Entergy’s Indian Point nuclear power plant, located just 30 miles from Manhattan, has long been a cause for public concern. A major accident at this plant could make the entire area of New York City uninhabitable. Now a new high-pressure natural gas pipeline will be built within 105 feet of critical structures of the plant. Journalists Ellen Cantarow and Alison Rose Levy believe the authorities should take action. Courtesy of Tomdispatch.
It was a beautiful spring day and, in the control room of the nuclear reactor, the workers decided to deactivate the security system for a systems test. As they started to do so, however, the floor of the reactor began to tremble. Suddenly, its 1,200-ton cover blasted flames into the air. Tons of radioactive radium and graphite shot 1,000 meters into the sky and began drifting to the ground for miles around the nuclear plant. The first firemen to the rescue brought tons of water that would prove useless when it came to dousing the fires. The workers wore no protective clothing and eight of them would die that night – dozens more in the months to follow.
It was April 26, 1986, and this was just the start of the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the worst nuclear accident of its kind in history. Chernobyl is ranked as a “level 7 event,” the maximum danger classification on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. It would spew out more radioactivity than 100 Hiroshima bombs. Of the 350,000 workers involved in cleanup operations, according to the World Health Organization, 240,000 would be exposed to the highest levels of radiation in a 30-mile zone around the plant. It is uncertain exactly how many cancer deaths have resulted since. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s estimate of the expected death toll from Chernobyl was 4,000. A 2006 Greenpeace report challenged that figure, suggesting that 16,000 people had already died due to the accident and predicting another 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus still to come. A significant increase in thyroid cancers in children, a very rare disease for them, has been charted in the region – nearly 7,000 cases by 2005 in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
“Many scholars have already argued that any evacuation plans shouldn’t be called plans, but rather fantasy documents”
In March 2011, 25 years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, damage caused by a tsunami triggered by a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake led to the meltdown of three reactors at a nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. Radioactive rain from the Fukushima accident fell as far away as Ireland.
In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency had, in fact, warned the Japanese government that none of the country’s nuclear power plants could withstand powerful earthquakes. That included the Fukushima plant, which had been built to take only a 7.0 magnitude event. No attention was paid at the time. After the disaster, the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power, rehired Shaw Construction, which had designed and built the plant in the first place, to rebuild it.
Near misses, radioactive leaks, and flooding
In both Chernobyl and Fukushima, areas around the devastated plants were made uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. In neither place, before disaster began to unfold, was anyone expecting it and few imagined that such a catastrophe was possible. In the United States, too, despite the knowledge since 1945 that nuclear power, at war or in peacetime, holds dangers of a stunning sort, the general attitude remains: it can’t happen here – nowhere more dangerously in recent years than on the banks of New York’s Hudson River, an area that could face a nuclear peril endangering a population of nearly 20 million.
As the Fukushima tragedy struck, President Obama assured Americans that U.S. nuclear plants were closely monitored and built to withstand earthquakes. That statement covered one of the oldest plants in the country, the Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) in Westchester, New York, first opened in 1962. One of 61 commercial nuclear plants in the country, it has two reactors that generate electricity for homes across New York City and Westchester County. It is located in the sixth most densely populated urban area in the world, the New York metropolitan region, just 30 miles north of Manhattan Island and the planet’s most economically powerful city.
The plant sits astride two seismic faults, which has prompted those opposing its continued operation to call for a detailed analysis of its capacity to resist an earthquake. In addition, a long series of accidents and ongoing hazards has only increased the potential for catastrophe. According to a report by the National Resources Defense Council (NDRC), if a nuclear disaster of a Fukushima magnitude were to strike Indian Point, it would necessitate the evacuation of at least 5.6 million people. In 2003, the existing evacuation plan for the area was deemed inadequate in a report by James Lee Witt, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
American officials have urged U.S. citizens to stay 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. Such a 50-mile circle around IPEC would stretch past Kingston in Ulster County to the north, past Bayonne and Jersey City to the south, almost to New Haven, Connecticut, to the east, and into Pennsylvania to the west. It would include all of New York City except for Staten Island and all of Fairfield, Connecticut. “Many scholars have already argued that any evacuation plans shouldn’t be called plans, but rather ‘fantasy documents,’” Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political science at Purdue University, told the New York Times.
