(Entergy is appealing the decision, and the reactors will keep operating past their license expiration while the process continues.) To get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to renew its licenses, Entergy needs the state Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) to issue it a Water Quality Certification, which NYSDEC pointedly refused to do in 2010, arguing that the plant’s everyday operations and effluents present an ongoing risk to people and wildlife. The State of New York, joined by Riverkeeper, is fighting the plant on several fronts.
In the legal arena, the battle over Indian Point is more about fish casualties than human ones. We need to think hard about these questions, because lurid speculation can box us all into an energy policy that’s aimed at the wrong disaster. But are those fears realistic? What would an accident at Indian Point be like? Do science and history of nuclear accidents elsewhere bear out the visions of radioactive desolation that drive the opposition to Indian Point? Or could New York live with a meltdown at Indian Point rather than die from it? To its opponents, Indian Point is the worst place in the world to put the worst threat in the world. Critics from Governor Cuomo to environmental groups like Riverkeeper vehemently oppose the relicensing, prodded by the conviction that an accident at the plant would turn New York into an uninhabitable wasteland. Entergy Corporation, the plant’s owner, wants to renew the licenses for its two functioning reactors, which expire Sept. Such forebodings haunt the controversy over the Indian Point nuclear power plant, perched on the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown in the village of Buchanan, ground zero of a 50-mile spewing radius that contains nearly 20 million people. Scary and compelling, these images shape our understanding of nuclear fission, the one force we’ve all grown up believing would destroy civilization. We’ve seen umpteen doomsday thrillers about radiation-induced mutation on a scale somewhere between AIDS and a zombie apocalypse. We’ve seen Chernobyl’s lugubrious “zone of alienation,” its vacant towns reclaimed by wolves. We’ve seen men in haz-mat suits wanding down terrified children with Geiger counters at Fukushima. Indian Point is safer than you might think, say the author and this fisherman.
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