A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up
When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.
But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.
Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.
Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planetheating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.
“From a climate change point of view it’s been a real step backwards and made it harder for New York City to decarbonize its electricity supply than it could’ve been,” said Ben Furnas, a climate and energy policy expert at Cornell University. “This has been a cautionary tale that has left New York in a really challenging spot.”
The closure of Indian Point raises sticky questions for the green movement and states such as New York that are looking to slash carbon pollution. Should long-held concerns about nuclear be shelved due to the overriding challenge of the climate crisis? If so, what should be done about the US’s fleet of ageing nuclear plants?
For those who spent decades fighting Indian Point, the power plant had few redeeming qualities even in an era of escalating global heating. Perched on the banks of the Hudson River about 25 miles north of Manhattan, the hulking facility started operation in the 1960s and its three reactors at one point contributed about a quarter of New York City’s power.
It faced a constant barrage of criticism over safety concerns, however, particularly around the leaking of radioactive material into groundwater and for harm caused to fish when the river’s water was used for cooling. Pressure from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s then governor, and Bernie Sanders – the senator called Indian Point a “catastrophe waiting to happen” – led to a phased closure announced in 2017, with the two remaining reactors shutting in 2020 and 2021.
The closure was cause for jubilation
in green circles, with Mark Ruffalo, the actor and environmentalist, calling the plant’s end “a BIG deal”. He added in a video: “Let’s get beyond Indian Point.” New York has twoother nuclear stations, which have also faced opposition, that have licenses set to expire this decade.
But rather than immediately usher in a new dawn of clean energy, Indian Point’s departure spurred a jump in planet-heating emissions. New York upped its consumption of readily available gas to make up its shortfall in 2020 and again in 2021, as nuclear dropped to just a fifth of the state’s electricity generation, down from about a third before Indian Point’s closure.
This reversal will not itself wreck New York’s goal of making its grid emissions-free by 2040. Two major projects bringing Canadian hydropower and upstate solar and wind electricity will come online by 2027, while the state is pushing ahead with new offshore wind projects – New York’s first offshore turbines started whirring last week. Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, has vowed the state will “build a cleaner, greener future for all New Yorkers”.
Even as renewable energy blossoms at a gathering pace in the US, though, it is gas that remains the most common fallback for utilities once they take nuclear offline, according to Furnas. This mirrors a situation faced by Germany after it looked to move away from nuclear in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, only to fall back on coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, as a temporary replacement.
“As renewables are being built we still need energy for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining and most often it’s gas that is doing that,” said Furnas. “It’s a harrowing dynamic. Taking away a big slice of clean energy coming from nuclear can be a self-inflicted wound from a climate change point of view.”
With the world barreling towards disastrous climate change impacts due to the dawdling pace of emissions cuts, some environmentalists have set aside reservations and accepted nuclear as an expedient power source. The US currently derives about a fifth of its electricity from nuclear power.
Bill McKibben, author, activist and founder of 350.org, said that the position “of the people I know and trust” is that “if you have an existing nuke, keep it open if you can. I think most people are agnostic on new nuclear, hoping that the next generation of reactors might pan out but fearing that they’ll be too expensive.
“The hard part for nuclear, aside from all the traditional and still applicable safety caveats, is that sun and wind and batteries just keep getting cheaper and cheaper, which means the nuclear industry increasingly depends on political gamesmanship to get public funding,” McKibben added.
Wariness over nuclear has long been a central tenet of the environmental movement, though, and opponents point to concerns over nuclear waste, localized pollution and the chance, albeit unlikely, of a major disaster. In California, a coalition of green groups recently filed a lawsuit to try to force the closure of the Diablo Canyon facility, which provides about 8% of the state’s electricity.
“Diablo Canyon has not received the safety upgrades and maintenance it needs and we are dubious that nuclear is safe in any regard, let alone without these upgrades – it’s a huge problem,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director of Friends of the Earth, which was founded in 1969 to, among other things, oppose Diablo Canyon.
Templeton said the groups were alarmed over Diablo Canyon’s discharge of waste water into the environment and the possibility an earthquake could trigger a disastrous leak of nuclear waste. A previous Friends of the Earth deal with the plant’s operator, PG&E, to shutter Diablo Canyon was clouded by state legislation allowing the facility to remain open for another five years, and potentially longer, which Templeton said was a “twist of the knife” to opponents.
“We are not stuck in the past – we are embracing renewable energy technology like solar and wind,” she said. “There was ample notice for everyone to get their houses in order and switch over to solar and wind and they didn’t do anything. The main beneficiary of all this is the corporation making money out of this plant remaining active for longer.”
Meanwhile, supporters of nuclear – some online fans have been called “nuclear bros” – claim the energy source has moved past the specter of Chernobyl and into a new era of small modular nuclear reactors. Amazon recently purchased a nuclear-powered data center, while Bill Gates has also plowed investment into the technology. Rising electricity bills, as well as the climate crisis, are causing people to reassess nuclear, advocates say.
“Things have changed drastically – five years ago I would get a very hostile response when talking about nuclear, now people are just so much more open about it,” said Grace Stanke, a nuclear fuels engineer and former Miss America who regularly gives talks on the benefits of nuclear.
“I find that young people really want to have a discussion about nuclear because of climate change, but people of all ages want reliable, accessible energy,” she said. “Nuclear can provide that.”
little couch in our TV room, watching I Love Lucy – and I had a bottle, so I was weaned on Lucille Ball, and what a great example she was. But all the women of that era, you couldn’t have better teachers.” When she was sent away to summer camp one year, one of the teachers took her aside and told her she had a “spark” during drama class. “I was so excited. Nobody ever told me I had anything going at all.”