Paul Blanch, a nuclear engineer who worked in the industry for 40 years as well as with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), thinks a worst-case accident at Indian Point could make the region, including parts of Connecticut, uninhabitable for generations.
According to a report from the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, there were 23 reported problems at the plant from its inception to 2005, including steam generator tube ruptures, reactor containment flooding, transformer fires, the failure of backup power for emergency sirens, and leaks of radioactive water laced with tritium. In the latest tritium leak, reported only last month, an outflow of the radioactive isotope from the plant has infused both local groundwater and the Hudson River. (Other U.S. nuclear plants have had their share of tritium leaks as well, including Turkey Point nuclear plant in Florida where such a leak is at the moment threatening drinking water wells.)
It seems odd to independent experts that the nuclear plant with the sorriest safety history in the country has been judged safe enough for a high-pressure gas pipeline to be run right by it
Experts agree that although present levels of tritium in groundwater near the plant are “alarming,” the tritium in the river will not be considered harmful until it reaches a far greater concentration of 120,000 picocuries per liter of water. (A picocurie is a standard unit of measurement for radioactivity.) Tritium is the lightest radioactive substance to leak from Indian Point, but according to an assessment by the New York Department of State, other potentially more dangerous radioactive elements like strontium-90, cesium-137, cobalt-60, and nickel-63 are also escaping the plant and entering both the groundwater and the river.
Representatives of Entergy Corporation, which owns the Indian Point plant, report that they don’t know when the present leak began or what its source might be. “No one has made a statement as to when the leak started,” wrote Paul Blanch in an email to us. “It could have started two years ago.” Nor does anyone seem to know where the leak is, how much radioactive matter is leaking, or how it can be stopped. The longer the leak persists, the greater the likelihood of isotopes more potent than tritium contaminating local drinking water.
Vulnerability to flooding
According to David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and once a trainer for NRC inspectors, the danger of flooding at the reactor should be an even greater focus of concern than radioactive substance outflows, since it could result in a reactor core meltdown. Yet despite repeated calls for Indian Point’s shutdown from the early 1970s on, it keeps operating.
On April 2, 2000, the NRC rated one of Indian Point’s two reactors the most troubled in the country, and it has been closed for lengthy periods because of system failures of various sorts. This, it turns out, is typical of Entergy-owned reactors. There were 10 “near-miss” incidents at U.S. nuclear reactors last year, a majority of them at three Entergy plants, according to a UCS report on nuclear plant safety. A near-miss incident is an event or condition that could increase the chance of reactor core damage by a factor of 10 or more. In response, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must send an inspection team to investigate.
The number of such incidents has declined since UCS initiated its annual review in 2010, “overall, a positive trend,” according to report author Lochbaum. “Five years ago, there were nearly twice as many near misses. That said, the nuclear industry is only as good as its worst plant owner. The NRC needs to find out why Entergy plants are experiencing so many potentially serious problems.” Upstate New York’s Ginna plant, he adds, has been operating as long as Indian Point, but with only two “events” in its history. At Indian Point “there’s a major event every two to three years.”
The history of Indian Point offers a grim reminder that the government agencies expected to protect citizens from disaster aren’t doing a particularly good job of it
What troubles Lochbaum more than anything else is Indian Point’s vulnerability to flooding. “There was a problem in May 2015 where a transformer exploded,” he told us. “There was an automatic fire sprinkler system installed to put this out. But it ended up flooding the building adjacent to where the explosion had taken place. Fortunately a worker noticed that an inch or two of water had accumulated. If the room had flooded up to five inches, all the power in the plant would have been lost. It would have plunged unit 3 into a ‘station blackout.’”
This might indeed have led to some kind of Fukushima-on-the-Hudson situation. In Fukushima, after the earthquake wiped out the normal power supply and tsunami floodwaters took away the backup supply, workers were unable to get cooling water into the reactor cores and three of the plant’s six reactors melted down.
