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Radioactive Ship “Discovered” in National Marine Sanctuary

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015

A recent expedition by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in conjunction with the US Navy and Boeing, “discovered” the USS Independence laden with radioactive waste 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco. The World War II aircraft carrier, a Bikini Atoll nuclear test survivor, had been loaded with countless barrels of nuclear waste and then sunk in a secret location by the Navy in 1951. The former Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Dump Site is host to a total of 48,000 barrels that were abandoned from 1946 and 1970. The vessel was found at the dump site, which is now designated the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Damage from two Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests is visible in this January 1951 photo of the USS Independence at anchor in San Francisco Bay, California. San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Photo.

The 55-gallon barrels on the ship contained hazardous equipment and materials used for cleaning radioactive surfaces. The barrels went down with the ship, which—along with 90 other vessels—the US military itself bombed during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The ship was subjected to two nuclear test strikes, code-named Able and Baker, both 21-kiloton tests. The Navy then returned it to the mainland, converted it into a radiological decontamination school, partially cleaned it, and finally had it scuttled.

While the leader of the NOAA expedition, James Delgado, stated that water near the ship tested at “normal background radiation levels,” UC-Berkeley nuclear physicist Kai Vetter, also part of the expedition, admitted that due to normal corrosion, reactions could occur that would allow radioactive material to leak into the water. In addition to harm to human life, there is a threat to the wildlife in the sanctuary, including elephant seals (which like all mammals are protected by the Marine Mammals Protection Act) and the white shark, a vulnerable species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Neither the effects of contamination, nor the cost of clean-up around the ship and the dump site have been independently studied. The ship’s discovery after 64 years is one more unfortunate reminder that begs the question: What ugly secrets does the government have that we won’t learn about for another 64 years?

—Live Science, Apr. 17; San Jose Mercury News, Apr. 16, 2015; United States Nuclear Tests: July 1945 through September 1992, US Department of Energy, Dec. 2000; Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 6, 2014; International Union for Conservation of Nature, July 2014 —KL

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Public Interest Groups Declare Canadian Waste Dump Study Fatally Flawed: Ontario Urged to Reject Great Lakes Basin for Deep Disposal

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015

Calling a federal review report issued last week on a proposal to bury nuclear waste beside Lake Huron “flawed,” close to 100 public interest groups issued an “Open Letter to the Government of Ontario” May 15, calling on the province to step up and halt the project in light of a failed and error-filled federal process.

The letter calls on the government of Ontario, as the sole shareholder of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), to direct the provincial utility to withdraw its proposal to bury hundreds of cubic meters of radioactive waste in limestone caverns beside Lake Huron, beneath the Bruce Nuclear Site. OPG is the proponent of the burial scheme.

On May 6, a panel appointed in 2012 by the federal Minister of the Environment and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission provided the Minister with its final report on its review of OPG’s proposed Deep Geologic Repository for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste. The Joint Review Panel (JRP) recommended that the federal minister approve the proposed repository despite volumes of expert testimony and evidence it heard during public hearings that detailed the proposal’s numerous technical uncertainties and gross incompleteness. The proposal still faces growing public opposition.

“They got it wrong, plain and simple,” said Eugene Bourgeois, closest neighbor to the Bruce Nuclear reactor complex. “There are layers upon layers of dishonesty at play here. This [JRP] has now teamed up with the nuclear industry to rush ahead with unproven technologies to bury wastes OPG claims are being safely managed where they are, and to continue to ignore some of the most vulnerable and most hazardous wastes…”, he said.

OPG’s proposal was to bury 200,000 cubic metres of low and intermediate level radioactive wastes produced during reactor operations deep underground in a series of underground caverns carved out of limestone. Weeks before the federal hearing began in September 2013, OPG publicly acknowledged its intention to double that amount by adding decommissioning wastes—including radioactive reactor components and contaminated building materials and rubble—through a license amendment after approval based on the initial proposal has been issued.

“The Joint Review Panel got one thing right: they named OPG’s proposed burial plan as “precedent-setting” and described it as “likely … to assist” in the push to bury high level nuclear waste. We’ve always seen this project as the nuclear industry’s trial balloon for nuclear waste burial,” said Brennain Lloyd, a spokesperson with Northwatch, a principle intervener in the case.

