One year after the shutdown of Indian Point nuclear plant, the folly of New York’s crusade against a safe and reliable form of energy is even clearer.
One year after the shutdown of Indian Point nuclear plant, the folly of New York’s crusade against a safe and reliable form of energy is even clearer.
A midst a sea of bodies moving around a grassy field, a strange sight grabbed everyone’s attention: a thousand yellow hard hats hung on a chain-linked fence. Nuclear New York, a grassroots pro-nuclear energy organization, created this open-air art installation to depict the loss of a thousand jobs. These were well-paying jobs for a small town in an energy industry that emits no greenhouse gases from its activity, all attributes supposedly valued by the party in power in the Empire State. Beyond the fence sat Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear-power plant in a scenic locale along the Hudson River that supplied the vast majority of downstate New York’s zero-emission electricity. That day was April 30, 2021 — the last day the facility remained in operation.
Nuclear power is the most scalable, reliable, efficient, land-conserving, material-conserving, zero-emission source of energy ever created. A refutation of a false dichotomy between “dirty” fossil fuels and “clean” renewables, it offers the best of both worlds, pairing reliability with the absence of airborne emissions. Any climate in the world (from Finland to Abu Dhabi) provides ample opportunity for its deployment. Today, virtually every industrialized country is pushing to dramatically increase zero-emission electricity as quickly as possible, and nuclear fission delivers this like no other source can. Its discovery in 1938 was as close to a miracle as has ever occurred in history. It generates nearly perpetual electricity on a grid without any air pollution and stands out as the only energy industry that accounts for all its waste products. In over 60 years of operation, nuclear waste (which adds up to a relatively small amount of spent fuel pellets incased in concrete) has never killed even one person.
Despite this stellar list of pros, the American nuclear industry has suffered a series of setbacks over many years. The first and most persistent problem emerged with the anti-war movement in the wake of the Vietnam War. Humble demands to merely bring our troops home eventually extended to cries for complete nuclear disarmament. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomer environmentalist wave concurrently began with the creation of various anti-pollution activist groups surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970, including those concerned with nuclear waste. This unfortunate conflation of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy culminated in an all-encompassing “anti-nuclear” movement. This shift was most obvious with the Sierra Club, whose stance on nuclear power changed from support to opposition by 1974. Protests from green groups led to a greater regulatory burden for nuclear plants, making them increasingly cost-prohibitive to build. Adding fuel to the fire, an accident occurred at Three Mile Island in 1979, albeit resulting in no deaths from radiation exposure, the same outcome of an accident that would later take place at Fukushima in 2011. The only lethal nuclear accident happened at Chernobyl in 1986, resulting in 56 deaths. This tragedy is an indictment against the USSR’s lack of a sufficiently free press to alert the public to safety concerns about energy and not allowing enough leeway for safety officers and whistleblowers to act in time. Soviet nuclear physicist Valery Legasov led the commission that investigated the meltdown afterward, and he recorded in his audio-taped memoirs (published after his suicide by hanging in 1988) that the Chernobyl accident was the “apotheosis of all that was wrong in the management of the national economy and had been so for many decades.” Driving the point home, the Soviet Union itself collapsed a few years later in 1991. Just as the industry was recovering, natural gas suddenly became much more abundant and cheaper through the shale revolution of the 2000s. Although environmentalist activists rallied behind the anti-fracking movement, the expansion of natural gas ultimately displaced coal in the U.S. as its top source for electricity by 2016, thereby reducing carbon emissions overall.
