waste problems, and unjust in its impacts across its life cycle, from the mining and milling of uranium, to radioactivity released into the environment of reactor communities, to the disposition of the nuclear waste. Spent fuel remains lethal for thousands (and for some isotopes, millions) of years, and there is no way to ship or store it safely.

Three obsolete nuclear plants still operate in New York today, propped up by billion-dollar subsidies from New York ratepayers. The longer they run, the more unreliable and unsafe they become, the more spent fuel they generate, the more expensive they are to operate, and the more public money they consume — money that should be used to scale up renewables.

Even the industry's so-called “advanced” reactors are essentially the same old 20th century fission designs in new packaging. If anything, they’re worse. They would generate up to 30 times more radioactive waste than conventional reactors, have no safety standards, are hopelessly uncompetitive, and pull resources away from scaling renewables. 

This guest essay reflects the views of Lisa Tyson, executive director of the Long Island Progressive Coalition.