The Irony of Strength
Picture it. A lifelong vegan, stomach rumbling, walking past a barbecue joint. She tells herself she’s morally superior, but then the wind shifts, and the smell of brisket hits. That’s New York in 2025. After decades of preaching the gospel of renewables, it’s finally sidling up to the one clean energy source it swore off: nuclear.
Gov. Kathy Hochul just authorized a 1-gigawatt nuclear reactor project. It’s the first major plant approval in over 15 years. For a state that once cheered the shutdown of Indian Point, it’s a stunning about-face. But it’s not courage. It’s a necessity.
The lights still have to stay on. Even when the sun doesn’t show and the wind refuses to cooperate.
Three Mile Island: The Panic That Paused a Movement
March 28, 1979. Central Pennsylvania. A minor mechanical fault, a stuck valve, triggered a series of missteps. Operators didn’t catch it in time. A hydrogen bubble formed. The core overheated. Partial meltdown.
TV stations lost their minds. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Evacuation orders poured in. Over 140,000 people fled.
But when the smoke cleared? No deaths. No injuries. Radiation exposure is barely registered. Scientists studying the aftermath decades later found no health effects in the population.
Didn’t matter. The panic had taken root. Nuclear became the villain. Permit applications stalled. Construction ground to a halt. For most of America, the nuclear age died that day, not because of radiation but fear.
It wasn’t the reactor that melted down. It was public trust.
When Progressivism Meets the Grid
Look past the headlines, and New York’s electricity portfolio tells a harder truth.
As of 2024, nearly half the state’s power came from natural gas. Another 21% is from nuclear. Hydro chipped in around the same percentage. Wind and solar? Combined, they barely reached 7%. That’s it. Seven.
And when Indian Point went offline, the state lost 18 terawatt-hours of clean, steady electricity a year. The gap? Filled with fossil fuels.
Nuclear’s gift is its indifference. It doesn’t care if it’s night or if the wind’s dead. It just runs. Smooth. Quiet. Constant.
It’s the difference between a backup generator and a coin flip.
No rolling blackouts. No panic texts begging you not to charge your EV after dinner. Just reliable energy. The kind you notice only when it disappears.
Progressives, trapped in their own echo chamber, now face the music. They’ve sold voters a fantasy: that solar and wind can carry the load. But when the weather stops cooperating, and it always does, reality comes knocking.
Now, suddenly, they’re all in on “next-gen fission.” Same atom. New name. Different pitch.
From Virtue Signals to Voltage
States aren’t embracing nuclear out of passion. They’re surrendering to arithmetic.
Michigan is trying to restart Palisades. Wyoming is digging the ground for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, a Bill Gates-backed molten salt SMR. Illinois, Montana, Wisconsin? Nuclear moratoriums lifted. Colorado redefined nuclear as “clean.” Indiana greenlit a cost-pass-through to ratepayers.
They didn’t do this because of a feel-good campaign. They did it because the math was decided for them.
Batteries are still limited. Most large-scale batteries typically last for six hours. Winter lasts longer than that. EVs are devouring kilowatts. A single Tesla charging draws about as much power as an entire suburban home.
Then you’ve got AI, the digital beast with a bottomless appetite.
These data centers? They aren’t quaint server rooms with blinking lights. They’re sprawling, concrete-chomping fortresses that devour electricity by the bucketload. Some of them now require 80 to 120 megawatts of power each. That’s not just more than your neighborhood. That’s more than your whole ZIP code.
Related: Every Time a Server Hums, an AI Gets Its Wings
And there’s no ceiling in sight. Experts predict that by 2030, artificial intelligence could consume as much electricity as some entire countries.
Power grids, as they exist today, weren’t made for this kind of surge. They were designed for use with light bulbs and refrigerators. Not for training trillion-parameter language models around the clock.
Nuclear, though? It doesn’t flinch. It was built for backbone duty. Always on. Always steady.
Big Tech’s Atomic Bet
Microsoft’s already in the game. They’ve teamed up with Constellation to fuel their data operations with nuclear output. Amazon is dipping its toes into small modular reactor projects. Google? They’re on a scavenger hunt for a round-the-clock clean energy cocktail, part fission, part fusion, all urgency.
This isn’t some branding stunt. It’s survival math. AI doesn’t do downtime. Neither does the cloud. Every file stored, every image rendered, and every chatbot query processed all feed off a constant energy supply.
When a gust dies down or a shadow drapes across a solar field, renewables hesitate. That’s a luxury that server farms can’t afford.
So the tech giants have stopped asking for permission. They’re signing contracts directly with nuclear providers. Quietly, efficiently, without ceremony.
And in doing so, they’re dragging the clean energy narrative away from slogans and straight into the control room, where the hum of atomic power is starting to sound less like yesterday’s story and more like tomorrow’s backbone.
New York's Rebranding of the Atom
Indian Point was no slouch. Tucked near NYC, it generated about 2,000 megawatts, roughly 25% of the city’s electricity. It ran well. It ran clean.
But activists didn’t like it. They claimed leaks. Claimed danger. Claimed proximity risk. In 2017, Cuomo struck a deal to shut it down.
By 2021, it was gone. And in its place? Gas-fired plants. More emissions. Higher costs. Fewer jobs.
Today, Hochul’s administration is singing a new tune. Not admitting fault, just quietly pivoting. This time, it’s “climate resilient nuclear.” Same atoms. New adjectives.
It’s a rebrand. Nothing more.
Conservatives Saw This Coming
While liberals played SimCity with windmills, conservatives asked the hard questions.
What if the wind doesn’t blow? What if the sun sets at 5 p.m.? What powers hospitals, then? What happens during a polar vortex, wildfire, or an overcast week?
Germany shut down its nuclear power. Coal shot back up. California promised net zero, then begged gas plants for help during heat waves. Texas froze. Only the nuclear plants held steady.
Even Hawaii had to put a cap on solar. Too much green juice and not enough places to put it.
The warnings were there. Ignored, mocked, but not wrong.
Now reality has kicked the door in, and suddenly, the most vilified power source is the only one left standing.
Final Thoughts
Nuclear isn’t perfect. But it’s consistent. And in the business of keeping civilization running, consistency beats idealism every time.
New York’s pivot isn’t bold. It’s late. But it’s still welcome.
Because eventually, every utopian fantasy crashes into a wall of physics. And on the other side? There’s a humming reactor quietly doing its job.
No hashtags. No ribbon cuttings. Just power.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
