A Nuclear Free New York

The first of a series of “Forums for a Nuclear-Free New York” was held last week following New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposition for an expansion of nuclear power in New York State. Earlier in the week she called in a “State of the State” address for an additional four gigawatts of nuclear power in New York, the energy generation equivalent of four large nuclear power plants.

This continued Hochul’s nuclear drive through 2025 pushing for the state to become the center of a nuclear power “revival” in the United States and then proposing one gigawatt of new nuclear power in New York.

This first forum, a webinar on January 15, was titled a “Symposium for Safe and Affordable Energy in New York.” It was organized by a coalition of safe-energy and environmental organizations and moderated by Alec Baldwin, actor and nuclear power opponent. It featured Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, and Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.

“We are at a crossroads in New York,” said Baldwin. “The state is leading a multi-state consortium that seeks to rapidly expand nuclear power. In her ‘State of the State’ address this week, Governor Hochul announced plans to build another four gigawatts of new nuclear in New York, in addition to the one gigawatt of previously announced new projects plus 3.4 gigawatts of existing nuclear. That would bring total nuclear generation in New York to 8.4 gigawatts, increasing it by 2.5 times.”

Baldwin continued, “Governor Hochul also arranged a $33 billion ratepayer subsidy to keep four aging reactors in upstate New York operating for another 20 years, including the oldest and second oldest reactors in the U.S.”

Two days before the forum, in her “State of the State” address, Hochul said: “Last summer I took the bold step of greenlighting the first nuclear power project in a generation…At the time we set a goal of building one gigawatt of nuclear power. But if there’s one thing I believe, it’s this: go big or go home. So, I’ve decided to raise the bar to five gigawatts. That’s more nuclear energy then has been built anywhere in the United States in the last 30 years.”

Hochul’s nuclear push is “taking place,” Baldwin went on, “amid unprecedented dismantling of federal nuclear regulation, rubber-stamping and fast-tracking new nuclear projects and dumbing down federal radiation exposure standards.”

He said there was recently a report on the New York Daily News online with the passage: “Some have raised concerns that moving too quickly to build a new fleet of nuclear power facilities could be unsafe; the focus on quickly deploying new reactors could leave safety gaps that could result in disaster.”

“Those concerns need more attention,” said Baldwin, “And so do clean, renewable sources of energy that can meet New York power needs and climate goals without the health and safety risks of nuclear.”

“Mark Z. Jacobson, our first presenter, is a leading authority on this,” continued Baldwin. He noted Jacobson’s positions at Stanford and his having “published 190 peer-reviewed journal articles and seven books” on energy most recently 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything and also No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air.

Jacobson said: “I’m going to talk about, first of all, why nuclear is not helpful or useful. It will not help, at all, New York State regardless of how much money is poured down it. It will also increase risk…and increase air pollution compared with alternatives. Also, it is obsolete already and it is not needed because there are alternatives.”

“There’s a direct alternative that does the exact same thing as nuclear, takes less land and can be put up quicker, is less expensive, does not have the risks and dangers associated with it, and that’s enhanced geothermal,” said Jacobson. And, in addition “there are other…clean renewable” sources of energy. “Wind, solar, and batteries together, for example, are already dominating markets around the world and providing nearly 100% clean renewable energy in 12 countries.”

“China, the biggest…user of energy in the world, is growing clean renewable energy at a pace 100 times greater than that of nuclear,” said Jacobson. “And if they continue growing…renewable energy at that same pace, will be 100% renewable across all energy sectors by the year 2051.”

“The U.S. is putting money into useless technology such as nuclear but also carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, etc.,” said Jacobson.

“There’s just no reason whatsoever we would want to go forward with nuclear,” he said.

In addition to nuclear power’s “health and danger problems,” he went on—and he pointed to the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plant catastrophes—”“worldwide there’s never been a nuclear reactor of any kind built” and put into “operation in less than 10 years in history. And today that number is 12 years….That includes not only the construction time but the permitting, the siting and the financing, etc….”

“In the last 30 years, we’ve only built two nuclear reactors from scratch in the United States…the Vogtle plants 3 and 4 in Georgia. And those took 17 and 18 years respectively from planning to operation,” said Jacobson.

As for “these small modular reactors which are being proposed, they do not even exist commercially,” said Jacobson. “There’s not even a test reactor….So, there’s no reason to even think that those will take less than worldwide 12 years…and more likely 15 to 20 years from planning to operation.” And, “They suffer the same problems as large reactors.”

There are other “new designs” but they, too, “can cause disasters.”

With climate change needing to be tackled rapidly, nuclear power “is completely useless” because “it just takes too long,” said Jacobson.

Then, there’s cost: the two new Vogtle reactors “cost $5.5 billion for 2.2 gigawatts.”

Solar and wind energy take one to three years from “planning to operation,” he said. With nuclear “you are basically waiting around 15 years to put something up” the cost of which is “three to eight times” more than solar and wind power.

“I mean who would do that if you’re actually thinking rationally about it?” asked Jacobson. “It’s just nonsensical to even start.”

Then there’s “security problems that are really important especially with small modular reactors—weapons proliferation. Multiple countries have developed weapons in the guise of civilian nuclear energy programs either by importing uranium that they can enrich like Iran is doing with…centrifuges, or by harvesting plutonium from spent fuel rods.”

