This town has three nuclear plants. Now it wants another one

This is Oswego. It's a very small, very snowy town on Lake Ontario with a population of 17,000. They have a movie theater, a children's museum, a flower shop, and three nuclear power plants within 10 miles. And they want another one. I think our residents overwhelmingly will support a fourth nuclear power plant. So here in New York, Governor Hochul recently announced plans to build a new nuclear reactor upstate. And a big part of the reason why is the increased need in electricity from AI and data centers. Harnessing the power of the atom is the best way to generate steady zero emission electricity. Nuclear energy has come up as one of the potential solutions because it can deliver a huge amount of electricity 24 hours a day and without producing greenhouse gas emissions. But a lot of people are nervous about having nuclear in their area, understandably. Disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi dominate the public imagination of nuclear power. Well, mostly dominate it. As much as I loved watching The Simpsons growing up, a lot of what they show on the screen is not what reality is. But there are a lot of challenges for building nuclear in the US. So, I'm headed to US Wego to find out more about why this town wants another nuclear power plant and what would happen next if it got one. Personally, I wasn't sure I'd be comfortable having nuclear power so close. So, I met with the mayor of Oswego to ask why nuclear power has been so great for this small town and why it doesn't bother him. Oswego. I mean, if you're from here, you kind of let it, uh, roll. Oswego. I'm a lifelong resident of the city of Oswego. My name is Robert A. Corradino. I've been mayor for almost two years. Mayor Corradino is pushing for Oswego to get its fourth nuclear power plant largely because of the economic benefits it would bring. Most people can say that they either know somebody who works at the plant, plants, or they uh uh work there themselves. 100 years ago or so, the city of Oswego was a a huge port here on the Great Lake Ontario. This was a very busy area. A lot of jobs that were concentrated in industry and manufacturing. And over the course of time, that's changed. Now, our nuclear industry is our number one uh number one employer. I believe it's probably close to 3,000 employees. Nuclear power can be a godsend in towns like Oswego. Not only does it provide jobs, it provides really good jobs. There's thousands of construction jobs that will come with with each build. And then every 18 months or two years, depending on reactor design, you bring in hundreds of specialized employees to do the maintenance, the refueling. Patrick works for Holtech, a company that designs and builds nuclear reactors. He tells me the average salary for workers on these plants is around 100,000 a year. Compare those to the other jobs in most of those communities. Nuclear is always going to be on the high end. And of course, no one would want that in their own backyard. But again, uh it's it's a fact of life. People can live wherever they want. This is a free society. It's like anything, you know, you get used to it. It's crazy. You can just see the steam from the water tower peeking out over all these houses, over all these trees. Feel like it is important to note that is steam, not smoke. I feel like it looks like a smoke stack, but that's a water cooling tower. So that's steam coming out of the top. So that there is the water cooling tower for Nine Mile Point Unit Two, one of the three nuclear power plants they've had here in Oswego County since the 70s. And it's not unusual that these nuclear reactors are so old. In fact, many of the US's nuclear reactors were built in the 60s and 70s. Let's take a look at that history. After World War II, uh basically in the aftermath of the use of nuclear weapons, there was this push to try to see could we harness this immensely powerful force for peace. And so in the 60s and the 70s, we started seeing a proliferation of nuclear reactors across the country. In that time frame, the risks of nuclear also started to become more present in the public mind. You know, I think the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania, which triggered a partial reactor meltdown, that kind of soured a lot of Americans on nuclear. So, as people got concerned about safety, more regulations got imposed on nuclear power plants and they had to basically meet a higher bar for construction and that started raising costs. Then in the 80s, one of the big things that happened was that interest rates went up. The reason why that's a really big concern for nuclear is that nuclear has very high upfront costs. What that means is that for nuclear energy developers, they had to borrow money at a very high expensive rate from banks in order to finance the construction of nuclear reactors. On top of the high interest rates, in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, which led to countless thousands of deaths and changed the public imagination of nuclear power forever. And so basically around the 80s, nuclear reactor construction in the United States stopped. The combination of high price and fear put the US behind the rest of the world in nuclear power. For context, let's compare the US to France. In the US, nuclear makes up 20% of our energy source. In France, nuclear accounts for a whopping 70%. Another virtue for nuclear power plants is that it tends to be on balance one of the safest sources of electricity. Statistically speaking, the chances of nuclear disaster are actually quite slim. Working in nuclear is safer than working in coal, oil, or gas. That's because nuclear power plants don't pollute the air like fossil fuel plants do, which makes it safer for the workers as well as the residents who live in the area. Spending time in Oswego, it started to feel like nuclear is a no-brainer, but I knew that wasn't the full picture. Of course, there are a lot of reasons why the residents of a town like Oswego might not want nuclear built in their backyard. For example, there are very real environmental concerns, largely stemming from the issue of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste can stay hazardous for a very, very long time, hundreds, if not thousands of years. Most nuclear waste is stored in dry casks at the site of the nuclear power plant. This has been a fairly safe way to store nuclear energy waste, but it's never intended to be a permanent solution. In 2021, concerns around nuclear waste and possible disasters pressured then Governor Andrew Cuomo to close Indian Point, a nuclear power plant just outside New York City. If we ever had a major problem at Indian Point, that might be a problem that we couldn't solve. Though, it's worth noting that when Indian Point closed, the state replaced that energy output with plants that burn natural gas. Now, I know it looks like it's just me out here, but reporting stories like these takes a