OPG also holds majority control in the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, an association of provincial utilities in Canada who operate nuclear reactors. The NWMO is currently investigating nine communities as potential burial sites for high level nuclear fuel waste, including six in northern Ontario and three in the vicinity of the Bruce nuclear site.

“These wastes have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years; burying them in limestone right beside Lake Huron simply makes no sense,” said Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with US-based watchdog group Beyond Nuclear.

“Ontario Power Generation’s experts during the hearing talked about Lake Huron being large enough to dilute radioactive wastes that leaked from the repository. That a federal hearing panel would accept using the Great Lakes for the dilution of radioactive pollution as a solution to the industry’s waste management problems robs their report of any credibility,” Kamps said.

The Saugeen Ojibway and Anishnabek First Nations along with the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative also released statements condemning the project and expressing grave concern with the Joint Review Panel’s conclusions. —JL

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Fukushima Triple Reactor Disaster—A Crisis Without End

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015
John LaForge

The Great Northeast Japan Earthquake in March of 2011, which resulted in the deaths of 15,000 people and destroyed the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor complex, caused the evacuation of 160,000 residents who might not return in their lifetimes.

The catastrophic meltdown of three separate nuclear reactors, out of the six at the complex, was unprecedented and—between hydrogen explosions and ongoing flushing of the molten uranium fuel, with tons of seawater—sent plumes of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and into the Pacific Ocean. Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has positively documented radioactive contamination from Fukushima in seawater off the west coasts of the US and Canada, said in a statement last April 7, “Radioactivity can be dangerous, and we should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history.” Woods Hole began its monitoring regime when US agencies declined to initiate routine measurements.

Nick Roney

Buesseler told the (Oregon) Statesman Journal April 6 that radiation concentrations off the east coast of Japan near Fukushima in the first weeks of the catastrophe measured 50 million Becquerels* per cubic meter. Woods Hole has tracked the radiation plume for 5,000 miles as it spread across the Pacific, and its concentration now is both diluted and ubiquitous. Reuters news service reported that Canadian water samples off Vancouver Island, British Columbia contained 1.4 Becquerels per cubic meter of cesium-134 and 5.8 Bq per cubic meter of cesium-137.

Decommissioning lacks plan, method, means

At the reactor site, Naohiro Masuda, President of the Fukushima-Daiichi Decommissioning Company, told Japanese Public Television NHK in a March 31 interview that technical equipment needed to remove the brutally radioactive melted fuel wreckage from three shattered reactor vessels still needs to be invented.

“We have no idea about the debris [the melted fuel]. We don’t know its shape or strength. We have to remove it remotely, from 30 meters above, but we don’t have that kind of technology yet. It simply doesn’t exist.” The current manager of the reactor site, Akira Ono, said likewise. “For removal of the debris, we don’t have accurate information (about the state of the reactors) or any viable methodology…”, he told the Times of London March 30.

Robots sent inside the vessels have repeatedly broken down under the harsh radioactive environment and have failed to transmit sufficient information to even pinpoint the location of the mass of fuel much less design a decommissioning process.

Theoretically, during the fuel removal process—not expected to begin for another five years—workers must keep all the melted uranium submerged under water, which shields workers by absorbing much of the radiation. This theory may not be sound.

“We still don’t know whether it’s possible to fill the reactor containers with water,” Masuda told NHK. There are so many cracks and holes in the containers, Masuda says, “We may have to look for some other way to remove the debris.”

Can the removal begin in 2020 as the government insists? Masuda said he doesn’t know if that is possible either, and “There is no text book to teach us what to do.”

Taiwan imposes new limits on Japanese food imports

Taiwan imposed new bans on food imported from Japan, the French news agency AFP reported May 15. The cause was the recall of hundreds of products in March whose labels were faked in order to disguise the fact they came from areas contaminated by Fukushima’s radioactive fallout.