In 2007, when Indian Point’s plant owner applied to the NRC for a 20-year extension of the plant’s operating license, it was found that a flood alarm could be installed in the room in question for about $200,000. As Lochbaum explains, “The owner determined it was cost-beneficial, that if they installed this flood alarm… it [would reduce] the risk of core meltdown by 20%, and [reduce] the amount of radiation that people on the plant could be exposed to by about 40%, at a cost of about two cents per person for the 20 million people living within 50 miles of the plant.” But nine years later, he told us, that flood alarm has still not been installed.
Potential pipeline explosions
As if none of this were enough, a new set of dangers to Indian Point have arisen in recent years due to a high-pressure natural gas pipeline currently being built by Spectra Energy. Dubbed the Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline, it is to carry fracked natural gas from the Marcellus Shale formation underlying New York and adjacent states to the Canadian border. At 42 inches in diameter, this pipeline is the biggest that can at present be built – and here’s the catch: AIM is slated to pass within 105 feet of the critical structures at the plant.
A former Spectra worker hired to help oversee safety during the pipeline’s construction told a reporter that the company had taken dangerous shortcuts in its rush to begin the project. He had witnessed, he said, “at least two dozen” serious safety violations and transgressions.
Taking shortcuts in pipeline construction could, in the end, prove a risky business. Pipeline ruptures are the commonest cause of gas explosions like the one that, in March 2014 in Manhattan’s East Harlem, killed eight, injured 70, and leveled two apartment buildings. Robert Miller, chairman of the National Association of Pipeline Safety Representatives, attributed the rising rates of such incidents in newly constructed pipelines to “poor construction practices or maybe not enough quality control, quality assurance programs out there to catch these problems before those pipelines go into service.”
In January 2015, the National Transportation Safety Board published a study documenting that gas accidents in “high-consequence” areas (where there are a lot of people and buildings) have been on the rise. With the New York metropolitan area so close to Indian Point, it seems odd indeed to independent experts that the nuclear plant with the sorriest safety history in the country has been judged safe enough for a high-pressure gas pipeline to be run right by it.
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
A hazards assessment replete with errors was the basis for the go-ahead. Richard B. Kuprewicz, a pipeline infrastructure expert and incident investigator with more than 40 years of energy industry experience, has called that risk assessment “seriously deficient and inadequate.”
At another nuclear plant subsequently shut down, as David Lochbaum points out, a rigorous risk analysis was conducted for possible explosions based on a worst-case scenario. (“I couldn’t think of any scenario that would be worse than what they presumed.”) At Indian Point, the risk analysis was, however, done on a best-case basis. Among other things, it assumed that any pipeline leak around the plant could be stopped in less than three minutes – an unlikelihood at best. “It’s night and day. They did a very conservative analysis for [the other plant] and a very cavalier best-case scenario for Indian Point… I don’t know why they opted for [this] drive-by analysis.”
Tombstone regulation
Of all the contaminants released in this industrial world, radioactivity may, in a sense, be the least visible and least imaginable, even if the most potentially devastating, were something to go wrong. As a result, the dangers of the “peaceful” atom have often proved hard to absorb before disaster strikes – as at the Three Mile Island reactor near Middletown, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979. Even when such a power plant sits near a highway or a community, it’s usually a reality to which people pay scant attention, in part because nuclear science is alien territory. This is why safety at nuclear power plants has been something citizens have relied on the government for.
The history of Indian Point, however, offers a grim reminder that the government agencies expected to protect citizens from disaster aren’t doing a particularly good job of it. Over the past several years, for instance, residents in the path of the AIM pipeline project have begun accusing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) of overwhelming bias in the industry’s favor. As FERC has a corner on oversight and approval of all pipeline construction, this is alarming. Its stamp of approval on a pipeline can only be contested via appeals that lead directly back to FERC itself, as the Natural Gas Act of 1938 gave the agency sole discretion over pipeline construction in the U.S. Ever since then, its officials have approved pipelines of every sort almost without exception. Worse yet, at Indian Point, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission joined FERC in green-lighting AIM.
