New York’s big new bet on nuclear energy

When Gov. Kathy Hochul took office in 2021, New York was in the middle of a complicated energy transition. Albany had passed one of the nation’s most ambitious decarbonization laws only two years earlier, yet the state had just shuttered its single largest source of carbon-free power: the Indian Point nuclear station.

Five years later, the situation has flipped. Hochul, a Democrat who is up for reelection in November, watered down the state’s decarbonization goals this spring and is now calling for the biggest buildout of new nuclear reactors in modern U.S. history.

“Expanding our nuclear energy capacity will play a key role in my all-of-the-above energy strategy to ensure we have enough reliable power to keep the lights on and costs down for New Yorkers while helping attract 21st century economic development opportunities,” Hochul said in an exclusive statement to Canary Media.

If successful, the 5 gigawatts of new nuclear power plants that Hochul aims to build would make New York the No. 3 state in the country in terms of atomic generating capacity.

It’s an ambitious target. The entire U.S. has built just over 3 GW of new nuclear capacity over the last 20 years, and most of it came from the first-of-a-kind AP1000 buildout at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating plant in Georgia, which was plagued by cost and deadline overruns.

Hochul’s nuclear embrace comes as federal support flows toward efforts to build both smaller next-generation reactors and larger-scale facilities similar to the three New York already has.

“This is part of the return of energy realism to the Western world,” said Isuru Seneviratne, the co-founder of Nuclear New York, an advocacy group that has pushed for more atomic energy in the state.

Not everyone is happy with the move. Influential local groups such as NY Renews say the state has not done enough to maximize wind and solar power, and some state lawmakers have called for a moratorium on nuclear.

Hochul, for her part, has cast nuclear energy as necessary for long-term decarbonization. The state has struggled to execute on its plan to build large-scale renewables upstate and ferry the power downstate, and President Donald Trump has all but crushed the offshore wind industry that New York was otherwise banking on for clean power.

“While dangerous policies coming out of Washington, D.C., threaten to halt our progress, I am doubling down on our efforts to strengthen our grid and invest in the clean energy we need to power New York,” Hochul said in the statement to Canary Media.

Changing tides

The Empire State’s turnaround marks a major shift in state energy policy.

Indian Point station, north of New York City — at one point the state’s largest nuclear plant — shut down its last reactor in April 2021, following a decades-long campaign by those who believed the facility represented a grave risk from a September 11–style terrorist attack; among them were then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also argued that the warm water the facility discharged harmed wildlife in the Hudson River.

Hochul took office later that same year, but it wasn’t until 2024 that she began calling for the state to revisit nuclear energy.

In January 2025, Hochul issued a nuclear ​“master plan” for the state. Five months later, she ordered the New York Power Authority (NYPA) — the largest state-owned utility in the country — to help bring down the cost of building the first gigawatt of new nuclear capacity.

That December, New York inked a partnership with Ontario, where the conservative government is building what will likely be North America’s first small modular reactor: a 300-megawatt BWRX-300 from the American Japanese giant GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy. The pact was aimed at working together to settle on one or two reactor designs that the entire Northeast could get behind, allowing for a regional supply chain to form that would bring down the costs of building the second, third, and fourth versions of the same technology.

In January 2026, Hochul upped the target, adding another 4 GW of capacity to the state’s nuclear goal while announcing that eight upstate New York communities had responded to NYPA’s request for information to express their interest in hosting nuclear facilities.

Two months later, she spearheaded a deal with the governors of all six New England states to coordinate plans for new nuclear projects with the hopes of further cementing a regional standard for nuclear. In June, her office kicked off the Public Service Commission process to begin siting the plants.

While Hochul has moved fast in recent months, the process of actually getting a new nuclear power plant built will be much slower.

“These are generational investments that we’re talking about,” said Doreen Harris, the chief executive of the New York State Research and Development Authority, the government agency in charge of charting the state’s energy future. ​“These are not investments that necessarily mean you have a project in the ground in a small number of months. This is an infrastructure investment that the governor has committed us to that will be beneficial for many generations to come.”

Political blowback could build once projects get underway.

Already, state Sen. Kevin Parker, a Democrat from Brooklyn, has introduced legislation to temporarily ban construction of any nuclear power projects. The bill, proposed in April, calls for a two-and-a-half-year pause and mimics the tactic data center opponents used in pushing the state to adopt the nation’s first moratorium on the computing facilities.

Plans by the U.S. Army to deploy a microreactor at Fort Drum, located in the state’s northern reaches, also drew pushback following the announcement last week.

“This is going to be the first one of these reactors that’s ever been deployed anywhere. You’ll discover how expensive it is and you’ll discover how potentially dangerous it is,” Alan Kuperman a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, told WWNY, a CBS affiliate located upstate.

Figuring out financing

Still the biggest hurdle to building a new nuclear power plant is financing it. In New York, electricity markets make the task that much harder.

In 1999, Albany established the New York Independent System Operator as the new overseer of the liberalized electricity market, officially breaking up the monopoly utilities

New York isn’t alone in this. In the post–Cold War scramble to apply market logic to as many facets of American society as possible, most states broke up their utilities. Rather than one company owning the power plants, the distribution system, and the sales to customers, new electricity markets forced vertically integrated utilities to split apart, pitting electrical generators against one another at an auction overseen by new nonprofit grid operators. The idea was to drive down prices.

The new system had benefits. No longer could an obstinately coal-burning utility, for example, block the construction of increasingly cheap renewables. Independent developers could just build clean energy on their own and compete.

But financing large-scale power plants that take years to build has proved virtually impossible. The hydroelectric buildout of the 1920s and 1930s — and the nuclear boom of the 1960s and 1970s — relied on utilities offsetting the losses from megaprojects with soaring electricity sales in another division of the business. The private developers who now build power plants in markets like New York have no such ability, and are thus generally not willing to bear the risk of a capital-intensive project like a nuclear power plant. 

New York’s most recent nuclear reactor, Unit 2 of Nine Mile Point plant, in Oswego, came online in 1988. No new nuclear projects have even been attempted in the state since then.

All that is what makes NYPA’s role so compelling. The state created the power authority in 1931, when then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a way to harness more hydroelectric power. NYPA later served as a national model once Roosevelt became president and enacted the New Deal, establishing federal utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority in the rural Southeast. Now, it can serve as a tool to help Albany exceed the typical limits of a liberalized market.

The state-owned power company can provide steady financing and support to help lower the hurdles private developers face in building electricity megaprojects.

NYPA’s current nuclear mandate is limited to the first gigawatt Hochul wants to build. Asked whether NYPA could be used for more projects going forward, Sean Ewart, the deputy secretary of energy Hochul tasked with overseeing the new reactor buildout, said Albany was open to the idea.

“My honest answer to that question is that it’s TBD,” he said. ​“Our mission is to build this in the fastest way possible … so we’re not thinking about this from any kind of ideological perspective. We’re just thinking about this practically. Let’s get this done.”