Taiwan’s government banned food sent from five prefectures near Fukushima soon after the March 11, 2011 disaster when it was found to be contaminated. Now, all food imports from Japan will have to carry proof that they come from outside the banned areas. Some particular foods will also require “radiation inspection certificates,” according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Japan complained about the new restrictions through its de facto embassy in Taipei, saying, “Falsified labels of product origins and food safety are different issues.” Three weeks earlier, on April 22, Japanese officials brought a complaint against South Korea in the World Trade Organization, over similar food import restrictions saying they violate trade rules. In place since March 2011, South Korean precautions include an outright ban on seafood from the Fukushima region and require radiation testing and certification for other foods.

Separate courts reject, approve reactor restarts

A three-judge panel set back Japanese government and industry hopes to restart the idled nuclear reactor industry, ruling April 14 that restart of two Takahama reactors appear too unsafe. The ruling affects reactors 3 and 4 which went on-line in the 1980s but have been shut down since the catastrophic March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple meltdowns at Fukushima.

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) had approved the restart at Takahama, in west-central Japan, but a group of citizens filed suit to stop it. They convinced the court that the NRA had underestimated the reactors’ vulnerability to earthquakes and that evacuation plans in the event of another disaster, prepared by the Kansai Electric Power Co., were inadequate. Presiding judge Hideaki Higuchi, who issued a similar ruling against separate reactor restarts last May, said the restart proposal was “lacking in rationality.”

A similar lawsuit—against restart of the Sendai reactors No. 1 and 2 in Japan’s far southwest—was dismissed April 22, although citizens had argued that a recent increase in volcanic activity threatens potential disaster. The citizens vowed to appeal.

Then on May 27, the NRA announced that only operational tests were still needed to fire-up the Sendai reactors, opening the door to the possible restart of Unit 1 in July and Unit 2 in September.

Owned and operated by the Kyūshū Electric Power Company, Sendai is located on Japan’s main southern island of Kyushu, home to Japan’s most active volcano, Mount Aso, as well as the great Sakurajima volcano.

The NRA’s announcement came two days before the May 29 volcanic eruption on the southern island of Kuchinoerabujima, 70 miles away. The eruption may lend weight to the citizen’s appeal of the court’s restart approval. Restart may also be reconsidered in view of recent earthquakes: the severe 8.5 magnitude earthquake that struck deep undersea, 620 miles south of Tokyo, and dramatically shook buildings there May 30, and the 5.5 level quake on May 25 that hit northwest of Tokyo.

Hong Kong finds radioactivity in Japanese tea

Powdered tea imported by Hong Kong from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba in March, was found to have traces of radioactive cesium-137, although at levels below what the government allows in food, the New York Times reported March 12. Chiba is over 135 miles from Fukushima-Daiichi in northeast Japan—site four years ago of the world’s worst or second worst radiation disaster.

Soon after Fukushima’s triple reactor meltdowns and massive radiation releases began in March 2011, Hong Kong’s state Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables imported from Japan to have “unsatisfactory” levels of radioactive contaminants. Since then, Hong Kong has repeatedly found samples of food imports contaminated with low levels of Fukushima’s radioactive fallout. 

Hong Kong’s limits for radioactive materials in food are “low and stringent,” the New York Times indicated. But allowable limits of radioactive contamination in foods are set arbitrarily and enforcement is poorly regulated. Ingestion of even the smallest trances of radioactive materials can cause cancer and other illnesses, although illnesses may not appear for years or decades following ingestion or inhalation. 

Surge in workers exposed to high radiation

Radiation containment workers at the devastated Fukushima site have increasingly been exposed to high levels of radiation, the Japan Times reported May 10.

A total of 992 workers were exposed to more than 20 milliSieverts* in 2014, according to data made public by Tokyo Electric Power, Co. (Tepco), which runs the operation. The number of highly contaminated workers was 50 percent higher than the 660 who were so exposed in 2013. Tepco said that the increases were because of increased debris removal and decontamination work in areas of high-radiation.

The most dangerous work in the worst of high-radiation areas—the three destroyed reactor vessels, where hundreds of tons of melted fuel rods make them inaccessible—has not been started, and “poses a huge long-term challenge,” the IAEA said.

