Why Zohran Mamdani Should Fight for a Nuclear-Powered New York

Tuesday, November 4, New Yorkers go to the polls to elect their new mayor. They face a three-way choice — Democratic candidate, state assemblyman, and suddenly prominent democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani; Republican candidate and battery foe Curtis Sliwa; and independent candidate and former governor Andrew Cuomo.

While Mamdani’s surprise win in June’s Democratic primary electrified New Yorkers of all political persuasions, this cycle has been a relatively sleepy one for climate issues. Neither of the two frontrunners, Mamdani and Cuomo, has been keen to draw much attention to himself on clean energy.

At a televised debate two weeks ago, however, things got interesting.

“New nuclear power plants can help bring down the rising cost of utilities in New York State, yes or no?” asked moderator Brian Lehrer. “Upstate? They’re already starting, yes,” answered Sliwa, referring to Governor Kathy Hochul’s landmark announcement in June that she was ordering the New York Power Authority, the state’s public power utility, to develop a gigawatt of new nuclear energy-generating capacity upstate. Couched in atomic-powered abundance, the plan distinguishes her from Democrats nationwide primarily because she has the largest state-owned utility at her disposal, whereas other governors, from both parties, merely intimate that private developers should really get started.

To the untrained ear, Mamdani’s answer at the debate was anodyne: “I think it’s something worth exploring.” Prompted by Cuomo about whether that constituted “a yes,” Mamdani confirmed, “yeah,” to which Cuomo evinced surprise and then a “yes” of his own. On the surface, all three candidates agreed.

But in affirming the role of new nuclear plant construction to meet the state’s energy needs, Mamdani put himself at odds with a number of environmental justice nonprofits that have become fixtures of the city’s progressive left — that is, his own political home base.

“We unequivocally oppose any new nuclear facilities in New York State.” So begins a letter signed by 153 environmental justice groups, issued following Hochul’s “Future Energy Economy Summit” last fall, where she first raised the prospect. The signatories include chapters of prominent activist Bill McKibben’s advocacy groups Third Act and 350.org, Bezos Earth Fund awardee WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Food and Water Watch, chapters of the Sierra Club, and solar industry boosters Vote Solar, among many others.

When the governor advanced her nuclear plan this year, environmental organizations responded with anger. NY Renews — a coalition of groups that successfully lobbied for the state’s landmark climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, which was signed by Governor Cuomo — issued a statement opposing “the expansion or further investment in nuclear energy production.” An op-ed from the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest called Hochul’s proposal a “dangerous distraction” from building renewables. In a separate comment issued alongside these same groups, decades-old Brooklyn Latino community organization UPROSE urged the state to avoid the “expensive and unrealistic” path of nuclear development.

The political appeal of nuclear today is undeniable. Six in ten Americans want more nuclear energy, according to a recent Pew poll. Not only is it the energy source with the smallest divide in enthusiasm between the parties, including both clean and fossil-fueled sources, the most common reason respondents gave Pew for supporting nuclear was its decarbonization potential.

New York’s nuclear energy “provide[s] reliable, continuous, predictable, emissions-free supply and must remain online to maintain electric system reliability,” according to a recent filing from the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid. Since it takes up less land and requires fewer transmission lines than purely renewable alternatives, it could mitigate a fiery political tension in New York and elsewhere. And it’s almost universally held up as essential by industrial labor unions, for the clean, firm power it produces, and for the high-paying careers it supports. “Nuclear energy, being the cleanest, zero-emission, and most efficient way to produce energy, should be a no-brainer,” Frank Morales, the president of New York’s Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2, which represents thousands of ConEd utility workers in the city, told me by email.

And yet despite his statement during the debate, nuclear’s decarbonization bona fides, its strong bipartisan appeal, and its acclaim from labor unions, Mamdani — a democratic socialist champion of public power and the clean energy transition — still hasn’t endorsed the governor’s plan for public nuclear power development.

This tracks an ideological inconsistency within the environmental left that has become less tenable as the need for clean power has grown more urgent. “It’s a belief system that these nonprofit groups have wrapped themselves in, and one that they have not yet been motivated to seriously reexamine,” Charles Komanoff told me. He’s the director of the Carbon Tax Center and a decades-long stalwart of New York City progressive activist groups, spanning environmental and transportation causes, among others.

Komanoff has had to reexamine his own beliefs on nuclear. During the 1970s and ’80s he opposed nuclear power, primarily for its past operational inefficiencies. He spoke before a crowd of thousands at an antinuclear protest in Washington in 1979, after the Three Mile Island incident. The premature closure of New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021, however, finally tipped him into public nuclear advocacy. The “true Indian Point disaster,” he wrote in an analysis earlier this year, is that “emissions are mounting, and in New York City and other downstate areas formerly supplied by Indian Point, electricity is getting costlier and less dependable.”

