Why closing NYC's only nuclear power plant would be a really bad idea

Rawwwrrr! It's a progressive cat-fight! On the one side is New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who wants to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of the Bronx.

On the other side is Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who thinks this would be a really crap idea, mostly because it would mean replacing fully a quarter of the power delivered to NYC with greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuel power plants. Also, it would probably lead to brownouts.

Cuomo's reasoning is that the Indian Point plant happens to be right on top of an earthquake fault. That sounds really bad, except the odds of anything going wrong have been estimated at about 1 in 10,000. This isn't California, after all: New York City is hit by tiny earthquakes once a century, and decent size ones once every 3,400 years.

So the citizens of New York City have to weigh unreliable, expensive power and huge quantities of greenhouse-gas emissions against decommissiononing Indian Point a few years later than Cuomo would like. Bloomberg is still all about replacing it with renewables, but that takes time.