Failed pumps cause additional ocean spills

On April 22, all eight water transfer pumps at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex were shut down by an electric outage, and the shutdown led to another spill of highly radioactive water into the Pacific, the Japan Times reported.

The April accident followed a series of ocean-contaminating leaks of highly radioactive water that came from faulty holding tanks. Thousands of such tanks were hastily built to hold waste water poisoned with cesium, strontium, tritium and dozens of radio-toxic chemicals. The contaminated water results from constantly flushing seawater through the three wrecked reactor vessels and over the 150–300 tons of melted uranium fuel. Thousands of tons of contaminated waste water is also produced by the movement of groundwater that enters the wreckage through cracks and smashed duct work before finding its way to the Pacific.

According to Tepco admissions over the last few months, the period between May 2011 and August 2013, saw leaks that put at least 20 trillion Becquerels of cesium-137, 10 trillion Becquerels of strontium-90, and 40 trillion Becquerels of tritium into the sea.

New leaks douse attempts to limit water pollution

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors hurried to Japan in April to investigate a spike in radiation levels caused by highly contaminated water leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Tepco had known about the leaks for months, but kept the information secret during the IAEA monitors’ February 2015 visit. Bloomberg News reported May 5, that Tepco has since claimed to be disclosing more of its radiation data, although, as IAEA spokesperson Serge Gas wrote in an e-mail from the agency’s offices in Vienna, “Tepco has no obligation to report to the IAEA.”

Tepco behind in payments for decontamination work 

The Japan Times reported March 30 that Tepco has only covered 2 percent of the $638.8 million that municipalities have spent on decontamination work since 2011.

According to the federal Environment Ministry, the company has refused to cover the costs of removing and bagging up contaminated soil and debris in radioactive fallout-hit areas, saying it is studying whether the law requires it. A law enacted in August 2011 stipulates that Tepco bears financial responsibility for the decontamination work.

The central government has paid for the cleanup and expects to be reimbursed by Tepco. So far the company has paid only for decontamination work done by the central government near its reactors. Japan allocated $11.3 billion in this regard, including around $5.08 billion for work done by local municipality offices by the end of fiscal 2014. The Environment Ministry asked that Tepco reimburse $638.8 million by the end of February, but Tepco has only covered $12 million.

Accidents still happening

On March 1, the Japan Times reported that waste water pouring into the Pacific from the reactor wreckage showed a huge spike in radioactivity. Tepco acknowledged that levels of strontium-90 in the waste water were up to 70 times, or 7,000 percent higher than what is allowed to be dumped into the ocean. Strontium was measured at up to 7,230 Becquerels per liter of water, while the contamination limit is supposed to be 5 Bq/L.

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Chernobyl and the Fire Next Time

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015
By John LaForge 

The April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster was remembered unhappily the world over. In Germany, 29 years after the fact, the ancient custom of wild boar hunting is still prohibited because the animals remain too contaminated with Chernobyl’s long-lived radioactive fallout.

Government warnings of Chernobyl’s dispersed cancer agents are nearly forgotten today, but a May 14, 1986 bulletin from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)said, “[A]irborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States.”

A week later, Minnesotans read, “For the second time since the [Chernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said. … The amount of iodine-131 in the air also increased slightly [May 19] after several days of decline, health officials said.” (“Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” Duluth News-Tribune & Herald, May 22, 1986)

The AP reported May 15, 1986, “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.” Likewise, regarding the triple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, Forbes reported on April 11, 2011: “Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the EPA late [April 8].”

Wildfires put contamination back in the air 

Chernobyl exploded and burned out of control for weeks. The French Nuclear Energy Agency’s “2002 Update of Chernobyl,” noted that “[C]ontinuing low-level releases occurred … for up to 40 days after the accident, particularly on 15 and 16 May, attributable to continuing outbreaks of fires or to hot areas in the reactor.…”

Demonstrating nuclear power’s capacity for whole-earth poisoning, the catastrophic consequences are still spreading three decades later.

The dispersion of large amounts of radioactive cesium-137—which persists in the environment for at least 300 years—was especially concentrated in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, where half the spewed radiation fell. The other half spread to every country in the Northern Hemisphere. The American Geophysical Union reported in 2009 that radioactive cesium-137 dispersed by Chernobyl wouldn’t “disappear” from the environment through decay for up to 320 years.

