BEACON, NY — The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and 52 individuals have filed a lawsuit against the Public Service Commission to block electricity ratepayers in New York State from subsidizing three aging upstate nuclear power plants.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said that the power plants need to be maintained in order to achieve his goal of having 50% of the state’s electricity being generated by renewable or non-fossil fuel resources by 2030. 

But the cost of keeping the plants operational is being born by a surcharge onto electric bills in the state as ordered by the Public Service Commission (PSC), and will ultimately cost ratepayers between $7 and $10 billion dollars.

The plaintiffs say the subsidy was not justified and that the PSC did not follow the law when enacting the subsidy.

The individuals who signed onto the lawsuit have opted to purchase 100% renewable energy, and they argue that by charging them extra they are being forced to pay for more than 100% of their electricity use.

Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental director, said, “Nuclear power is far from clean in its mining, milling, transportation, use and storage. Nuclear plants emit radioactivity into the air, water and ground through planned and unplanned releases. This mandatory 12-year $7.6 billion subsidy means that ratepayer dollars that should be going to scale up renewables and energy efficiency are instead being used for the bailout of aging, unprofitable and dangerous nuclear plants, which will continue to generate highly radioactive nuclear waste for which there is no safe storage. At Diablo Canyon in California, they are phasing out their last nuclear plant by committing to 100% renewable replacement energy.”

“In rushing through this $7.6 billion corporate bailout, policymakers who are supposed to protect New Yorkers recklessly circumvented the law and shut down public review,” said Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). “We have laws requiring government agencies to operate with integrity and accountability to make sure things like this don’t happen. The PSC trampled all over those laws, at the governor’s request, to deliver an unprecedented, unjustified and counterproductive subsidy to a politically powerful dirty energy industry. If we don’t hold our state government accountable for such an abuse of the law, then we can only expect more and worse abuses in the future.”

Critics say a better solution for the state is to pump more resources into wind and solar installations, which don’t create nuclear waste and at this point are much more cost-effective than nuclear power.