Ben Furnas, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability under Bill de Blasio — himself an iconic New York City progressive — has experienced this inconsistency firsthand. (De Blasio also cut his teeth in the antinuclear movement, telling The New York Times in 2019 that he’d marched against Three Mile Island in his youth.) “A lot of the old guard antinuclear activism sits uncomfortably in a broader, clear-eyed climate coalition,” Furnas told me. Mamdani, however, appears to take a “more expansive view of what a decarbonizing energy system looks like,” he said.

As a member of New York’s State Assembly, Mamdani backed a campaign to cancel the repowering of an ancient, highly-polluting gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens, squarely in his district, that was slated to retire. He also aligned himself with the effort by Public Power NY, a coalition between the Democratic Socialists of America and environmental groups, to “build public renewables.” Both maneuvers eventually paid off — in 2021 the state denied the repowering project’s permit, and the old power plant later closed down for good; and in 2023 Hochul signed into law a (heavily rewritten) version of the Build Public Renewables Act, turning activist goals into implementable policy for NYPA.

Two years later, NYPA has made remarkable progress building state capacity in renewables. Its development pipeline of wind, solar, and battery projects now amounts to about 7 gigawatts, though most of that is still in very early stages. But Public Power NY has spent that time dismissing the progress from the sidelines, charging Hochul with “refusing to lead on climate.” While it’s true that Hochul is far overdue on implementing parts of the 2019 climate law, a huge political challenge as energy affordability becomes a top concern, Public Power NY has responded by demanding that the governor ramp up NYPA’s renewables development to a staggering 15 gigawatts deployed by 2030. Mamdani spoke at a rally for that demand just a month into his mayoral campaign last November.

Neither energy nor public power, however, has been at the forefront of his campaign, especially in these closing months. Instead, Mamdani’s laudable message discipline has been trained on affordability in New York City: free childcare, free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and temporarily freezing the rents of the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. He’s even taken a decidedly pro-abundance position on housing in interviews with the Abundance co-author Derek Thompson and on the Odd Lots podcast.

It would be reasonable to ask, Even if Mamdani had aggressively talked up nuclear, what would he be able to do about it as mayor? As it turns out, there are a few routes that a Mayor Mamdani could take to influence nuclear development.

First and foremost, for half a century, the “governmental customers” of New York City have been critical sources of revenue for NYPA. The city government, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the New York City Housing Authority, for example, remain NYPA’s largest customers, dating back to when the state acquired Indian Point Unit 3 from ConEd during the 1974 financial crisis. While the MTA is infamously not under the mayor’s purview, at least two of those major customers are — and their power contracts are set to expire at the end of 2027, during the next mayor’s term. That’s both a bargaining chip for the next mayor and a potential avenue for the city government to subsidize, at least in part, the cost of a new, NYPA-developed nuclear plant.

Second, de Blasio already set a precedent for applying the city’s progressive tax base to help shoulder the cost of statewide clean power initiatives. To help solve an imbalance in renewable energy deployment upstate and downstate, the state created the “Tier 4 Renewable” program in 2020, at the urging of the de Blasio administration, to subsidize transmission projects that would deliver renewable energy into New York City. The enormous cost of the program, however, fell on the backs of ratepayers statewide, in proportion to their electricity consumption.

Seeing the unevenness in a program that largely helps the city, the de Blasio administration struck a deal in 2021 with the state’s clean energy procurement agency, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, to purchase far more Tier 4 renewable energy certificates than would have otherwise been allocated to the city based on its electricity demands via its utility, NYPA. As a result, the rest of the state’s ratepayers would save, in the city’s calculation, a few billion dollars. It’s not hard to imagine a similar possibility for the next mayor to advance the state’s nuclear policy, especially when it’s being led by NYPA.

Finally, the city’s Local Law 97 — a comprehensive law passed in 2019 requiring large buildings to meet escalating greenhouse gas emission limits or else face fines — presents another opportunity. Mamdani has spoken during the campaign about the need for the city to procure heat pumps for landlords to install in compliance with the law. But landlords also have to decarbonize their utility electricity supply, which they can do by purchasing RECs. With the recent cancellation of one of two projects that would have supplied said RECs, the real estate industry will soon be hungry for more supply.

That’s where nuclear could come into city policy. The city council could amend Local Law 97 so that nuclear energy likewise delivered into the city — from either existing or solely new sources — could be used to comply, as well. That would put landlords in a position of subsidizing a new state nuclear project, just like the Tier 4 program put them in a position to subsidize new state transmission projects. That could be a way for a Mayor Mamdani to throw them a bone amid his attacks on unaffordable housing prices.

