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.

“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.