Attempts to regulate nuclear plants after a Fukushima- or Chernobyl-type catastrophe are known in the trade as “tombstone regulation”
During the two-and-a-half-year period in which the pipeline was approved and construction began, the mainstream media virtually ignored the project and its potential dangers. Only this February, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been opposed to the relicensing of Indian Point, first raised concerns about the dangers of the pipeline, did the New York Times, the paper of record for the New York metropolitan area, finally publish a piece on AIM.
So it fell to a grassroots movement of local activists to bring AIM’s dangers to public attention. Its growing resistance to a pipeline that could precipitate just about anything up to a Fukushima-on-the-Hudson-style event evidently led Governor Cuomo to urge FERC to postpone construction until a safety review could be completed, a request that the agency rejected. In February, alarmed by reports of tritium leaking from the plant, the governor also directed the state’s departments of environmental conservation and health to investigate the likely duration and consequences of such a leak and its potential impacts on public health.
According to Paul Blanch, the risk of a pipeline explosion in proximity to Indian Point is one in 1,000, odds he believes are too high given what’s potentially at stake. (He considers a one-in-a-million chance acceptable.) “I’ve had over 45 years of nuclear experience and [experience in] safety issues. 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.”
According to Blanch, attempts to regulate nuclear plants after a Fukushima- or Chernobyl-type catastrophe are known in the trade as “tombstone regulation.” Nobody, of course, should ever want to experience such a situation on the Hudson, or have America’s own mini-Hiroshima seven decades late, or find literal tombstones cropping up in the New York metropolitan area due to a nuclear disaster. One hope for preventing all of this and ensuring protection for New York’s citizenry: the continuing growth of impressive citizen pressure and increasing public alarm around both the pipeline and Indian Point. It gives new meaning to the phrase “power to the people.”
Editor’s Note
Ellen Cantarow reported on Israel and the West Bank from 1979 to 2009 for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, Inquiry, and Grand Street, among other publications. For the past five years she has been writing about the environmental ravages of the oil and gas industries.
Alison Rose Levy is a New York-based journalist who covers the nexus of health, science, the environment, and public policy. She has reported on fracking, pipelines, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, chemical pollution, and the health impacts of industrial activity for the Huffington Post, Alternet,Truthdig, and EcoWatch.
This article was first published on Tomdispatch.com and is republished here with permission.
Copyright 2016 Ellen Cantarow and Alison Rose Levy
Dan Yurmsn says
In 2010, more than six years ago, Gwyneth Cravens and I published an OP ED in the NY Daily News making the case for Indian Point. All of the points we made then are still valid today. Here’s the link.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/andrew-cuomo-not-shut-indian-point-nuclear-plant-safe-clean-cheap-power-article-1.452888
Karel Beckman says
Well, Dan, that’s 6 years ago.
I don’t think you addressed the problem of the gas pipeline in that article!
As a general rule, I don’t want comments on this website that are just links.
If you don’t agree with the article, comment on the arguments, don’t just link.
Btw, there was a reply to your 2010 article on The Energy Collective from David Lewis, dated November 2010: http://www.theenergycollective.com/david-lewis/47657/indian-point-my-bislightly-differerentbi-take-it
Joris van Dorp, MSc says
Karel, if you are going to publish blatant antinuclear scare scories on energypost.eu (the NRDC is a hard-core antinuclear propaganda outfit, which you should know by now), then I think people like Mr. Yurman who spend a lot of time and care in debunking such stories should be allowed to post links to where these stories have been debunked.
Concerning the response you linked to, please read the comments to that response, and you will see that the response is misdirected and weak, and has itself been debunked.
Lets stop giving to much air time to these antinuke scaremongers.
Taken from the article:
“… the nuclear plant with the sorriest safety history in the country …”
Says who?
This is just your standard fact-free antinuke fear mongering. In my opinion you bring down the value of Energypost.eu by posting this boring nonsense.
