New York governor Kathy Hochul announced Monday that her state will host a large new nuclear power plant designed to generate at least 1 gigawatt of electricity.
“If you take nuclear off the table, you have to burn more fossil fuels,” Hochul said at a press conference. “That’s not going to work for us here in New York.”
The governor is directing the New York Power Authority (NYPA), which owns and operates two dozen power plants — mostly dams and gas turbines — to develop the new facility. The plans are still in their infancy: NYPA, a state government entity, has yet to pick a location or a design.
Hochul said the state will work with private partners to develop the power plant and will finance construction while buying the power it generates.
Among the sites under consideration are three nuclear plants currently operating in upstate New York, according to the Wall Street Journal. All of them are owned by Constellation Energy, which has been wooing tech companies to purchase output from its nuclear portfolio.
Microsoft and Meta both currently have deals with Constellation: Microsoft is reopening a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in a $1.8 billion project, while Meta is buying the clean energy attributes of the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois in a deal that is reportedly worth billions of dollars. Amazon recently signed a deal with Talen Energy to buy nearly 2 gigawatts of nuclear in Pennsylvania.
But the nuclear industry still faces some potential headwinds. No new nuclear power plant has broken ground in the U.S. in over 15 years.
The most recent large-scale nuclear power plants in the U.S. have blown through deadlines and exceeded budgets by billions. Small modular reactors, which many startups are pursuing, promise to address those concerns by leveraging mass manufacturing, but the commercial viability of the technology remains untested until a few are built.
Hochul said that the success of the project will depend on regulatory and permitting reform at the federal level. Previous large nuclear power plants took years to complete the process. “The barriers are in Washington,” she said.
Nuclear power has received renewed interest as tech companies and data center developers scour the grid for new sources of power. It has also become a rare point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans, suggesting that the nascent nuclear renaissance might refresh the nation’s aging nuclear fleet.
“If we don’t get on board, it’ll pass us by,” Hochul said.
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