Enough with the populist pandering, please.
Which is what Gov. Cuomo seemed to be doing yesterday when he reiterated his opposition to the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester, even amid wide concern over Japan’s nuclear woes.
“[I]t should be closed,” he said.
Indeed, Cuomo has long favored an Indian Point shutdown — and what better time to start the ball rolling than now, as Japan struggles to control radiation leaks from its tsunami-wrecked reactors?
But before there’s any talk of actually shutting that plant, there also needs to be talk of where, exactly, New York will get its electricity from in its absence.
New York barely has enough juice to power its economy with Indian Point at full crank. Its two reactors pump out 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to run 2 million homes. They account for 12 percent of the state’s electric power.
Where will all that electricity come from if Indian Point is closed?
Not coincidentally, New York has long been known for its hostility toward power plants, thanks largely to zealous enviro-activists.
Now the enviros are pushing for an indefinite ban on a type of natural-gas extraction called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — in which water is injected into rock formations to crack them open and release gas deposits.
Already, New York is the only state that prohibits the practice. That’s particularly tragic, because a region upstate known as the Marcellus Shale is thought to be rich in natural gas, though it requires fracking to harvest it.
The ban denies New Yorkers not only an important energy source, but also thousands of drilling-related jobs in the Southern Tier.
Indeed, fracking is going great guns across the border in Pennsylvania — to no discernible ill-effect.
But the key question, again, is: If firms can’t drill for natural gas here, and the state shuts down Indian Point, where will residents, businesses, schools, hospitals and trains get their power?
Not from oil- or coal-burning plants, that’s for sure; they’re said to promote global warming.
Conservation? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine businesses eager to sink money into such a restricted environment.
All in all, it’s a scary prospect.
Sure, concern over nuclear power, especially post-Japan, is natural. Some nations are now reviewing their policies and checking whether their reactors can withstand quakes. As they should.
Indian Point, moreover, apparently sits near a seismic fault line. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ranks one of its units as the nation’s most earthquake-prone (though quakes here are rare, and the odds of reactor damage is but 1 in 10,000 in any one year).
Actually, America as a whole should be ensuring that its nuclear facilities are safe, just as it needs to hammer out a coherent, workable overall energy policy.
But economic costs of any action need to be factored in, along with risks. Let’s hope Cuomo remembers that.