New York’s Nuclear Future That Might Have Been
The year was 1962, and nuclear power was in the ascendant.
A handful of atomic plants had opened across the country, with more in the pipeline. Across the ocean, a depressed coal town in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima had welcomed overtures from Tokyo Electric to build a nuclear generating station, and the utility was surveying the site.
Thirty miles north of New York City, the Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point plant, the nation’s biggest, had just achieved a sustained chain reaction and was about to go online.
But Con Ed had more ambitious plans. On Dec. 10, it applied to the Atomic Energy Commission to build the world’s largest nuclear plant, with a capacity of a thousand megawatts, more power than all the other atomic plants in the United States put together.
The plant, Con Ed said, would rise on the East River waterfront in Long Island City, Queens, less than two miles from Times Square.
The idea of siting a mammoth nuclear generator in the heart of New York City seems preposterous now, and increasingly so.
At the time, while controversial, it was not unthinkable....
Read entire article at NYT
A handful of atomic plants had opened across the country, with more in the pipeline. Across the ocean, a depressed coal town in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima had welcomed overtures from Tokyo Electric to build a nuclear generating station, and the utility was surveying the site.
Thirty miles north of New York City, the Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point plant, the nation’s biggest, had just achieved a sustained chain reaction and was about to go online.
But Con Ed had more ambitious plans. On Dec. 10, it applied to the Atomic Energy Commission to build the world’s largest nuclear plant, with a capacity of a thousand megawatts, more power than all the other atomic plants in the United States put together.
The plant, Con Ed said, would rise on the East River waterfront in Long Island City, Queens, less than two miles from Times Square.
The idea of siting a mammoth nuclear generator in the heart of New York City seems preposterous now, and increasingly so.
At the time, while controversial, it was not unthinkable....