With the world’s attention focused on Japan’s attempts to avoid a nuclear catastrophe, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is calling for a nuclear plant just 24 miles from New York City to be shuttered.
As the New York Daily News reports, the Indian Point nuclear power plant lies within 50 miles of 20 million people, and has suffered a number of safety accidents during its 40-year history, from radiation leaks to oil spills.
Yet what spurred fresh concerns among Cuomo and others is an assessment by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, disclosed by msnbc.com, that pegged one of the two reactors operating at Indian Point as the most vulnerable in the country to an earthquake disaster.
“The suggestion is that of all the power plants across the country, that the Indian Point power plant is most susceptible to an earthquake because Reactor No. 3 is on a fault,” Cuomo said. “It should be closed. This plant in this proximity to the city was never a good risk.”
The operating licenses for both of Indian Point’s reactors come up for renewal with the NRC over the next four years, so Cuomo conceivably could see his wish become reality before long. Cuomo has long criticized the facility, saying in 2007 that Indian Point was “a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
Yet just before the Japanese disaster, Indian Point, which supplies nearly one-third of the electricity powering New York City and neighboring Westchester County, won a safety concession. On March 4 the plant’s operator, Entergy, received the thumbs-up from a federal judge to install an insulation that protects against fire for only 27 minutes, rather than the normally required one hour.
Entergy downplayed the likelihood of a disaster comparable to the one afflicting Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant.
“I say only if a tsunami could make its way … up New York Harbor and the Hudson River, somehow avoid New York City, and drench our plant,” Entergy spokesman Jim Streets told CBS New York. “It just doesn’t seem very realistic to me.”
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