Indian Point is closed. The work is just starting.

I · What decommissioning actually means

After the shutdown, Entergy, the company that ran the plant, transferred its licenses to Holtec International, a firm that specializes in dismantling reactors. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees every step, generally allows two paths. One is SAFSTOR (mothball the plant and let the radioactivity decay for up to 60 years before the heavy work). The other is DECON (take it apart promptly). Holtec chose the faster route and has said it aims to finish most of the teardown by the early 2030s.

Money is the other half of the story. Federal rules require a decommissioning trust fund, built up over the plant's operating life from charges collected while it sold power, not from a new line on your bill today. At last public report that fund held on the order of two billion dollars. Whether that covers the whole job is a fair question, because cleanups like this can run over, and the NRC periodically checks the estimate against the balance.

II · The spent fuel stays by the river

Dry cask storage is where most of the attention should go. Used nuclear fuel comes out of the reactor intensely hot and radioactive, cools for years in a deep pool, and then gets sealed into steel-and-concrete containers that sit on a guarded concrete pad on site (the industry calls this an independent spent fuel storage installation). By roughly 2022 the bulk of Indian Point's fuel had made that move.

Why keep it on the Hudson at all? Because there is still no federal repository to send it to, with the Yucca Mountain plan stalled for years, so the casks are likely to sit at Buchanan long after the reactor domes come down. Water is the other open question. Holtec once proposed discharging treated water containing tritium (a radioactive form of hydrogen that is hard to filter out) into the Hudson, New York responded with a 2023 law barring radioactive discharges into the river, and the handling of that water is not fully settled.

III · How the grid replaced the output

Losing roughly 2,000 megawatts from the downstate grid was the scenario critics warned about for years, and the lights stayed on anyway. Natural gas filled most of the gap. Two large gas plants, Cricket Valley in Dutchess County and CPV Valley in Orange County, came online around the same window, existing plants ran more, and the New York Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that runs the state's grid and wholesale market, managed the handoff without a regional blackout.

That came at a cost the state has acknowledged: with gas doing more of the work, downstate power-sector emissions ticked up rather than down. The longer-term fix leans on transmission. The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a buried high-voltage line built to carry Canadian hydropower into Queens, is expected to begin service around 2026. One line is not a one-for-one swap for an always-running reactor, though, and other clean-power timelines, offshore wind among them, have already slipped.

IV · Worth watching this month

1. Holtec's spent-fuel and dismantling milestones, filed to the NRC's public docket, are mostly routine but are the clearest read on how fast the teardown is moving.

2. Keep an eye out for the next NRC public meeting or state oversight-board session on Indian Point, where the schedule and budget get aired.

3. The Champlain Hudson Power Express is working toward its roughly 2026 in-service date, and any slip there matters for downstate clean power.

4. Watch for any filing that compares the decommissioning trust fund balance against an updated cost estimate, which is the number that decides whether the public ends up on the hook.

5. The unresolved question of how Holtec manages on-site water under New York's 2023 Hudson discharge law is worth tracking, and it is the item most likely to turn into a fight.