"A very large gas pipeline will soon skirt the Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC), an aging nuclear power plant that stands in the town of Cortlandt in Westchester County, New York, 30 miles north of Manhattan. The federal agencies that have permitted the project have bowed to two corporations -- the pipeline's owner, Spectra Energy, and Entergy, which bought the Indian Point complex in 2001 from its former owner."
This situation ignores sea level rise (SLR) and flooding dangers, not to mention the Safety 101 notion of not stacking risk upon risk ("don't put all of your eggs in one basket"):
Paul Blanch is a professional engineer with nearly five decades of experience in nuclear safety, engineering operations and federal regulatory requirements. He has security clearance for his work, and is a nuclear industry proponent. He has worked with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since its inception and for utility corporations across the United States, including Entergy. He also works pro bono for nuclear safety and has been doing this for the town of Cortlandt and local organizations including the grassroots group, Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Extension (SAPE), which has been fighting AIM for the past year and a half.
"I've had over 45 years of nuclear experience and [experience in] safety issues," Blanch told Truthout. "I have never seen [a situation] that essentially puts 20 million residents at risk, plus the entire economics of the United States by making a large area surrounding Indian Point uninhabitable for generations. I'm not an alarmist and haven't been known as an alarmist, but the possibility of a gas line interacting with a plant could easily cause a Fukushima type of release."
The potential hazards of the AIM construction near IPEC are no longer hypothetical. On March 3, 2015, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the AIM project in its entirety, from New York to the Canadian border.
First, steam leaks. 2 days later, exploding transformers.
Set against a backdrop of a political battle between naive environmentalists, self-serving politicians, and profit-hungry executives (intent on generating high returns on an asset with a questionable remaining useful life).
What could go wrong???
Indian Point Nuclear Generating (Buchanan, New York)
2 Operating Nuclear Reactors
Pressurized Water Reactor
First Operating License Issued 38 years ago
Operating at 106.25% of Original Design
Within 10-mile Evacuation Zone:
317,000 People (2010 Total Population)
71 Public Schools
7 Hospitals
Within 50-mile Potential Contamination Zone:
17,639,000 People (2010 Total Population)
3902 Public Schools
470 Hospitals
Wholesale power gained in the New York market after Entergy Corp. closed Unit 3 at its Indian Point nuclear power plant.
The 1,012-megawatt reactor, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) north of New York City, was shut Thursday morning after workers found a steam leak on the non-nuclear side of the facility, the company said in a press release.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...sale-power-falls-as-consumption-on-grid-slips
A transformer failure at the Indian Point nuclear power plant caused an explosion and fire at the facility Saturday evening, sending billows of black smoke into the air near Buchanan, New York.
The fire broke out on the non-nuclear side of the plant, about 200 yards away from the reactor building, according to Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi.
"The fire is out and the plant is safe and stable," Nappi said. Federal officials said one reactor unit automatically shut down.
No one was injured in the blaze.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/09/us/new-york-nuclear-plant-fire/
Indian Point, located on the shores of the Hudson River in Westchester County, is authorized to use up to 2.5 billion gallons of water a day to cool its nuclear reactor, which has concerned environmentalists for years. Fish and insect larvae are sucked into the system and killed and warmer water is returned to the Hudson. The state is reviewing Indian Point's water usage as part of its relicensing application.
Outages at the plant would cost Entergy billions of dollars, a company spokesman said. The nation's nuclear fleet is struggling with aging infrastructure costs and an influx of cheap natural gas.
Indian Point is the “crown jewel” of Entergy's business, said Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an energy analyst at UBS financial.
“Its continued operation is an essential element to the cash flow of that company,” he said.
Closing Indian Point would require new transmission lines and other power producing units to be built, according to the New York Independent System Operator, which runs the state's electricity grid. Closing it could jeopardize the reliability of the state's bulk electrical grid, according NYISO.
“Failure to do so would have serious reliability consequences, including the possibility of rolling consumer blackouts,” NYISO vice president Tom Rumsey testified in a state hearing on the permanent closure of Indian Point last year.
The shutdown proposal does not come from nowhere.
Cuomo has repeatedly stated his desire to shut down Indian Point. State officials had explored outages as a way to protect fish more than a decade ago, but shelved the idea as impractical, an Entergy spokesman said.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/artic...ttle-over-unprecedented-indian-point-shutdown
It's not just Indian Point caught between a rock and a hard place...
The U.S. nuclear industry is feeling its age. Once touted as a source of electricity that would be “too cheap to meter,” plants need expensive upgrades to protect them from terrorism and natural disasters. At the same time, they face growing competition from renewables and natural gas. While five new reactors are under construction, current economics give little incentive to build more. Looming is an unprecedented wave of closures.
Yet 82 of the 117 U.S. nuclear power plants, including seven in the process of shutting down, don’t have enough cash on hand to close safely, according to NRC records. And closing tends to cost more than operators expect. Based on NRC filings, the actual combined cost may be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion -- $43 billion more than the current balance of the trust funds.
So the coming closures could drag on for decades and place unexpected burdens on investors, consumers or taxpayers.
“The public has a right to demand that all nuclear power plant operators are secure in their funding,” Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement in response to questions from Bloomberg.
Among the underfunded plants are FirstEnergy Corp.’s Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, site of the 1979 partial meltdown, and Entergy Corp.’s Indian Point, about 35 miles north of New York City.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-03/radioactive-and-short-on-cash
Pro tip: If you can, do live outside a 10 mile radius of a nuke plant, and preferably as close to or outside of a 50 mile radius. If you're curious, here's the fall-out zone (50 mile radius) for a meltdown at Indian Point:
http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-...3&r=80.4672000307346&lc=FFFFFF&lw=1&fc=00FF00
For other areas, you can find your nearest nuke plant here:
http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/
And here's a nice map with all the evacuation and fall-out zones:
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fallout/
