Hochul’s Going Nuclear. Environmentalists Should Cheer Her On.

It’s every bit as bold as congestion pricing. Perhaps bolder.

Kathy Hochul didn’t just say nice things about nuclear power in her State of the State address. She pledged her troth to it. 

Directing the New York Power Authority to undertake a gigawatt (1 GW, or 1,000 megawatts) of new nuclear electricity capacity, as the governor did last summer, was one thing. Her promise now to augment that with 4 GW of privately financed and managed reactors makes for a whole new ballgame — and, paradoxically, one that may prove easier to sell to wary New Yorkers.

Details are sketchy, but the possible benefits are tantalizing. By my calculations, five gigawatts of new nuclear power would be enough juice to dispense with half of the entire output of the state’s gas-fired electric plants — and their malignant carbon emissions. (See endnote for link to this and other calculations.) The nukes would also help fortify the grid against blackouts, with none of the intrusive and costly battery storage banks required for equivalent solar and wind capacity. 

Gov. Hochul’s initiative is well-timed. The state has done next to nothing to replace the enormous carbon-free electricity supply it discarded when it closed down Indian Point’s two 1 GW reactors five years ago. Factoring in nuclear power’s minuscule carbon footprint along with the reactors’ late-life technical excellence, those 2 GW were providing a larger carbon benefit than the state obtained from all of its wind turbines, rooftop panels and solar farms combined in 2024, the most recent full year with available data.

Lower carbon pollution and a “reliability backbone,” to use the governor’s term, are the most palpable benefits from going big on nuclear, along with well-paying union jobs and, quite possibly, lower electric rates and bills compared to a fossil-dependent grid subject to increasingly volatile gas prices. 

Here’s another less well-understood benefit from Hochul’s nukes: leveraging more wind and solar.

That’s right. Getting those five nuclear gigawatts into the energy pipeline will, I believe, make it harder for the bad hombres in Washington to cancel indispensable renewable energy ventures like Empire Wind, the Atlantic Ocean complex off Nassau County’s south shore that a federal judge this month ordered the Trump administration to let construction proceed on. By reframing green energy as nuclear and renewables — not just wind and solar, which still have NIMBY opponents as well as detractors on the right — Hochul is fashioning New York into a state of can-do climate hard hats that Trump messes with at his peril. 

Nukes are the grid’s energizer bunnies

Key to understanding these benefits is opening our eyes to the sea change in the operating record of the country’s 90-odd nuclear power plants.

Since 2000 — a full quarter-century ago — U.S. nukes have collectively averaged 90% “capacity factor” (a power plant’s electricity output relative to its maximum possible output). That’s a far cry from nuclear’s early decades, when the average reactor’s output rate was stuck at around 60%. It’s as if underachieving Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe (lifetime OPS: .662) blossomed into Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio (OPS: .977).

The change is profound. Nationwide, reactor downtimes have shrunk fourfold, from a 40% out-of-service rate to just 10% — mostly routine maintenance in times of low demand. That allows for less back-up capacity as well as less runtime needed for the grid’s polluting fossil-fuel generators. The vastly improved reactor performance has also granted a new lease on life for a technology that, to many, couldn’t be trusted to be a safe neighbor.

Why not just wind and solar?

Still, you could ask: Can’t New York decarbonize its grid and keep it humming with solar and wind alone? The solar tribune Bill McKibben thinks so, as do legions of New Yorkers who drank deep from his 2025 book “Here Comes the Sun” and are already mobilizing against Hochul’s new nukes. Instead, they say, New York should focus on somehow ratcheting up the state’s wind and solar supply two- or threefold. (That’s what it would take to match the climate value of the governor’s 5 GW of nukes. Note that additional hydro-power from Quebec is no panacea; the nearly complete Champlain-Hudson Power Express transmission line from Quebec to downstate New York will provide only around 1 GW worth of new nuclear electricity running at high capacity factor, and is a one-off, besides.) 

Yet it should be plain as day that the quickest and cheapest way to decarbonize the state’s grid is to build nuclear and renewables in tandem rather than going all-in on just one. If that’s not obvious enough, just look under the hood of the all-renewables vision propounded by McKibben’s West Coast energy guru Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor with a large public-facing profile.

The mainstay of Jacobson’s energy sketch for New York is 67 GW of offshore wind turbine capacity. That’s more than 30 times the capacity of the Empire Wind I and II projects that Trump tried to thwart before Hochul seemed to get him to change his mind (in a wise but controversial deal in which she acceded to a natural gas pipeline). Permitting and erecting the equivalent of 30 more such projects — a venture necessitating 4,500 giant turbines — feels not just daunting but quixotic. Ditto, the 17-fold increase in solar farms and roofs that Jacobson’s scenario requires as well. 

