Joseph Romm oped NY's $100 bn nuclear plan worsen affordability crisis (Jan 23, 2026)
January 2026
New York’s $100 billion nuclear plan would worsen its affordability crisis
By Joseph Romm
The last nuclear plant New York State built was completed in 1988. As the New York Times reported in 1984, “The Nine Mile Point 2 nuclear reactor under construction here is a decade behind schedule, is almost three years from operation, and has a price tag 12 times the original estimate.”
Yet, at her Tuesday State of the State speech, Governor Hochul announced her plan to build five new large reactors.
The only U.S. commercial reactors built this century—the only ones the state modeled in its deeply flawed new Energy Plan—are the twin 1100-Megawatt AP1000 reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle plant.
Vogtle was “the most expensive power plant ever built on earth,” one analysis noted, with an “astoundingly high” electricity cost. The final Vogtle cost was upwards of $40 billion.
As a result, Georgia ratepayer bills are rising over $220 a year. South Carolina consumers still pay for two never-completed AP1000s.
Hochul has asserted nuclear power will help “make energy more affordable.” But the reverse is true. The Energy Plan says the recent “surge in large load interconnection requests” is “driven primarily by data center development.” While Hochul has been in office, data center energy demand has helped triple Buffalo’s wholesale electricity prices, raising the state’s residential rates 40%.
Nuclear can’t be built fast enough to matter for new data centers or semiconductor plants. Five new reactors could cost the state $100 billion and still not deliver much, if any, power before 2035.
New York’s Plan is built around the notion that the next reactor built will inevitably be much cheaper per Megawatt than the Georgia plants because of “learning.” But the electricity price from new reactors just keeps increasing, soaring 60% in the previous decade alone.
In contrast, there have been decades of price drops in batteries, solar and wind power. Battery prices fell 40% in 2024, a December study noted. “The economics for batteries are unrecognizable,” the lead author explained. “Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity, solar is now anytime dispatchable electricity.”
These technologies should be the focus of a genuine energy affordability plan.
Joseph Romm is a former acting assistant secretary of energy and author of the Penn Cemter for Science, Sustainability and the Media report, “New York’s Nuclear Anti-Affordability Fiasco.”
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