One relatively small environmentalist group in Westchester, N.Y., took advantage of this 21st century chain reaction (so to speak) to forcefully campaign for the permanent closure of Indian Point. Riverkeeper, with the help and influence of its chief prosecuting attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., focused its public argument on the threat of terrorism, which resonated strongly with New Yorkers after the September 11 attacks. This justification helped persuade then-Governor Andrew Cuomo (whose father also spearheaded a shuttering of a nuclear power plant during his tenure as governor in 1989). By 2017, Entergy, Indian Point’s owner, formally announced that it would close the plant, citing more public opposition, cheaper natural gas prices, and rising costs for relicensing. The fact that a 40-inch thick layer of steel-reinforced concrete created enough of a shield to protect its reactors from even a plane crash did not sway a panicked populace from accepting the demands of a vocal minority. Riverkeeper’s other complaint was an unfortunate reality that the cooling systems Indian Point used ended up producing negative externalities in the form of deaths of marine organisms (most of which were fish eggs and fish larvae). But all forms of energy production involve some animal casualties. More-anthropocentric readers should note that fossil fuels (which nuclear power can largely displace) end up killing many more people than nuclear, specifically from breathing in particulate matter from the air.
The great irony of the efforts of the anti-nuclear activists is that fossil-fuel usage (and thereby greenhouse-gas emissions) rose just as each of Indian Point’s last two reactors shut down. The vacuum in supply has been filled by natural gas, specifically two recently opened plants in New York: Cricket Valley Energy Center in Dover and CPV Valley Energy Center in Wawayanda. Moreover, already-existing fossil-fuel plants in the region have had to run at higher capacity. Despite cries from the fashionable eco-bourgeoisie to rapidly expand renewables, there are few if any utility-scale solar parks or wind farms in wealthy counties, like that in which Riverkeeper is headquartered.
The current landscape shows a direct correlation of support for nuclear with how far right one is, which mirrors the recent pattern in Europe. There, the strongest push to abolish nuclear energy comes from green socialist parties, as opposed to most conservative nationalist parties wanting to keep it in the mix. The same survey indicated another direct correlation between how far left one is and his assessment of the degree to which humans affect climate change. So, ironically, the people who are the least alarmist about rising greenhouse gases are the strongest advocates of expanding the most likely method of actually lowering them. This pattern holds true regarding support for the three still-in-business nuclear plants in Upstate New York on Lake Ontario, all of which are located in electoral districts represented exclusively by Republicans. Other recent studies have shown a correlation between education level and support for nuclear, one suggesting that it “could be concluded that those with more knowledge of nuclear energy technology hold a more positive view on its safety.” This pattern might change in the future, as evidenced by a recent slight uptick in Democrat support for nuclear. However, this approval may be short-lived based on the current energy-price inflation exacerbated by increased energy regulations, Covid mandates, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
These efforts to shut down Indian Point came just as the political party that supported them simultaneously demanded more government support for renewables. Currently, the most common criticism among anti-nuclear zealots is that nuclear power is too expensive. An obvious double standard emerges: Because nuclear is too expensive, we have to shut it down . . . but because renewables are too expensive, we must continue to give them increasingly greater government subsidies? The logic does not add up. Climate scientist James Hansen, who was among the first to testify on global warming before Congress in 1988, has pointed out this irrational stance against nuclear embraced by the dominant environmentalist groups:
I have this little movie clip of 200,000 people in a New York City park at an anti-nuclear rally, and they’re swinging and swaying and singing, ‘Give me the warm glow of a wood fire! Take your nuclear poison away!’ And, you know, I point out that this indoor air pollution from wood fires is killing thousands of people per day. It’s just irrational. But that period ended up with this movement that turned out to be very productive, particularly to the Democratic Party . . . and it turns out to be a vote-getter.
Conservatives’ support for nuclear energy is a ready counter to weak accusations that they do not understand or care enough about the natural world. The adults in the room need to speak up and let the enviro-radical chic know that there is nothing remotely “sustainable” about spending money we do not have on energy technology that does not work at the scale required. There is no good reason to rely on the least reliable plan. The argument is simple: We can decarbonize our electric grids without lowering quality of life for average people whatsoever (i.e., no new taxes or regulations). A strong nation with a thriving economy demands an increasingly greater supply of energy. Let nuclear power supply our demands.