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- Hacker News
- It would be interesting to bring a Geiger counter to measure if there's any residual radiation.by kmoser
- As an aside, and as a life-long Long-Islander, it has long been considered an open-secret (whether it's true or not) by many that Cold Spring Harbor Lab has a small nuclear reactor somewhere on site.
- I think the control panels are as compelling as the big industrial rooms. Fantastic pictures!by epistasis
- Has the site also been decommissioned - or just hugged - none of the images are loading for me at the momentby ozmaverick72
- All good its working for me nowby ozmaverick72
- Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.
Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.
by cwal37 - if you want to see a video (9 years ago) from inside the plant, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEm1ph3MP4 - the top comment is also interestingby wsor4035
- This video about Shoreham was my entry into the Proper People's channel. If you like this kind of abandoned structure exploration, I recommend checking out their other videos.by trimbo
- If you want to see the inside of another nuclear plant that New York decided to turn off, Radioactive Drew has a good tour of Indian Point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJSH1_GH1HQby billfor
- I grew up there. I was maybe 14 so I have some memory of how worked up the community was. I remember people talking about building a bridge to CT since there would be no other way to get people off the island. It was such a fierce time then, nothing compared to nowadays about seemingly anything though.
- They should still build that bridge; it's funny to drive on 135 and just see the highway come to an end, but I'm not sure it would have survived even with the Long Island Sound link.by billfor
- (2014)
from the article: "Originally published February 26, 2014."
by goldfishgold - What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.by natnat
- Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap."
It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use.
Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, installing, and buying power from. This has been a trend for a number of years now, around the world. That isn't some conspiracy or coincidence.
The only place this is still considered a debated topic, or nuclear is considered preferential, is social media and forums like HN.
by KennyBlanken - ...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island.
Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC.
To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance.
Meanwhile, even the country's leading experts have no politically viable strategy for disposing of the waste, including the risk of derailments, terrorism, etc.
This isn't the world I want, but it's reality. IRL, people would rather die slowly from CO2 than live with the fear of 3MI/Chernobyl/Fukushima regardless of how rare they are (and they're not).
I'm optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues, but I can understand why voters go full NIMBY.
by asah - Not under LILCO management.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/28/nyregion/the-end-of-lilco...
by Animats - Interesting. You can see the building from the beach and I always wondered what's inside. And while it's the only (decommissioned) nuclear power plant on Long Island, it's not the only nuclear reactor. There was also the High Flux Beam Reactor at BNL that was decommissioned in the 90s:by HansHamster
- Oh, so that's what that building was!by hgoel
- The overriding impression I get is that the whole facility is complicated. There are lots of processes in place, and lots of very trained people required to keep it all running. The size and complexity of the control rooms for example, but also the inevitable maintenance and inspection of all the piping etc. Even the details of the cleanup (checking each store foot, grinding surfaces etc.)
I've recently been on a train in Europe and I saw solar panels and wind turbines everywhere. And what's striking by comparison is the lack of people or extraneous construction. They're just solar panels, or wind turbines. They're easy to install, easy (read cheap) to maintain, and are mostly just left alone to do their thing.
If I had a $100b to invest then solar, wind, even battery, is much more attractive than the time, complexity, uncertainty, running cost etc of nuclear. Not to even start on cleanup issues.
I get the base-load issue. But even there current storage is more attractive. And investing in future storage technology seems like a better return.
The argument against nuclear (fission, and even more so fusion) is purely financial. We can nimby and worry about the radiation but ultimately nuclear doesn't happen because financially its a dead end.
by bruce511 - If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.
Nuclear industry is running with very high quality standards, this requires very good training, good maintenance. In this aspects, nuclear industry is similar to aircraft industry.
Solar panels are cheap to install, wind turbines are not so cheap to install.
Solar panels are cheap to maintain. Maintenance of offshore wind turbines is very expensive, therefor offshore wind turbines are more expensive, build with higher quality, than onshore wind turbines - so they require less frequent maintenance.
I assume you are from US. The big difference between US and Europe energy landscape is the cost of natural gas, Europe pays 4-5x higher prices for natural gas then US. When solar power don't supply electricity (at night or under cloud cover) and wind has slow speeds (can happen for multiple weeks) some countries from Europe can use hydro-power (Norway, Austria, Switzerland), some countries can burn coal (Poland, Germany), but most European countries have to burn very expensive gas.
The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
by leonidasrup - Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive. Nuclear plants are very expensive to turn off and on. Nuclear plants leave you no choice but to leave them running 24x7, even when power that is an order of magnitude cheaper is available most of the time. Proponents call this base load. But technically it's just very expensive power that you can't turn off when it's completely redundant.
Flexible load is where the action is these days because renewables sometimes push energy prices into the negative whenever there's too much of it. Having to expend fuel during such times is a negative thing.
The big benefit gas plants have over coal and nuclear plants is that you can turn them off and on quicker. So you don't have to run them 24x7. Newer coal plants are similarly cheaper to use for backup power generation. A common mistake with assumptions about Chinese coal plants is that yes they build lots of them. And no, they mostly aren't running a lot. Their coal use actually is starting to decline. The new plants are more flexible and they use them to replace the older ones.
Renewables are plenty and cheaper most of the time. Batteries can deal with short term fluctuations and help time shift renewable power to cover peak loads in the morning and evenings.
And if you can bring online some gas/coal power when it's actually needed, there is no need for base load.
In practice this is still quite often but not most of the time and gradually declining. With dirt cheap renewables + batteries coming online by the hundreds of gw per year, the ability to turn the rest off is the most important feature with backup power generation.
Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.