whole team. Editors, reporters, fact checkers, animators, audio engineers, all working together to tell a story that's nuanced, accurate, and more importantly, fun to watch. And, if high quality independent journalism like this is important to you, then you would love our new Vox community on Patreon. For just $6 a month, you'll have a deeper and more direct way to experience our reporting and connect with our journalists. And if you're a fan of our work, then you know it takes time, care, and real resources. Plus, you'll get a sneak peek to see new shows we're developing and a chance to tell producers like me what stories you're interested in seeing more of. Now, back to the video. Nuclear power plants are sort of like Goldilocks. They require a very specific set of circumstances, circumstances that do exist here in Oswego. You need to be close enough to a major city or factories to send the electricity, but it needs to be isolated so that people feel safe and the area is secure, but not too remote because you need to be near a desirable residential area in order to draw long-term workforce. You need to be near highways in order to bring in construction materials and ideally near existing electrical transmission lines. And finally, you need water, a lot of it. Nuclear power plants are very thirsty. You need to use a lot of water in order to power the nuclear cycle. Basically, in order to boil the water to spin the turbine. Nuclear power plants also need a lot of water for cooling and that also tends to be a limitation. So, there's a number of criteria that you really are looking for for where to build a nuclear power plant and that drastically limits the number of sites that are available to do so. So, all of this sets up Oswego really well. But even if they're chosen for the site, there's a really long road ahead before they can flip the switch and start putting energy into the grid. Once New York State chooses the site, they might not even start building until 2033. And many folks upstate have pushed back against Hochul's addition of a new nuclear plant. They cite issues of danger and cost. Increasingly, the the objection by environmental groups is just that nuclear is very expensive. And that's true. Basically, if you want to build a nuclear power plant, you need to have tens of billions of dollars ready and you may have to wait a decade or more before you start generating power before you actually start seeing a return on your investment. And the big question, how long will it take and how over budget will it be? Depending on the size of reactor, 5 to 10 years is is probably a reasonable construction time. You already have an infrastructure. You already have an educated community and workforce. Like those are huge pieces. Um I think to cut down on some of these timelines in 5 to 10 years would be quick. The most recent nuclear power plant built in the US was Vogle in Georgia which was completed after 15 years. It was 7 years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The problem is because we haven't been steadily building nuclear power plants for a long time that workforce has started to decline. And so there's sort of a chicken and egg problem here where, you know, you don't have a huge industry that's ready to hire a whole bunch of nuclear energy engineers, but that's because they don't have a huge workforce to staff these uh power plants and you don't see a huge demand for these new power plants and it's getting more expensive because you have to invest so much in training people to build and operate these power plants. So even if everything goes well, it's probably at least a decade until Oswego gets that new nuclear power plant. But for them, it could really be worth the headache. I'm not a nuclear energy expert, but uh number one, I think uh there's a need for that in New York State, especially our power grid because of the demands on it in the next few years. All the data centers that they're proposing for New York State. The AI, I think, uh there's going to be a huge need for that and as I said, uh we could use uh jobs here in our area and there are ways to make the process of building nuclear quicker and easier. With existing facilities, you've kind of already jumped through all the hoops that you would need to do to build a nuclear power plant. Which is why the Department of Energy announced that they would be giving a loan to help restart the reactor at Three Mile Island at the site of the famous 1979 meltdown. This is a site that already exists. It's already zoned as an industrial site. It already has the infrastructure that was needed to build the plant in the first place. there's there's potential in restarts, but again, there's only so many plants, I think, that are even in a condition um or in the space to restart. Another way of building nuclear more efficiently is through small modular reactors or SMRs. So, one of the problems with nuclear is that we were doing customized designs for every facility. With small modular reactors, you're building one standardized design and you're building it at a factory. You get you get the same benefits of basically mass production. Ultimately, this is part of a much larger question about infrastructure in the US because if we want to prevent climate change and keep using AI, well, it's going to require some kind of large scale infrastructure, whether it's nuclear or something else. Any way you slice it, we're going to have to replace a lot of the existing power infrastructure with clean infrastructure. That's going to cost a lot of money. That's going to take a lot of time. And to date, the United States does not have a good track record of delivering big projects on time and on budget. On the other hand, if we can get through this red tape, we can actually tackle climate change at the scale that we need to in order to meet the targets that we've set for ourselves. Thanks for sticking around. If you keep watching, you'll see a sneak preview for What's Working, a new Patreon exclusive Vox series that uncovers creative policy solutions that are improving the lives of Americans around the country. In the last 30 years, the average price of 4-year public and private college tuition has nearly doubled. Along with it, federal student loan debt has skyrocketed to $1.8 trillion. And you've probably heard a lot of buzzy solutions. President Obama unveiled the goal of a nation where everyone has not only the chance, but also the means to go to college. Essentially, get the first half of their bachelor's degree for free. Tuition-free attendance. College is free. Tuition-free. And the free college movement has become more than just talk. Many Americans agree that free college is a good idea. The left loves to talk about free college, but I was surprised to find out that it was actually a red state that was the first to launch a statewide program in the modern era. So, what's working about free college in Tennessee? Let's crank up the country music and head south.