Scriba, N.Y. – Twice a year, in June and December, 40 sirens scattered around northern Oswego County scream for three minutes to test a warning system that would alert residents if catastrophe struck the nuclear plants at Nine Mile Point.
It’s a periodic reminder of the unique character of nuclear power, where the stakes are high and vigilance is paramount.
Security officers at the plants carry long guns. Employees wear radiation monitors. The spent uranium fuel stored on site must be kept safely away from humans for thousands of years.
Oswego County long ago embraced its role as a nuclear powerhouse. A symbol of the atom lies at the center of the county seal.
But a decision looms over the future of New York’s nuclear power reactors that could have seismic implications for Oswego and New York state. How much longer will the nukes run?
The three reactors in Oswego County, plus a smaller sister plant in Wayne County, are the only remaining nuclear plants in New York. They are key anchors in the electric grid, cranking out more than one-fifth of New York’s electricity.
They also provide 1,800 high-paying jobs in a needy region and pay tens of millions in local property taxes. Their presence helped lure Micron Technology to Central New York.
But the nukes are aging and expensive. Owner Constellation Energy Corp. has received hefty, state-mandated subsidies to keep the plants running since they nearly shut down in 2016 to stop losing money.
The oldest of the four – the 55-year-old Nine Mile Point Unit 1, outside Oswego – is the oldest operating nuclear reactor in the country. The R.E. Ginna plant in Wayne County is second. Their operating licenses expire in 2029.
Constellation must decide soon whether to ask federal regulators to renew their licenses. The government review takes years. If the company obtains 20-year extensions, it could keep the plants running a total of 80 years, rather than the 40 they were originally approved for.
All signs point to go. New York is hungry for electricity made without carbon emissions. But there is one important condition.
“It has to be economic,” said Richard Barlette, Constellation’s state government affairs director.
The licenses are not the only things that expire in 2029.
New York state customers have been paying extra on their utility bills to fund roughly $500 million in annual subsidies to keep the four Upstate nuclear plants running, under a deal approved by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Public Service Commission.
Those subsidies, which have totaled roughly $3.6 billion so far, also are scheduled to end in 2029.
Before applying for license extensions, Constellation officials will seek a commitment from New York state to guarantee the financial prosperity of the nukes, according to correspondence filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That’s likely to mean either ongoing subsidies or some other mechanism to ensure adequate revenue.
Ultimately, the future of the nuclear plants may depend on whether state officials decide to continue to support them to help meet New York’s ambitious energy plan. Under a clean energy law passed in 2019, the electric grid is required to produce zero emissions by 2040.
Several environmental groups oppose extending the use of nuclear power – especially if that means ongoing subsidies – arguing that more resources should be devoted to beefing up renewable energy instead.
But Constellation says New York can kiss its zero emission goal goodbye if the nuclear plants are not part of the solution.
“Assuming that there’s continued policy support, and that the units are made solvent, they’ll certainly be there to help hit that 2040 target,’’ Barlette said. “Otherwise … you’re going to see a backsliding on achievement of that 2040 goal.”
‘We would definitely have concerns’
During their first few decades, the Upstate nuclear plants often struggled. They averaged only 75% production through the year 2000. They labored through some lengthy shutdowns, including one at Nine Mile 1 that started in 1987 and stretched to 2 ½ years.
But the nukes are reliable workhorses now. Since 2001, they have been available more than 94% of the time, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The people who run the state’s electric grid would hate to see them retire anytime soon.
“We would definitely have concerns about that,’’ said Kevin Lanahan, a vice president at the New York Independent System Operator. The NYISO oversees the state’s bulk electric system that supplies local utilities with power to send to customers.
New York’s last coal-fired power plant closed in 2020. Plants fueled by natural gas and oil are targeted for extinction as the state aims for an emission-free electric system by 2040.
That leaves nuclear and hydroelectric power, which produce roughly equal amounts, as the main sources of around-the-clock generation at a time when the demand for electricity is rising. The NYISO estimates that New York will need 35% more electricity in 2040 than it does now.
If the nukes retire when their current licenses expire, “that would be moving in the wrong direction,’’ Lanahan said. “We need to add capacity.”
When Micron Technology executives were shopping for a place to build a $100 billion chip fab complex, they were attracted to a site in Clay because of its proximity to the Oswego nuclear plants, said Scott Gatzemeier, the Micron official in charge of the project. The high-voltage substation across the street from Micron’s site is fed directly by the nuclear plants 30 miles away.
“It’s linked, literally, with a direct line,’’ Gatzemeier said.
If Micron builds all four planned chip fabs in Clay, they will gobble up 16 billion kilowatt-hours a year, enough for more than 2 million homes. At the same time, the equipment is extremely sensitive to fluctuations in voltage. The reliable, around-the-clock output from nuclear plants will be important, Gatzemeier said.