The mild nuclear support at the debate was encouraging, Komanoff, the longtime progressive activist, told me. But “it would’ve been huge-er if Mamdani had said something specific and favorable about Governor Hochul’s gigawatt announcement over the summer.” The governor, who in September endorsed Mamdani in the race, is presumably thinking the same thing, having made NYPA — the same public power authority behind the Build Public Renewables campaign that Mamdani championed — the centerpiece of her nuclear plan.

NYPA’s vice president of corporate communication, Lindsay Kryzak, told me by email that the authority has “seen widespread support for this critical technology,” and that it’s looking forward to “ensuring the benefits of advanced nuclear energy reach our customers in all five boroughs.”

Mamdani has been a staunch proponent of public clean energy in the legislature, and he’s apparently open to new nuclear for decarbonizing the state. That he hasn’t yet embraced this public power nuclear plan illustrates the strong gravitational pull of the environmental left coalition that surrounds him, one rooted in antinuclear politics.

Across progressive and democratic socialist media, multiple activists who’ve worked on the public power campaign have revealed their personal and professional ties to nonprofits like the Alliance for a Green Economy, New York Energy Democracy Alliance, and the Sane Energy Project, all of which have firmly rejected Hochul’s nuclear plans.

As for the Public Power NY coalition itself, it wants the state to build public renewables, not public nuclear. In a statement following the governor’s nuclear announcement, it argued that the plan “shows just how unserious she is about New Yorkers’ energy bills and climate future.” According to the organization’s website, 12 of the coalition’s 16 partner organizations, excluding DSA chapters, have publicly opposed new nuclear power since the governor kicked off discussions last year. Public Power NY did not respond to requests to comment on this story.

When the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, warns of the dire reliability-related need for “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” a technical term whose only existing commercial realization is nuclear, one would think building more nuclear power is actually the serious thing to do. That conviction isn’t just coming from the governor’s office; it’s shared by major industrial unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the UWUA, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the state Building Trades Council, and the state AFL-CIO, as I reported this summer for Jacobin.

What does labor think of Mamdani’s recently expressed openness to nuclear? Vinny Albanese, executive director of the New York State Laborers’ Political Action Fund, says over email that his union, LIUNA, is “encouraged to see Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani express openness to nuclear energy, which currently provides half of New York’s carbon-free electricity.”

“With potential energy shortfalls projected to affect New York City as early as next year,” he wrote, “we must act decisively to bring more reliable, clean generation online.” The Laborers, like many unions, endorsed Cuomo in the primary, but haven’t endorsed anyone in the general election.

Morales, the UWUA Local 1-2 president, told me over email that Mamdani’s remark in favor of nuclear energy is “definitely a step in the right direction.” And yet Local 1-2 nonetheless endorsed Cuomo. That’s despite the fact that as governor, Cuomo was directly responsible for shutting down Indian Point, destroying hundreds of Local 1-2 members’ jobs.

Without the antinuclear baggage of his coalition, Mamdani could have pounced on Cuomo for having closed the plant — as Sliwa did at the debate and throughout his own campaign — in order to show solidarity with the union workers and to demonstrate a more responsible energy policy for New York City. In doing so he could have pinned the blame on his opponent for rising power prices and worsening air quality in his own district.

A 2023 public letter on South Bronx air pollution from various city environmental groups admits only obliquely, in the title of one of its charts, that Indian Point’s shutdown “expos[es] area residents to even more pollution.” Assemblyman Mamdani, like several other local elected officials, signed the letter, seemingly his only public engagement with Indian Point’s closure. But some of the nonprofit signatories actually championed the end of the plant, a situation that rules out a more explicitly recognized tradeoff between nuclear energy and air pollution.

If Mamdani wins the mayoral election, as polls indicate he is likely to do, he will take on the tremendous responsibility of governing a major world city. That city is one whose power grid is facing reliability concerns alongside costly maintenance and infrastructure needs, all on top of a popular push to electrify buildings and reduce air pollution. As mayor, he’d have limited levers to address these problems. But with the backing of the governor and the public power authority, he stands a chance. He should embrace Hochul’s public nuclear power plan, and with it nuclear’s potential to help advance New York City’s climate goals.

If he can buck the trend of the environmental left’s hostility to nuclear, he could demonstrate to New York City — and to democratic socialist supporters nationwide, who already view him as a likely successor to (notoriously antinuclear) Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — that the left can think rationally about the energy system, its affordability, and the wide scope of the climate problem. That would truly be charting a new path.

Editor’s note: This author’s bio has been updated to clarify that he writes under a pen name.