Just as her career was getting started, it was almost derailed by a car crash when she was 21. “Drunk drivers, three carloads of teenagers in the middle of the day were drag-racing down the wrong side of a two-lane highway and ran head on into the car I was in.” Virtually every bone in her body below the waist was broken, she says. “It took a very long time to recover. I’m still trying to recover.” It must have shattered her sense of security and invincibility, which many of us take for granted at that age. “Yes, when you almost lose your life, it becomes pretty dear. I don’t know if you can know how dear it is until you are faced with losing it.” She says she doesn’t want to minimise the impact of the accident – she has had numerous operations because of it throughout her life – or tritely turn it into a lesson, but it did become “my hardest and my best teacher because I learned so much”.
The #MeToo movement that came to prominence in 2017 highlighted how rife sexual harassment was in the entertainment industry in the 1980s and 90s. Did Potts go through it? “A little bit, and it didn’t really land with me what it was until it had passed by, and I thought, ‘Surely that person didn’t mean that?’ Which is not to say there weren’t untoward things said and insinuated when I was a young woman, but it never overwhelmed me.”
Even if sexual harassment is now considered appalling, it’s not as if women have equality yet, she points out. “Even in the United States in 2024, we cannot pass an equal pay agreement.” She raises her voice. “I hope it won’t be too much longer before the unfairness of that will be realised and amended.” We talk about abortion rights being rolled back. “It is very scary, but the men think they know best what to do with our bodies, which is none of their effing business. I’m hoping that will shift. It has to.”
Potts starred in the successful American TV series Designing Women, as well as others including the sitcom Love & War and Any Day Now, but when she reached her 50s, she noticed the work drying up. “Like, 55 to 65 sucked,” she says. She went back to theatre, her first love, and did a couple of plays in New York, including God of Carnage on Broadway in 2010. “If anybody told me I’d be 57 when I made my Broadway debut, I might have just tossed in the towel three decades ago,” she says. “But I just kept pushing through and waiting it out.”
It worked – in 2017, Potts joined the cast of Young Sheldon, the spin-off prequel of the hugely successful TV series The Big Bang Theory, as Sheldon’s spirited grandmother Meemaw. Now in its seventh and final series, Potts has had a lot of fun with her character. “She’s a bit of a handful, I love her, and she’s a southern woman who’s well known to me,” she says. Alongside that, she has also voiced Bo Peep in the Toy Story films. The character had been more of a background member of the toy gang, but was given a leading role in Toy Story 4 in 2019. And now there’s Ghostbusters, where this time around she’s in the suit and ghostbusting herself.
The slow years must have been tough. How did she cope with it? “The best I could,” she says. “You run into people and they’re like, ‘Didn’t you used to be an actor?’” She remembers one man: “He said, ‘I remember you, you were really cute and now you’re … old.’” She laughs and pretends to be gracious: “I’m going to accept what the universe just delivered me, I shall be humble, and thank that person. ‘Thank you so much, so nice of you to say, I’ll be on my way now.’”
We’re both laughing at the awfulness of it, but it must have knocked her confidence. “Of course, and the way that that affects some people is they don’t want to go out any more, or they get so much plastic surgery that they’re wearing their lack of confidence on their face.” She smiles. “Of course, a little work can be fun. But there is a temptation to want to please those people so they never come up to you on the street and go, ‘God, you used to be so pretty.’ Just shoot me now.”
Roles have got better for women, she says, and throughout her career she has seen huge shifts in other ways. When she went into TV as a way to keep a stable life for her and her children, it was seen as second best to film. That has switched entirely. Meanwhile, movie franchises have taken over cinema – Ghostbusters and Toy Story among them. Potts acknowledges that audiences like familiar things. “They know if they go to a Toy Story movie their kids are going to be entertained, they’re going to be entertained. They’re going to be moved, they’re going to laugh, everybody’s going to go home happier. Same with Ghostbusters. People know what they’re going to get. These are two examples of really good entertainment, but there are some things that are maybe not as appealing to people my age, but I think that’s just the way it is now.”
We talk for a while about what AI might mean for actors, particularly voice actors. “It will be very easy for them to recreate my voice, which has been a defining part of my career,” says Potts. “But now we have some guards against that,” she says – referring to the protections SAG won for actors in the recent deal. What does she think we’ll lose if humans are no longer acting? “My mind is not big enough to understand,” she says. “It seems like they’re going to be able to do everything we do, including acting and writing and all of that, and pretty much everything, so that we won’t have anything left to do but take care of each other. I soothe myself with thoughts like that. I try to anyway.”
She has always been an optimist, she says. This partly explains her four marriages; she has three sons, the younger two with her fourth husband, the director and producer Jim Hayman, with whom she has been in a relationship for more than 30 years. And life experience has taught her a lot. “When you’ve broken nearly every bone in your body, and you’ve been married four times, you know things, you find out things – and I’ve used those things to have empathy and compassion for others,” she says.
The success of Young Sheldon allowed her to set up a small charity with a friend, “which helps people who are in crisis, sometimes the people who fall through the cracks. People just kept falling in our path that we felt we needed to help.”
This currently includes three Afghan refugee families, and a young Guatemalan woman she’s been helping to put through college. “People were there to help me when I needed that, so I feel it’s only right to give back as long as I can. My salary was more money than I needed, so it seemed a good idea to share it.”
Potts wants to get back on stage, too, “because that is the well of creative nourishment, more than anything”. As for Ghostbusters, she says she wouldn’t be surprised if there was another one, now the younger characters are established. “And as long as us OGs are willing to strap on some kind of proton device, they’ll keep us in there a little bit.”
It took Janine a long time to get into that flight suit. Let’s hope she’s not hanging it up just yet.
• Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is in cinemas from 22 March.