“You lose up to a week’s worth of output for a millisecond power disruption,’’ he said. “So power stability and power availability were absolutely key factors in our decision.”
The four Upstate reactors line the shore of Lake Ontario. Besides Nine Mile 1 and Ginna, they include Nine Mile Point Unit 2, the youngest, which is licensed through 2046; and the James A. FitzPatrick plant, which abuts the two Nine Mile reactors, licensed through 2034.
The licenses for all four units have already been extended once, adding 20 years to their original 40-year terms. So far, only two of the 94 U.S. reactors have been extended a second time, for a total of 80 years, but more than a dozen have applications in the works.
The good times roll
Eight years ago, the Upstate nuclear plants were losing money and threatening to shut down. In response, the Public Service Commission approved a 12-year subsidy program to pay the nuclear plants a premium in return for their “zero emission’' power. The subsidies add about $2 a month to the average household utility bill.
That was a tough time for nukes. Many that operated in competitive markets like New York were losing money, forced to sell their power at low prices to match generators that burn cheap natural gas. Thirteen U.S. nuclear plants shut down from 2013 to 2022.
But now the nuclear script has flipped. Constellation, the nation’s largest nuclear operator, is riding high on the value of its nuclear fleet.
The company’s stock price rose about 70% in the past year, as the company spent $1.5 billion buying back shares. The CEO got a 45% boost in compensation, to $15.2 million.
The nuclear subsidies that started in New York caught on in two other states where the company operates, Illinois and New Jersey. And this year the federal government rolled out a nuclear production tax credit that will provide support for a decade.
On top of that, demand for electricity is predicted to skyrocket in years to come, boosting the value of any power plants that can survive the transition to a zero emission grid. Energy-intensive businesses like artificial intelligence data centers have even begun looking to locate at nuclear plants and buy their entire output directly.
There’s surging interest in developing new nuclear plants, but that future is uncertain.
Recent efforts to build large nukes have run into huge cost overruns and long delays. And plans for smaller innovative reactors are still being drawn up, leaving them a decade away from commercial use, Barlette said.
Existing nuclear plants, on the other hand, are gold.
Rather than shutting down reactors, Constellation and other nuclear operators are looking now to bring some of them back from the dead.
Constellation is taking a hard look at whether to reopen a Pennsylvania reactor that was shut five years ago for losing money, CEO Joe Dominguez said during a May call with analysts.
In Illinois, Constellation decided last year to invest $800 million to upgrade the capacity of two plants it had previously targeted for early retirement.
A Michigan company is working to restart a nuclear plant there that closed two years ago.
In New York, Constellation is focused on positioning the existing four reactors to run another 20 years, Barlette said.
Constellation gets paid more for power produced in New York than in other states, in part because New York provides the most lucrative subsidies.
For every kilowatt-hour it produces in New York, Constellation earns about 35% more than what it earns at its 17 reactors in other states, according to company financial projections issued in June.
‘Uncharted territory’
The Nine Mile 1 and Ginna reactors have already operated longer than any other nuke in the United States. They are among the three oldest nuclear plants in the world. (The oldest, a small reactor in Switzerland, fired up three months before Nine Mile 1.)
That puts the New York plants at the forefront of questions about how long nuclear reactors can keep running safely beyond their original 40-year licenses. (Forty years was chosen for economic reasons, according to the NRC, not physical limitations.)
When it comes to operating reactors beyond 60 years, federal regulators have said that the potential deterioration of materials is a key concern. In particular, the agency cites the potential for degradation of the reactor pressure vessel, internal vessel components, concrete structures and electrical cables.
Nuclear operators must demonstrate to the NRC that they have an effective “aging management program’' to monitor and upgrade the health of their equipment. The details are subject to ongoing modification based on industry experience, which is shared among operators.
Critics say there is too much potential for unanticipated component failures to justify letting nuclear plants run for up to 80 years. Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said no operator has experience running plants for that long.
“We are already in uncharted territory,’’ Judson said.
Roughly 90% of all U.S. reactors have already extended their licenses once, to 60 years. Nuclear advocates say the plants have gotten safer with age as operators gain experience and share knowledge. NRC officials say nuclear safety has “improved dramatically’' over the past 25 years.
Here’s one issue yet unresolved: No one knows what, exactly, will become of the spent nuclear fuel that is piling up around the nation’s power reactors. The waste remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years after it is used to generate electricity.
The United States has no long-term repository for spent fuel. Instead, each nuclear power plant stores the waste on site. For five years or more, used fuel rods are kept in pools inside the reactor building while they cool. Then the used fuel is placed in so-called “dry casks” and moved outside.
There are two types of cask in use at Nine Mile Point. In one type, the fuel rods are placed in a carbon steel canister that is encased in concrete 26 inches thick. The result is a 19-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide cylinder that weighs 180 tons and stands upright on a concrete pad 30 inches thick.
