Indian Point Nuke Revival Being Considered — for $10 Billion

(Bloomberg) -- The owner of Indian Point, the long-shuttered nuclear plant near New York City, says it’s now reconsidering bringing it back to meet surging power demand.

Its potential return faces several challenges: a cost of $10 billion, a governor focused on seeing the facility safely decommissioned and the many years it takes to develop reactors.

Holtec International, the company that’s been dismantling the site since it closed in 2021, says it’s getting pressure from federal officials, while some state-level people are intrigued by the idea of restarting the plant. The project would take four years. “Most of the interest has come at the federal level,” said Patrick O’Brien, director for government affairs at Holtec. 

Still, a representative for New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on Wednesday there are no plans to do so. O’Brien later said that local support was coming from village-level elected officials, not the Hochul administration. 

Holtec has already made significant progress in decommissioning the facility, and has previously said that restarting Indian Point was not on the table. However, surging demand for electricity and strong support in Washington for nuclear energy has prompted executives to reconsider the idea. It helps that other retired US nuclear plants are in the process of being revived, including a Michigan site that Holtec expects to switch on before the end of the year. 

Indian Point’s revival would be possible, O’Brien said. “It will just take time and money, and political will.”

The news that Holtec was considering restarting the plant was first reported by Politico. 

However, state officials said they haven’t considered such a move. Hochul in June announced plans to develop new nuclear facilities with at least one gigawatt of capacity, but said then that the effort would be focused on upstate regions. 

“There have been no discussions or plans to re-open Indian Point. We are focused on seeing this facility safely decommissioned,” said Ken Lovett, Hochul’s senior communications adviser on energy and environment.

The facility, 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of New York, had two reactors with about 2.1 gigawatts of capacity and once supplied about a quarter of the city’s power. A third reactor at the site on the banks of the Hudson River shut down in the 1970s. The 2021 closure came after years of pressure from environmental groups and safety advocates. 

Any plan to restart Indian Point would require significant government assistance. O’Brien said Holtec would likely seek funding from the US Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which provides financing for power projects and has generally been supportive of nuclear energy. 

President Donald Trump is also a nuclear supporter. In May, he issued executive orders seeking to accelerate deployment of more reactors. 

“President Trump is prioritizing and investing in the development of the nuclear energy industry which produces a safe and reliable energy source,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said via email Wednesday. “Nuclear energy is a critical component to restoring America’s energy dominance, protecting our national security and powering the next generation of technologies.” 

Several parts of the facility have already been dismantled, including key parts of both reactors. Restarting the plant would require reversing all that work, including building new components for the cores and patching holes that have been cut into the containment domes, O’Brien said. Despite that, the project is still a few years away from the point of no return, when it couldn’t be revived.

The estimated cost of $8 billion to $10 billion is significantly higher than other restart projects. Constellation Energy Corp. is spending about $1.6 billion to revive a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, now renamed the Crane plant. And Holtec is working to restart the Palisades plant in Michigan in the fourth quarter, an effort that will likely cost $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion. 

Both of those involve single-reactor facilities that were largely intact. O’Brien said Indian Point would cost more because it has two units that are both already in the process of being torn down. 

“It’s a heavy lift,” he said. 

(Updates with comment from executive in fourth paragraph.)

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