[The following Op-Ed is by Michael Daly for the NY Daily News & was published on March 15th following the Japan earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant disaster.]
Gaze up the Hudson River and hope, hope, hope our regulators are right.
Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity.
Hope we never, ever have an out-of-control reactor just 35 miles north – a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.
We are assured the Indian Point nuclear plant, which has had its share of problems, is designed to shrug off an earthquake under a magnitude 6.1. That’s a bit above the most powerful one on record in New York – a 5.25 way back in 1884.
We are also told not to be unduly worried that scientists at Columbia University have discovered Indian Point is within a mile of where our region’s two most active fault lines intersect.
The 2008 paper reporting this discovery estimated the chances of a earthquake here measuring a potentially disastrous magnitude 7 are 1.5% over a 50-year period.
Those are very long odds, but as the lottery ads say, hey, you never know.
Can’t you just hear the Japanese regulators saying before their disaster, “What’s the chance of a 9 anyway?”
The Columbia paper noted Indian Point is located “closer to more people” than any other nuclear plant in America, at “clearly one of the least favorable sites in our area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective.”
In other words, if the folks who built the plant had searched the whole region, they could not have found a worse spot.
Astonishingly, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined even to consider the newly discovered fault lines in reviewing the plant’s application to extend its operating license by 20 years.
“[The NRC] … has not permitted any new information to be used or old information on which the old licenses were based to be contested,” the paper noted.
The same agency quickly removed from its website after 9/11 a report estimating fatalities from a full meltdown at Indian Point for fear terrorists would find the information “advantageous.”
That report said a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson would pose a dire threat to people as far as 500 miles away and necessitate the evacuation of 93 million Americans and Canadians for as long as a year.
After all the lies at Ground Zero, who would believe it was safe to return?
The mayor on Monday described Indian Point as “far away from New York City,” but you can bet that if a nuclear mishap like the ones in Japan struck it would suddenly seem just upriver.
How safe do you think it feels to be 35 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now there is the threat of an uncontrolled release of radiation into the air?
A spokesman for Indian Point’s owner, Entergy of New Orleans, Monday reported that the application to extend its license is “pretty far along,” including a safety evaluation whose requirements include hardening against the “postulated maximum earthquake” for the particular area.
If the extension goes through, Indian Point will continue providing a third of the city’s power. The two remaining hurdles are state permits involving the 2.5 billion gallons of water that pass through the plant each day, more than twice the water consumed by all five boroughs.
One permit concerns the temperature of the water after it passes through. The other concerns the fish and their eggs sucked into the 40-inch intake pipes.
Indian Point (above) may yet be shut down not because it poses a danger for millions of people, but because of some shad.
In the meantime, a mysterious pool of water on a floor at the plant led to the discovery last year of a leaking underground pipe feeding a backup cooling system.
And, a transformer explosion triggered a brief shutdown in November.
At least the area surrounding Indian Point finally has a properly functioning warning system after only three years of delays and screwups.
Of course the system’s 172 sirens are just a precaution.
A nuclear disaster could never happen here.
Just ask the regulators.
(Source: NY Daily News)
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6 Responses
If you really want to be safe, try avoiding all electricity. Afterall, all the Gedolim prior to the mid-19th century made no use (zero, effesh, nada, zilch) of electrical applicans, and that didn’t prevent them from living a full life.
Any power plant is inherently dangerous. Just think of all the Americans killed by power plants. Think very hard.Think very very hard.
Nuclear plants are cheaper and better environmentally than the alternatives. Solar plants are “clean” but produce little electricity. Coal is cheaper, but much dirtier (and that is ignoring the questionable theory that buring coal affect climate).
The fact that you know of few Americans killed by power plants does not mean it doesn’t happen, but that’s not the main point of my reply.
The fact is that this plant is situated in about the worst possible spot. I am not suggesting that it be shut down immediately. However, we might consider building another plant to replace it, in some much less populated area. If my memory serves me correctly, Montana has the least dense population, but I have no idea about faults in the area, or any other problems. One problem that hits me right away is the lack of water. However, somewhere with a less dense population would seem to me to make sense.
As to nuclear plants being better environmentally, that would depend upon the window you are using to measure it. They certainly produce some waste we haven’t figured out what to do with yet. Also, hydro electric plants are usually cheaper and better environmentally than any of the others you mentioned.
As to nuclear plants being cheaper, they are certainly more expensive to build, and depending upon their lifetime, their cost may or may not be able to be spread over a long enough time span to make the electricity they generate cheaper.
As to people being killed, coal is certainly the worst offender in that regard, if you include mining the coal.
Regarding building new nuclear plants, no new nuclear plants have been planned since Three Mile Island. In any case, one issue in siting new plants is getting the power to the grid. Adequate transmission lines are necessary for that.
Nuclear plants in this country originally were licensed for 20 years; as the licenses expire many companies have been applying for and receiving 20 yr license renewals for functioning plants.
Hydroelectric plants are environmentally better in the sense that they don’t pollute. But people aren’t willing to have rivers diverted and water flows disturbed to accomodate them. The effects on migrating fish is another issue; currently water flow is diverted from existing plants for spawning salmon.
Many people die or become sick every year due to particulate pollution from coal plants.
#1, the fact is that nuclear fuel is even cheaper than coal on a dollar/btu basis. When Indian Point was operated by Con Ed, it had the lowest incremental cost (the total cost to operate, including fuel, maintenance,payroll and taxes) of any powerplant in their system by a factor of ten. In new reactor designs which have an initial fuel charge good for thirty years at ful power (like naval reactors), the incremental fuel cost is essentially zero as the fuel is part of the original cost of theractor.
#2, The the actual equipment and labor cost to build a nuclear power plant is roughly the same as the cost of a comparable fossil fired plant of (and about 1/4 the cost of a wind or solar plant of the same capacity.) The construction cost of nuclear plants has been artificially inflated by making inspection and licensing particularly onerous and time consuming thereby drastically increasing the finance costs (cost of money).
#3, The NRC has recently approved licenses for construction of three new power plants.
P.S. there can never be a Chernoblyl-on-the-Hudson (except for New Square). The Indian Point reactors are not graphite pile reactors as was Chernonyl and cannot catch fire. There could, however, be a Three Mile Island-on-the-Hudson. (Please note that the Three Mile Island accident had no measureable negative effect on the surrounding countryside even after thirty years).
Raphael Kaufman, thanks for the correction about new power plants. I see now that Georgia Power is building a couple of new units at Vogtle, where is the other new unit?
But besides for regulatory/ licensing costs, nuclear plants are just much more expensive to build than fossil plants.