“Right now there are 30 countries in the world with nuclear electricity,” said Jacobson.

“That would go up with small modular reactors because they can be shipped around the world. This will encourage more countries to develop [atomic] weapons.”

As for nuclear waste, “You have to store radioactive waste for a couple of hundred thousand years…The U.S. spends $500 million dollars a year just storing current waste. And you have to do this for 200,000 years…and there’s always a risk of it becoming loose and getting into the water or getting into the air.”

Jacobson spoke of the “lung cancer risk from underground uranium mining… Radon is a gas that decays into polonium breathed in by miners. And so there’s a huge increase…of lung cancer. You don’t have that with clean renewable energy.”

“And then carbon dioxide. People think that nuclear is carbon-free. It’s not close to carbon-free,” said Jacobson. “It’s nine to 37 times the carbon equivalent emissions as wind per unit of energy.”

That’s due to the nuclear fuel cycle, he explained, of mining, milling and enrichment of uranium to a level that can be used in a nuclear power plant—a carbon and “energy-intensive process”—and also the construction of nuclear plants. “So nuclear starts in a deficit of putting carbon into the air.”

Detailing “technologies that directly replace nuclear,” he repeated the use of “enhanced geothermal energy” in which water is injected deep in the ground to be heated by the hot rock below to come up through a production pipe as super-heated fluid or steam that can drive turbines and generate electricity—just like nuclear power. But “there are no emissions whatsoever from enhanced geothermal.”

And then there’s wind, solar and hydroelectric power. “New York has lots of hydro, lots of potential for solar, lots of potential for wind both onshore and offshore,” he said.

“There are 12 states that met 50 to 120% of their demand over the last year with just wind, water, solar. South Dakota met 120% of its demand with just wind, water, solar over the last year,” he said, and in “11 of those 12 states that price of electricity was…below the U.S. average. So, it’s cheaper to use clean renewable energy. Nuclear is just driving costs up everywhere you put it up. It’s really expensive and it’s just going to increase in cost.”

Mangano then spoke. He is the author or co-author of more than 40 peer-reviewed medical journal articles and is the author of the books Low-Level Radiation and Immune Disease: An Atomic Era Legacy; Radioactive Baby Teeth; The Cancer Link; and Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment.

The “efforts to expand nuclear power have been marked by certain claims. The one I’m going focus on is the claim that nuclear power is clean or specifically emission-free or zero emission,” he said.” You’ll see these terms quite often. This is a very misleading….really contradictory to what nuclear power is in a nuclear power reactor.”

“The way” nuclear power is produced, he said, “is to take uranium 235 atoms and split them no differently than they are split in an atomic bomb explosion,” Mangano continued. “And this produces over 100 radioactive chemicals not found in nature but only when this fission process occurs. They are tiny metal particles or gases. They are considered waste products. There’s no practical use for them. And they have to be stored…which is another issue of nuclear power.”

“These chemicals once they’re in the environment enter bodies either by breathing or by food or by water,” he went on. “Since each is radioactive, each is a risk for cancer, birth defects and other health problems.”

“Now the mantra that nuclear power is emission-free, zero emission” has been combined “since the beginning of the nuclear era that any emissions are too low and too small to cause harm to humans,” he went on. “This ignores many studies on low dose radiation exposure that have showed increased risk of cancer and other diseases. The way that regulators got around this is when nuclear reactors began operating in the 1950s, regulators set what they called ‘permissible limits,’ permissible limits of emissions and permissible limits of radioactivity in…air and water and food. And every owner of a nuclear plant must every year do a review of these levels and report them publicly.”

But “there is no regulation to monitor cancer in the local area or health trends in areas near nuclear plants,” said Mangano. “Our group which formed in in the late 1980s has tried to fill this void by doing studies of health near nuclear plants. And today I’m going to present…information about the plants in New York State which is the focus of this symposium.”

“The four reactors that are now operating are in upstate New York on Lake Ontario about 35 miles north of Syracuse. Three are in Oswego County….It consists of small towns, rural areas, and farms. Demographically, there’s really no obvious health risk factor. “

Then Mangano presented charts and said: “This is a time trend looking at the percentage that the Oswego County cancer death rate is either above or below the New York rate. And it goes by five-year periods. Now, if you look at the bar on the left-hand side, you see it is pointing downward. This is the period from 1968 to 1973 just before and just after the reactors began operating during which we wouldn’t expect any effect on cancer. But as you see as time goes on, we move to the right, within 10 years the county cancer death rate began to exceed the U.S. and the gap has grown since. The largest gap is the most recent period 2019 to 2023 where the county death rate is 32% above the state as opposed to 10% below before it started….This is all CDC data.”

“That is a very quick look at what happens when a nuclear reactor operates,” Mangano said. “We have done similar studies on cancer trends near nuclear facilities in a number of states, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, Illinois. And we have pretty much found a consistent pattern where at the beginning of startup…the cancer death rates are roughly the same as the state or may be a bit lower and then that is followed by a rising and growing gap where the county rate is much higher. “

He continued with further details about the nuclear plant-cancer link including about a study led by the Harvard T.H. Chain School of Public Health finding a significantly increased cancer incidence in the proximity of nuclear power plants in Massachusetts published in the December 2025 issue of Environmental Health.

To view a video of the forum, go to https://www.grassrootsinfo.org/forums

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