Constellation also uses a horizontal cask. The spent fuel is loaded into stainless steel canisters that are injected with helium as a coolant. Each canister is loaded horizontally into a concrete “crypt” that is 15 feet tall and 14 feet wide.
Dry casks are designed to be used to transport the waste to a permanent repository, if one ever becomes available. For now, they serve as on-site storage.
Thus far, Constellation’s four Upstate reactors have filled 110 dry casks that sit outside the plants. The NRC considers them safe for 100 years, after which they might have to be replaced.
Spent fuel is considered high-level nuclear waste that must be isolated for tens of thousands of years.
U.S. officials have tried unsuccessfully for decades to develop a site where spent fuel could be buried deep underground forever.
‘We still need the nuclear’
New York’s energy plans are driven by legislation passed in 2019 aimed at fighting climate change. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act requires ambitious changes to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
State energy officials are grappling with how to make that happen. So far, New York emissions have moved in the wrong direction.
The only Downstate nuclear plants, Units 2 and 3 at the Indian Point plant in Westchester County, shut down several years ago for environmental reasons. (They never received subsidies.) After they shut down, the gap in power production was filled by plants burning natural gas. Fossil fuel plants now supply 49% of the state’s electricity, compared with 39% before Indian Point went offline.
Wind and solar power – the intended mainstays of the future grid — have been painfully slow to develop. They provide only 8% of New York’s electricity, even after including all the solar panels on individual homes.
The Public Service Commission is one year into a review to determine which energy sources will help make the electric grid emission-free. Nuclear – existing or new – is one of the options.
To date, state energy officials have treated existing nuclear plants as part of the zero-emission solution, said Doreen Harris, president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Harris co-chaired the Climate Action Council, which assumed that the Upstate nukes would continue operations when the council drew up its 2022 plan for meeting state climate goals.
“We did make an assumption that they would continue to operate,” Harris said. “Obviously, it takes some of the pressure off of the need for other zero-emission new resources.”
But it will be up to the PSC to decide whether nuclear power should be supported with additional financial incentives to help meet emission targets, Harris said.
As part of its deliberations, the PSC hosted a two-day technical conference in December 2023 to hear from experts. The panel discussion on nuclear power featured three speakers — from government, academia and the nuclear industry – each of whom expressed full-throated support for nuclear power.
Julie Kozeracki, director of strategy in the U.S. Department of Energy loan programs office, said using a firm power source like nuclear to supply 20% to 40% of the state’s electricity is the cheapest way to achieve a zero-emissions electric grid, according to a video of the conference.
“We should build all of the solar and wind that we possibly can, as quickly as we can,” she said. “And we still need the nuclear.”
Emily Liu, a nuclear engineer and head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, agreed that nuclear should be part of the mix.
“You really need a base energy,’’ Liu said. “You cannot depend on solar and wind because they come and go. Even if you pack them with batteries, that’s going to be a huge cost and it’s not very dependable. So, yeah, having a baseload from nuclear is a must.”
Critics of nuclear power complained to the PSC that the panel did not include anyone who questions the economic viability or environmental risks of nuclear plants.
The Alliance for a Green Economy, a renewable power advocacy group, questioned the assumption that the future electric grid would benefit from having large generating plants that must run all the time. A number of studies have concluded that so-called baseload power is an outmoded concept that does not have the flexibility to mesh well with renewable sources like wind and solar, which vary in output.
A grid supplied chiefly by renewables will require flexible, quick-start power sources that can fill in when the sun isn’t shining or the wind blowing. That is not a role typically played by nuclear plants, which generally run at full power all the time.
“We hope that there will be additional time and discussion dedicated to understanding nuclear generating facilities, their environmental impacts, their cost impacts, and their ability, or lack thereof, to be part of a future electrical grid,” AGREE wrote in a response to the technical conference.
Judson, of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said committing resources to sustain nuclear power plants reduces the investments that could be better spent on improving battery storage or other technology to support renewable energy.
Sorting out the economics of the energy transition — what should be subsidized and how much it will cost — will be critical to planning the future electric grid, said John Howard, a former member of the Public Service Commission and the state Climate Action Council.
Like the nukes, renewable power plants have been eligible for subsidies for years. So far, that cost has been minimal compared with the nuclear subsidies because wind and solar plants have been slow to come online and produce electricity.
That is likely to change.
NYSERDA announced in June that it finalized a deal to buy enough electricity for about 1 million homes from two offshore wind farms to be built roughly 30 miles from Long Island. The complex deal could be worth up to $25 billion over its 25-year life.
The deal obligates utility customers throughout the state to pay subsidies if wholesale market prices fall below the price guaranteed by NYSERDA. The subsidies are estimated to cost an average household about $2 a month, the authority said.
Energy officials will have to make tough choices as they calculate the cost of building an emission-free grid, Howard said.
“We can do all of this, right?” he said. “We can do anything. Just … how big is the check?”
Staff writer Tim Knauss can be reached at: email | Twitter | 315-470-3023.