Cesium has heavily contaminated forested areas of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, an area of some 1,000 square miles surrounding the reactor where access and habitation are severely limited. When the forests catch fire, radioactive materials including cesium are again dispersed to the winds.

For two months in the summer of 2010, wildfires in Russia burned over 2 million acres and caused at least 50 deaths. The August 10, 2010 the New York Times noted that “dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones.” Two days later, the AP and the Agency France Presse cited government reports that at least six wildfires had been extinguished “this week” in the heavily-contaminated Bryansk region.

About the 2010 wildfires, Time magazine reported that Russian leaders had removed maps of likely radiation-contaminated fires from web sites maintained by the national forestry agency. (Taking a lesson from the Russians, the US government halted its emergency radiation monitoring of water and milk on the West Coast a mere two months after the start of Fukushima’s three explosions and meltdowns.)

In 2002, dozens of peat fires and wildfires again spread across heavily-contaminated Belarus. The AP reported July 22, 2002 that “Belarusian Emergency Minister Valery Astapov said radiation levels in the fire zone are elevated…”

The Washington Post and AP reported in April 1996 that a wildfire had “spread quickly through five villages in the exclusion zone, carried by strong winds blowing toward Kiev and its 2.6 million residents. It burned pines and buildings in one of the areas most heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium.”

“Eight percent” of radioactive fallout re-suspended—but eight percent of what? 

The latest news of cesium spreading from Chernobyl comes from a team of researchers led by Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. According to Dr. Mousseau’s report, published in Ecological Monographs, wildfires that burned in the exclusion zone in 2002, 2008 and 2010 have together redistributed approximately eight percent of the original amount of cesium-137 released by the 1986 disaster—the world’s worst accidental airborne release. The researchers warned that large blazes in the future could spread significant amounts of radioactive soot across Europe, leading to contamination of food crops, the New York Times reported April 6, 2015.

In 2006, The Other Report on Chernobyl (TORCH, by Ian Fairlie and David Sumner) concluded that about 30 percent of the reactor’s radioactivity was distributed over the reactor building and surrounding areas and about 1–2 percent was ejected into the atmosphere. The sum total of radioactivity released was about 324.3 million curies. All of the reactor’s radioactive gases (xenon and krypton) were released.

In 2005, the Chernobyl Forum—comprised of more than 100 scientists, eight UN agencies and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine—estimated that the total release over the first 10 days reached 378.3 million curies. (Bob Edwards, “Major UN report counts human cost of Chernobyl,” New Scientist, Sept. 5, 2005.)

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab suggested in 1986 that 50 percent of the core’s radioactivity was spewed—4.5 billion curies, according to Science, June 13, 1986. In 1991, Vladimir Chernousenko, a fellow of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and chief scientific supervisor of “clean up” in the 10-kilometer zone around the demolished reactor, noted that independent experts estimated that 80 percent of the reactor’s radioactivity escaped—over 6.4 billion curies.

According to Mousseau, forests covered 50 percent the Chernobyl exclusion zone before 1986, but trees and brush now cover 70 percent of the no-go area. Mousseau’s team reports that as climate change increasingly heats and dries the region, wildfires are expected to rage more often and more fiercely.

Asked by the Times what the consequences of this dispersion of radioactive materials might be, Mousseau was circumspect and grim. “There is never a positive consequence of having increased amounts of mutagenic materials in our environment,” he said. “It’s always negative.”

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Fire at Indian Point: New York’s Nuke Operating Without a License

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2015
By Karl Grossman

In 1976, Robert Pollard, a rarity among US government nuclear officials—honest and safety-committed—said of the Indian Point nuclear power station that it was “an accident waiting to happen.”

Pollard had been project manager at Indian Point for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from which he resigned at that time charging the NRC “suppresses the existence of unresolved safety questions and fails to resolve these problems.” He joined the Union of Concerned Scientists.

An explosion and fire at a transformer at Indian Point 3 on Saturday May 9 is but one of the many accidents that have occurred at the Indian Point facility through the years—none catastrophic as have been the disasters at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactors.

