On September 30, 2025, about 80 people gathered outside the Marriott Hotel in downtown Syracuse where Governor Kathy Hochul was holding a private meeting with nuclear industry representatives to strategize about expanding nuclear power in New York. They want to extend the operating licenses of four of the nation’s oldest operating nuclear power reactors on nearby Lake Ontario for another 20 years to 80 years of operation total. Hochul also wants to build another gigawatt of new nuclear power in New York. The lead organizers of the demonstration were members of the Onondaga Nation adjacent to Syracuse and the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force with the support of Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, Alliance for a Green Economy, Citizen Action NY, Food & Water Watch, Frack Action, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, NY Renews, Sierra Club, Syracuse Peace Council, Green Party of Onondaga County, and others. What follows is Howie Hawkins’ speech to the gathering.
No Nukes!
I’ma tell you why we’re going to win this fight.
50 years ago I was active in organizing the campaign against the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction in New Hampshire.
We formed the Clamshell Alliance and organized mass occupations of Seabrook construction site.
On May Day 1977, 1,414 of us were arrested on the site and locked up in National Guard armories for two weeks.
That put us into the national media for weeks and the anti-nuclear movement exploded across the country.
After that Seabrook occupation, no new nukes were ordered for more than three decades.
Our protests certainly brought public scrutiny to the problems of nuclear power.
But it was the terrible economics of nuclear power that nearly finished the job of killing it.
But then the Obama administration set up loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction.
The industry took the bait, but it didn’t work out well for them.
In South Carolina, the two plants they attempted to build were stopped in 2017 after long construction delays and cost overruns.
They wasted $9 billion for nothing.
They called it the Nukegate Scandal in South Carolina.
The nuke builder Westinghouse had to file for bankruptcy.
In Georgia, two nukes were finally completed last year in spite of long construction delays that doubled the construction time to 15 years and tripled the projected costs to $40 billion.
But here we are. In New York, nuclear power is back from the grave like a zombie.
The nuclear industry people meeting inside this hotel are losers.
They represent the most unsuccessful technology of the industrial era, if not all of human history.
Nukes can’t operate without massive public subsidies.
The insurance industry won’t insure them because the costs of potential damages from an accident are so astronomical.
The nuclear industry is dirty.
Using nukes to boil water to create steam to turn a power generator is like cutting butter with a chain saw. It just creates a big mess.
Solar and wind are like butter knives. They are the right tools for the job of generating power.
Nukes are certainly dirty from the viewpoint of pollution from radioactive emissions and waste.
They are also dirty from the viewpoint of corruption.
We saw that corruption in the nuclear industry’s $60 million illegal bribe in 2018 to the Speaker of the House in Ohio to get pro-nuclear legislation.
And we also see it in the legalized bribery of big private campaign contributions by the nuke industry to buy politicians in states like South Carolina, Georgia, and here in New York with Governor Hochul.
Meanwhile, the cost of solar, wind, and batteries for energy storage and backup power are falling through the floor.
We can build far more power capacity using solar and wind and batteries – and conservation and efficiency – than we can spending the same amount on nukes.
The only nuclear power plant we need is that fusion reactor in the sky — the sun.
The sun makes the solar power flow, the winds blow, the plants grow, and the rivers flow — you know, from solar-powered evaporation, rain, and rivers for hydropower.
These natural forms of energy are all around us.
We just need to harness them.
It’s clean and it’s economical.
The nuclear industry used to claim that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter. That obviously didn’t happen.
They can’t meter the sun and that’s why the nuclear losers meeting inside want us to subsidize their loser industry.
But renewable energy is cheaper and cleaner and we’re going to make sure the people know it and the politicians hear it from the people.
That’s why they are going to lose and we are going to win.
No Nukes!
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