Opinion: Why Nuclear Expansion Should Be a Nonstarter for New York – City Limits

“Hochul knows the risks of restarting Indian Point are unacceptable to downstate New Yorkers. But her planned nuclear buildout upstate is also unacceptable for the same reasons.”

For months speculation has been growing that Holtec might try to do at the Indian Point nuclear plant what it is doing at the Palisades nuclear plant it owns in Michigan: restart long dead reactors which it was supposed to be dismantling. Watchdog groups call such projects “zombie nukes.”

When Holtec floated the idea of reanimating Indian Point to power a data center last fall, some dismissed it as a ploy to pump up its perceived value ahead of its pending IPO. In October Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is pushing nuclear expansion upstate, made it clear she opposed renuclearizing Indian Point downstate. But earlier this month, when U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Congressman Mike Lawler stood in front of the plant and called for “rebuilding and reopening” it to lower rising electricity prices, the ploy became a real threat. 

Let’s be clear about what “rebuilding and reopening” means. It means Holtec would power up Indian Point’s obsolete, embrittled, more than 50-year-old reactors, which former owner Entergy permanently shut down five years ago because they were impractical to keep operating.  

Holtec acquired Indian Point’s licenses not to operate the old reactors, but to tear them down. That enabled it to take over the plant’s $2.4 billion ratepayer-financed decommissioning trust fund (DTF). Holtec does almost no accounting so we don’t know how the money was spent. In 2023, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admitted it was no longer even trying to track DTF spending, let alone enforce the requirement to spend it on decommissioning. Now Holtec has the chutzpah to pivot to restart and ask for another $10 billion in public money to “rebuild” Indian Point’s old reactors.

One thing we do know is Holtec will spend as little on “rebuilding” Indian Point as it can get away with, because that’s what it’s doing at its Palisades “zombie nuke” in Michigan: making cheap, Band-Aid repairs on safety-critical components—for example, sleeving degraded steam generator tubes instead of spending the money to replace the generators, or seeking exemptions for substandard reactor pressure head welds that don’t meet American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) or NRC requirements instead of doing the welds properly. 

Holtec failed for years to put Palisades’ reactors into protective “wet layup” storage, letting the steam generator tubes degrade further. Because of this, nuclear expert Arnie Gunderson recently warned the NRC that in as little as six months of Palisades restarting, there could well be a “primary coolant system failure or a steam generator tube failure due to years of neglect” which could potentially cause core meltdown and radiological release with “previously unimaginable impacts to the general public.”

Holtec is following the Palisades playbook at Indian Point, so Indian Point’s reactors were almost certainly improperly stored and similarly neglected and degraded.

Restarting shuttered reactors is unprecedented in the Western world, and reckless anywhere. But Holtec and all nuclear owners are insulated from the risks of restart. They are indemnified at taxpayer expense and their liability is limited under the Price-Anderson Act, plus they are compartmentalized in shell-game subsidiary structures. In effect, this means if a reactor melts down and releases radiation, residents could lose their homes, livelihoods, and lives, but Holtec could walk away unscathed.

At least in theory, regulating nuclear plants to protect the public and the environment was the NRC’s job—until last year, when its mission was revamped to prioritize promoting nuclear power. By Trump executive order, DOGE was installed in the NRC, a “review and wholesale revision” of NRC regulations and guidance was undertaken, and part of its licensing authority was transferred to the Department of Energy.

The order also guts radiation exposure standards (quintupling allowable exposure from 100 to 500 millirems a year). In January, Energy Secretary Wright eliminated the accepted “as low as reasonably achievable” standard for radiation exposure from Department of Energy facilities, and now NRC is taking steps to end it for civilian reactors.

It’s a perfect storm of deregulation, denial, disinformation, and doubling down on debunked claims that nuclear power provides safe, clean energy (there were three major nuclear reactor disasters in the last 50 years, and there is still no solution for lethal nuclear waste), that it can help the climate (it actually makes climate change worse), lower electricity prices (even after huge subsidies, existing nuclear is the most expensive power except for gas peaker plants, and building new nukes is the most expensive period at $7,000 per kW/hr), and make us energy-secure (Indian Point is a salient terrorist target).   

Only renewables together with storage and efficiency infrastructure can do those things.  Gov. Hochul’s plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear in upstate New York undercuts renewables ramp up, feeds the beast of nuclear boosterism, and leaves downstate New York more vulnerable to a zombie nuke takeover of Indian Point 25 miles from Manhattan. Now New Yorkers will have to fight to kill the undead plant—again.

Hochul knows the risks of restarting Indian Point are unacceptable to downstate New Yorkers. But her planned nuclear buildout upstate is also unacceptable for the same reasons. The New York State Legislature is right to push back and consider a moratorium on new nuclear projects. New York won’t be safe, or energy-secure, until it repudiates nuclear expansion statewide.  

Kevin Kamps is a member of the board of directors of Don’t Waste Michigan which is fighting restart of the Palisades nuclear plant.