Going big on nuclear upends the energy debate

True, undertaking new reactors is also no minor feat, largely on account of costs — I’ll get to that in a moment. But it’s worth considering how Hochul’s gambit could recast not just New York climate and energy discourse but our nuclear power debate as well.

In the wake of Hochul’s play, the nuclear debate isn’t whether a lone large reactor (or an equivalent brace of smaller ones) can cut carbon emissions. It’s whether a state grid anchored by nuclear power and supplemented by renewables can outperform a solar-plus-wind-plus-hydro electricity system alone.

Moreover, by setting an ambitious goal, New York State is no longer relegating the nuclear option to standalone, hence politically vulnerable, reactors but is pursuing just the type of holistic cost-reducing strategy that undergirded France’s early successful nuclear program and underlies South Korea’s current one. In addition, the proposal’s big reach could shine a spotlight on reactor benefits and finally turn the page from long-expired nuclear myths.

The “Vogtle” fiasco isn’t destiny

For decades, investments in U.S. nuclear power were stymied by memories of a 1979 slow-drip reactor meltdown that turned a Jane Fonda movie released just days earlier into prophecy, petrified opinion-makers in New York and decision-makers in Washington, heaped the nuclear industry with ridicule and soon saddled it with budget-breaking design changes. 

But the Three Mile Island calamity dates back almost half-a-century, a generation or two before Bitcoin, iPhones and Instagram. In the years since then, U.S. reactors have racked up nearly 20 times as much operating experience — every bit of it trouble-free. Today’s scary scenario, endlessly flogged by opponents, concerns a financial meltdown at Vogtle 3 & 4 — a grossly over-budget nuclear construction project in Georgia. Those overruns bankrupted the venerable Westinghouse Electric Corp. and are today burdening electricity consumers across Georgia — even as the plant itself dependably churns out gobs of carbon-free power.

To detractors, Vogtle, the sole brand-new reactor venture to reach fruition in the United States in three decades, is proof positive that dreams of nuclear unaffordability invariably become nightmares. But reactor boosters have been busy dissecting the plant’s torturous construction for lessons learned, as in “Understanding Vogtle,” an epic YouTube conversation between nuclear savant James Krellenstein and podcaster Chris Keefer. (Think “Marty Supreme” for reactor builders, except longer.)

I researched nuclear power cost escalation exhaustively in the 1970s and 1980s, publishing a book on the subject and representing officials in 15 states whose job it was to make investors pay for the overruns. I consider Vogtle not a harbinger but the death rattle of a cost virus that afflicted the U.S. nuclear sector even before Three Mile Island.

Many years ago, what inflated nuclear costs was “the environment of constant change,” as a prominent industry rep termed the regulatory churn arising from one reactor mishap after another. In contrast, costs at Vogtle skyrocketed largely due to the singular blunder of starting major construction before finishing the design. Additional Vogtle cost culprits also seem unlikely to pop up elsewhere: the COVID-19 pandemic hit midway through, atrophying supply chains that are now reviving globally.

Positive learning vs. negative

Differences of opinion on future reactor costs turn on disagreements over learning. Nuclear detractors look at increasing past costs and see only “negative learning” — costs inexorably rising as more reactors are built. Advocates see those same increases not as inherent in fission as a technology but the result of problems — project mismanagement, design immaturity, shriveled supply chains — that can be understood and fixed.

But won’t regulatory turbulence re-emerge, destroying the design stability needed to learn from each reactor project to the next? I consider that improbable, not because of potentially supine federal regulation but because of the competence demonstrated by U.S. nuclear builders and operators in the past quarter-century — and, over time, the exhaustion of the pool of mistakes that in the last century emerged one by one in construction or operation, feeding regulatory churn.

One additional factor: The antinuclear power movement that once could force action on every reactor document’s undotted “i” or uncrossed “t” has shrunk. Anti-nuke salience appears to have dwindled as Three Mile Island (and Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki) have receded; as nuclear power’s immense climate benefit comes to trump its hypothetical drawbacks; and as the vast quantity of electricity required to electrify everything from cars and trucks to making steel and heating homes outpaces even the fabulous progress in renewable energy and grid management.

Gov. Hochul is betting that bucking the remnants of antinuke sentiment can deliver her and New York State a big win. Staking the state’s energy future to a large new block of nuclear power is a bold environmental and economic gambit. So too was championing congestion pricing. She prevailed in that skirmish. Her chances here look good as well.

You can download a brief Excel sheet with the author's electricity and carbon comparisons here.