The Guardian "discovers" some negative side effects from the closure of Indian Point

Mar 23, 2024

Almost 40 miles from the heart of Manhattan, up the Hudson river, laid until a few years ago, the Big Apple’s largest source of consistent , reliable, and clean electricity - the three unit 1040 MW nameplate capacity Indian Point Energy Center. In late April of 2021, the last operating unit in Indian Point, a nuclear power plant was shut down for good with the entire facility beginning the multi year decommissioning phase. The first two reactors were shut down in previous years - one back in 1974, and the second one in 2020. NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a press release from his office noted, “This is a victory for the health and safety of New Yorkers, and moves us a big step closer to reaching our aggressive clean energy goals.” Cuomo had noted that shutting down Indian Point, which he insisted did not belong on the Hudson river nor in such close proximity to the millions of people, was something he wanted to do well before he was Governor.

Indeed, shutting down Indian Point, one of three of the Empire State’s nuclear power stations (the other two not being on the Hudson or near NYC) turns out was a long time thing coming. Environmental groups such as Riverkeeper, a non-profit originally dedicated to protecting NYC’s sources of drinking water famously, had their sights set on closing Indian Point for decades as did The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), The Sierra Club, Bill McKibben’s 350.org, and the Organization Beyond Indian Point who used actor Mark Ruffalo as a spokesman in propaganda videos. As noted by Fox Green, Robert F. Kennedy Junior also had significant roles in Riverkeeper and the NRDC for years including advocating for the closure of Indian Point.

Riverkeeper claimed throughout their advocacy and as highlighted in an FAQ (NRDC has a similar FAQ as well) that they believed Indian Point’s hot water discharge was a hazard to aquatic life in the river, the plant leaked “toxic, radioactive” water, vulnerability to earthquakes and terrorist attacks, the plant’s alleged multiple emergency shutdowns, and of course “meltdown” concerns. In response to the question “How will the energy grid remain secure,” Riverkeeper insists, emphasis mine, “The simple answer is that there is enough energy on the grid to shut down Indian Point today. It can and must be closed without additional natural gas or other carbon based fuel.”

They further write:

Analysis by an independent consultant working with Riverkeeper and NRDC concludes that, when Indian Point’s 2,000 megawatts go offline in 2021, measures already in place put us less than 50 megawatts away from full replacement energy.

Under the question, “Will Indian Point’s Closure Increase Electric Bills,” Riverkeeper citing a consulting group insisted,

“With a focus on using energy efficiency and renewables to replace the plant, the increase would be only 1 to 2 percent. Rapidly falling prices for renewables and energy efficiency mean that even this estimate is conservative making it likely that electric bills will go down. On the other hand, an accident at Indian Point would bring immeasurable costs.”

The closure of Indian Point was also viewed as a positive thing from an “environmental justice” perspective. Riverkeeper, well steeped in DIE ideology, insisted that if the plant were to suffer from an accident, resulting in the need for an evacuation that such “would have a disproportionate impact on people of color.”

There was also narrative for a “just transition,” for the thousands of employees who worked at the plant, who after suddenly losing their high paying jobs would be re-trained. New York State Senator from District 40 Peter Harckham said:

"The closing of Indian Point will impact the region and its residents in many ways, and I am very thankful to all of the workers there who dedicated their blood, sweat and expertise into running the plant safely. We have been working collaboratively for a just transition that protects the plant's workers, the environment and public safety while maintaining tax revenue for the affected municipalities and local school district."

Promises of such “just transitions” are pushed commonly by Progressive and “green-minded” looter politicians for workers of fossil fuel power plants, yet the only successful one so far was the transition of workers from a former coal power plant in Ontario to the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station.

In other words, proponents in support of shutting down Indian Point insisted at the time that the grid would not suffer from any stability problems, Indian Point would be replaced by cheaper “renewable energy” with no new fossil fueled power plants added to the mix. On top of that, all the former employees of Indian Point would find high-paying, meaningful work somewhere else closely. The hazards of the evil nuclear power plant would be gone once and for all.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not.

Almost three years later, newspaper The Guardian across the pond in Britain reported just this week some dim, dire truths about the closure of Indian Point.

In “A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up,” hard hitting journalist Oliver Milman notes the closure of what he labels a “deteriorating and unloved” nuclear power plant’s closure actually, “nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.”

Further he states:

Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.

And

New York upped its consumption of readily available gas to make up its shortfall in 2020 and again in 2021, as nuclear dropped to just a fifth of the state’s electricity generation, down from about a third before Indian Point’s closure

Whoops!

