The Manhattan Contrarian recently brought to my attention New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s announcement directing the New York Power Authority to develop a zero-emission advanced nuclear technology power plant.
The Manhattan Contrarian makes this point:
[I]t was just four years ago, in April 2021, that New York completed the forced closure of the two perfectly functional Indian Point nuclear plants, with combined generating capacity of about 2 GW, for no other reason than relentless opposition from environmentalists and NIMBYs. And yet now the Governor is saying that the plan is to start over and build a new nuclear plant at some unspecified place.
Tension seems to be growing within the environmentalist movement on whether or not to support nuclear power. The movement’s aging hippies (>50 years old) view their protest against nuclear power as a crowning achievement. The youngsters (<50 years old) in the movement care less about it and much more about the impending climate catastrophe that they have been told their whole lives is about to strike.
The argument against nuclear power was always an emotional one. The safety issue with nuclear power was overplayed and led to a regulatory regime in the U.S. that choked off investment in it. One only needs to look at the experience that France had with nuclear power to see that it could have been practical and economical in the U.S. as well.
Hochul, who looks surprisingly young for being 66, seems to be throwing her lot in with the movement’s younger set. As the Manhattan Contrarian article points out, the 2 GW of nuclear power by 2040 that she announced is only a token gesture on her part and not material in terms of New York’s future needs. However, virtue-signaling is what the Democrats do best. Virtue-signaling serves a need in its own right for them.
However, nuclear power will not serve as the elusive “dispatchable emissions-free resource” (DEFR) to replace natural gas generation that the New York Power Authority (NYPA) is so desperately seeking. DEFR is something that only exists on paper but is the lynchpin of NYPA’s renewables strategy. If one is going to phase out natural gas generation as NYPA has proposed to do by 2040, it will have to find a substitute, what New York State bureaucrats have coined as a dispatchable emissions-free resource or DEFR. Renewables cannot cut it by themselves, and batteries are impractical, so what DEFR to use is to be determined. One thing for certain is that nuclear power is not their huckleberry (a nod to Van Kilmer’s performance in Tombstone). Nuclear power in any of its present or future forms is not meant to be ramped up and down to follow fluctuations in renewable power as DEFRs are envisioned to perform.
Will the environmental movement abandon their hatred toward nuclear power just as they have their aversion to the wholesale slaughter of whales with the buildup of offshore wind turbines? Maybe, but as with all religions, followers often find it difficult to accept a fundamental reordering of their mythology. Climate movement adherents are no different. They may not embrace a Faustian bargain that would allow nuclear power to play a role in decarbonization. That leaves those in charge grappling with the engineering inadequacies and disastrous economics of renewables which Hochul and her crew are at a loss to solve.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.