But Indian Point 2 has been in operation for 41 years, although when nuclear power was first advanced in the United States, reactors were never seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. So licenses were limited to 40 years.

Indian Point 2 is thus now running without an operating license while the NRC considers an application before it from the reactor’s owner, Entergy Corp., to allow it to run another 20 years—for a total of 60 years.

Indian Point 3, where the transformer explosion and fire occurred, has been operational for 39 years and its license expires this year. (Indian Point l was shut down early because of mechanical deficiencies.) Entergy also is seeking to have Indian Point 3’s operating license extended to 60 years.

These old, long problem-plagued reactors, 26 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, are now disasters waiting to happen in a very heavily populated area. Some 22 million people live within 50 miles of the Indian Point site.

Smoke rises from a transformer fire at Indian Point’s Unit 3 reactor in Buchanan, New York on May 9. The Indian Point complex is just 26 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Photo by Ricky Flores/AP.

“This [reactor] is the nuclear plant that is closest to the most densely populated area on the globe,” declared New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at the Indian Point site on May 10. Gov. Cuomo, who has been pushing to have the Indian Point reactors closed, noted that this was “not the first transformer fire” there, and his concern is that “one situation is going to trigger another.” The unit came back on-line on May 27.

Entergy’s public relations people have recently stressed that the transformer explosion and fire occurred in the “non-nuclear part” of Indian Point 3. However, as Pollard noted in the television documentary “Three Mile Island Revisited”—that I wrote and narrated on that accident—“there is no non-nuclear part of a nuclear plant.”

What could be the extent of a major accident at Indian Point?

The NRC in 1982 issued a report titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” or CRAC-2. The research for the report was done at the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

CRAC-2—you can read the full report online at—www.ccnr.org/crac.html—projects that in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident with breach of containment at Indian Point 2, there could be 46,000 “peak early fatalities,” 141,000 “peak early injuries,” 13,000 “cancer deaths” and a cost in property damages (in 1980 dollars) of $274 billion (which in today’s dollars would be $1 trillion).

For an accident at Indian Point 3, where the transformer explosion and fire happened—because it is a somewhat bigger reactor (generating 1,025 megawatts compared to Indian Point 2’s 1,020 megawatts)—the impacts would be greater, said CRAC-2

For Indian Point 3, in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment, CRAC-2 estimates 50,000 “peak early fatalities,” 167,000 “peak early injuries,” 14,000 “cancer deaths,” and a cost in property damage at $314 billion.

Compounding the problem of the Indian Point reactors being old—consider driving a 60 year-old car on a high-speed Interstate—they are at the intersection of the Ramapo and Stamford earthquake faults. As a 2008 study by seismologists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found: “Indian Point is situated at the intersection of the two most striking linear features marking the seismicity and [is] also in the midst of a large population that is at risk in case of an accident. This is clearly one of the least favorable sites in our study area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective.”

“This aging, dilapidated facility has endless problems leaking radioactive chemicals, oil and PCB’s into the Hudson River. It’s unconscionable to permit the continued operation of Indian Point,” said Susan Hito-Shapiro, an environmental attorney and member of the leadership council of the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition.

Further, she pointed out this week, Indian Point has been described as “the most attractive terrorist target” in the US because of its proximity to New York City and it also being seven miles from the US Military Academy at West Point. Indeed, there was consideration by the 9/11 terrorists of crashing into Indian Point. Both captured jets flew over the Indian Point nuclear station before striking the World Trade Center minutes later.

And she described it as “outrageous” that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved an evacuation plan for Indian Point “although it would never work” in the event of a major accident at the reactors, considering the millions of people who stand to be affected.

The key to New York State’s strategy to shut down Indian Point is the denial by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to give Entergy a “water use permit” to let it continue to send hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day from the reactors into the Hudson River.

“We need to make sure DEC stays strong,” says Hito-Shapiro.

In light of the historic, reckless, scandalous weakness of the federal government when it comes to Indian Point—and the nuclear power reactors of other utilities—strong state action is most necessary.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

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