Not all is lost of course. Milman insists, this is nothing but a minor bump in the road and will not “wreck New York’s goal of making its grid emissions-free by 2040.”

What’s the catch?

Canadian, specifically Québécois hydropower, and the “renewables” are supposed to fill the gap of both the lost nuclear power and the all the fossil fuel plants including the ones that replaced the closure of Indian Point, Milman touches.

The Québécois hydropower one is quite ironic as it requires the construction of several hundred miles of transmission lines from deep within the province and into the US. Riverkeeper have been on record for years opposing hydroelectricity of any kind including these projects insisting, “Canadian hydropower is not a low carbon source of energy and the project will not directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” They allege it has “many other unacceptable consequences” and (of course) don’t want the project, which consists of mixture of overhead and underground transmission lines, running near or parallel the Hudson River. They also insisted it “harms Indigenous communities” both in NY and Canada.

As for “renewable” energy, specifically wind, Milman cites New York Governor Hochul’s recent press release bragging about the completion of the state’s first off-shore wind turbines - a whopping 12 of them with a 130 MW nameplate capacity - roughly ten percent of Indian Point’s and with a fraction of the reliability. This off shore wind project has been known to be a source of the killing and near extinction of North Atlantic right whales, yet has been virtually covered up by the wind industry, “environmentalists,” the Corporate Press, and Progressive politicians.

None of that is included in Milman’s hard hitting reporting, of course.

And neither are the job losses (over 1,000) and subsequent economic downturn of the cities and towns that surrounded Indian Point including over 20 million dollars in tax revenue for the Hudson School District and almost one half of the Village of Buchanan’s tax revenue. Weschester County received a few hundred grand in grants from the Federal Government which are supposed to go to the region’s biosciences industry but as anybody who understands “Government aid” will know will provide no meaningful help to any of the actual former employees of the plant.

So much for a “just transition.”

Could Milman and The Guardian just have an innocent blind spot in the whole matter?

Perhaps they were too busy covering other important things over there across the pond?

Perhaps he and his colleagues brushed over The Guardian’s very own reporting written by Edward Helmore in May 2021?

The sub headline nods to both increased emissions (at least in the short term) and lost jobs.

The power station on the banks of the Hudson has no place in the state’s plans switch to renewables but critics say in the short term it means lost jobs and increased emissions

And in the copy:

On Friday in the town of Buchanan, the mood was dark. The plant has provided about 1,000 well-paid jobs and half the town’s tax revenue. A lengthy decommissioning process will cut jobs by two-thirds.
“It’s a sad day, the end of an era, and it marks the loss of our largest employer and tax payer,” the mayor of Buchanan, Theresa Knickerbocker, told the Guardian.
“I think people really didn’t understand nuclear and I’m hugely disappointed that a clean energy plant is being replaced by two gas plants. We talk about the environment and that’s not environmentally sound.”

A source for something akin to “you’ve have to break a few eggs to make an omelette” for the increased emissions issue is none other than the former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President Obama, Greg Jaczko.

“There may be a period when the overall supply of electricity will see an increased dependence on natural gas, but in the long term the trend is to reduce emissions significantly.”

Shortly after that article, The Guardian, even let someone post an op/ed in the paper in favor of nuclear power.

Mentioning specifically the mistake with Indian Point, the author Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:

The first full month without the plant has seen a 46% increase in the average carbon intensity of statewide electric generation compared to when Indian Point was fully operational. New York replaced clean energy from Indian Point with fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
It’s a nightmare we should have seen coming. In Germany, nuclear power formed around a third of the country’s power generation in 2000, when a Green party-spearheaded campaign managed to secure the gradual closure of plants, citing health and safety concerns. Last year, that share fell to 11%, with all remaining stations scheduled to close by next year. A recent paper found that the last two decades of phased nuclear closures led to an increase in CO2 emissions of 36.3 megatons a year - with the increased air pollution potentially killing 1,100 people annually.
Like New York, Germany coupled its transition away from nuclear power with a pledge to spend more aggressively on renewables. Yet the country’s first plant closures meant carbon emissions actually increased, as the production gap was immediately filled through the construction of new coal plants. Similarly, in New York the gap will be filled in part by the construction of three new gas plants. For the Germans, investment in renewables did eventually pay dividends, but it largely replaced the old nuclear plants’ output rather than reducing existing fossil fuel consumption. The carbon intensity of German electricity is higher than the EU average.