New York’s liberal Democrat governor has stumbled on a truth her party has spent decades denying. Kathy Hochul has ordered the state’s power authority to develop at least a gigawatt of advanced nuclear capacity – a striking reversal for a politician whose party’s environmental allies long insisted nuclear power was unsafe, too costly, and politically toxic.
Perhaps that is why the decision has been met with such quiet acceptance, more of a reluctant acknowledgment of what the movement could not admit: nuclear may be the zero-emission energy pillar that wind and solar never managed to become.
Call it inconvenient timing. This week the climate elite are in Manhattan for Climate Week, many arriving by private jet to lecture everyone else about the virtues of wind and solar while ignoring the fact that their host state is turning to the one technology they still cannot abide.
In the lead up to Hochul’s decision, New York’s energy policy had become a contradiction: mandate more electrification while dismantling its power sources. The premature closure of Indian Point nuclear power plant, once a vital source of energy for New York City, created a massive supply gap that renewables could not fill.
Nonetheless, the state forged ahead with phasing out fossil-fuels and simultaneously instituting EV mandates and conversions to electric heating that require vast amounts of reliable power. Wind and solar cannot meet this surging demand, and battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. Nuclear is the only technology that delivers emissions-free electricity, around the clock, at the scale modern life demands.
Now, Hochul is squarely at odds with the activist groups that have long dictated Democratic energy policy. The Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative have fought every reactor license, every regulatory reform, and every attempt to rebuild America’s nuclear supply chain.
Funded by leftwing dark-money networks that thrive on renewable subsidies, they have done more to strangle emissions-free energy than to advance it.
Hochul is not the only Democratic governor diverging from these anti-nuclear so-called “clean energy” activists. Governor Gavin Newsom of California spent years trying to bury oil, gas, and nuclear alike while pouring taxpayer money into wind and solar.
That posture collapsed in 2022 when a heat wave threatened widespread blackouts and renewables could not sustain the grid. The lights stayed on only because Newsom reversed course and signed a bill to relicense Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear power plant, after years of advocating for its closure.
I visited the plant myself this summer and saw firsthand the amazing and amazingly safe technology that nuclear power is. Nine percent of California’s electricity is produced by a low-profile power plant that takes up just 12 acres of a 1,000-acre parcel right on the Pacific Ocean.
To replace Diablo Canyon’s power output with wind turbines would take 460,000 acres. A solar farm would require 50,000 to 80,000 acres. Diablo Canyon produces power 24/7/365 at about 90 percent efficiency. Wind and solar can’t match that performance, and require additional fossil fuel or nuclear power back-up.
Hochul’s embrace of nuclear, then, is less a bold step forward than an overdue recognition of the facts. Nuclear power is indispensable to powering our country. For those who worry about emissions, it is the only emissions-free source capable of sustaining the demands of modern life, and it will define the future of any serious energy policy.
Those who claim to support emissions-free energy should be promoting its development, not undermining it. Nuclear is the one energy source those on the left and the right can be enthusiastically unified in supporting. Continued resistance reflects extreme politics, not reality.
As the climate elite gather in Manhattan later this month, perhaps Governor Hochul should be the one to give the keynote address. The nuclear future these activists keep denying will already be under construction in their host state.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, Senior Policy Fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.
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