Karel Beckman says
Joris, if you think I am going to be intimidated by people like you into not publishing stories like this, you are mistaken. You are not responding to this article, it is clear that any article critical of nuclear power is “scaremongering” in your book. You don’t impress anyone with a response like that. As a European I had no idea that there even existed a nuclear power station that close to Manhattan. What about the gas pipeline they are going to build right next to it? Some readers are at least responding to that with counterarguments. They don’t regard it as boring nonsense. As I have said before, I will publish articles with different viewpoints. If you don’t like that, feel free to skip us and go to a website that only echoes your own opinions.
Joris van Dorp, MSc says
My suggestion is that articles like this one should be published with a proper regard for balance. Fossil fuels kill at least 1000 times more people per unit of energy than nuclear power. So in my view, articles detailing the (proven) risks of fossil fuels should outnumber articles detailing (presumed) risks of nuclear by at at least 1000 to 1.
So after this antinuclear article, I recommend that EnergyPost.EU will now publish one thousand articles on the risk of fossil fuels. To make sure that readers don’t get the impression that nuclear is particularly risky.
Besides: I’ve participated on The Energy Collective for a number of years. Throughout that time, I’ve seen that antinuclear arguments have been routinely presented, thoroughly discussed, and debunked. TEC was unique in that it featured a sizable group of experts willing to put in the effort to carefully disarm antinuke talking points time and time again.
However, it seems that the above article is heralding yet another thrust to undermine public acceptance of nuclear, using arguments which have by and large already been debunked earlier on The Energy Collective. This is what makes it especially curious in my view that you urge commenters to not refer to debunking already done on The Energy Collective.
Surely, the discussions on The Energy Collective have value and deserve to be brought to the attention of readers, if relevant?
Karel Beckman says
So what you are saying is that since all possible criticisms of nuclear power have been debunked on The Energy Collective, there is no need anymore to respond to arguments from critics. It suffices to simply reply with links to articles on The Energy Collective, even if they are six years old and do not refer to any new facts, such as the Fukushima disaster or the fact that a gas pipeline gets built right next to a nuclear reactor. You sure make it easy for yourself!
Joris van Dorp, MSc says
If I wanted to make life easy for myself, I would not have decided to speak up against antinuclear propaganda.
If you think being an advocate for nuclear power is easy, you should try it yourself. Let me know when you get your first death threat. 😉
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/17/world/crime-legal-world/anti-nuclear-firebrands-case-heads-canadian-court-death-threats-fukushima-environmental-scientists/#.VwfPy3NcLqB
KM says
A pipeline explosion would not harm the plant. The aux building and containment (where the radiation is) are concrete. The backup generators are also within concrete. They are all designed to withstand a jetliner strike so a pipeline explosion would not be a large worry. The biggest worry should be worker safety since many security and plant personnel have outside jobs. The switchyard is also a large worry since many things out there have to be special ordered. It would knock the plant out of service for a few months.
Tim Wyant says
If the pipeline presents such a danger to the plant, why not move the path of the pipeline? Makes alot more sense than closing 2,000 MW of clean electrical generation. As for the rest, the notion that Indian Point is another Fukushima or Chernobyl is just fear mongering with no actual basis in science or reality.
KM says
Chernobyl was a steam explosion caused by plunging the control rods too quickly into the reactor (which had a positive reactivity coefficient because they are were stupid). Chernobyl also did not have a containment structure like every other nuclear power plant outside of Russia. Also NYC would not be uninhabitable… Reactors 1-3 at Chernobyl continued to operate until the year 2000 (sooo radioactive right? heh). A full 14 years after the reactor #4 explosion. People still live near the plant and never left. This doesn’t even mention that there are thousands of construction workers at reactor #4 today that are getting background dose only. So no… A meltdown (nearly impossible) at Indian point would not cause NYC to be uninhabitable. The only reason any land is off limits at Fukushima is because the tsunami carried fission products inland and deposited them in the valleys. The only place with unsafe radiation levels is within the auxilliary building and the containment building at the actual plant.
Jared S says
I agree with Tim Wyant’s comment. I wish the debate on nuclear power would start to become less black and white. Unfortunately however these authors hardly mention the benefits of this proven technology and merely contribute to the problem. As a mechanical engineer who spent several years in nuclear plant design, I can attest to the very high level of rigor that is required whether building a new plant or modifying an old one. While I stand behind the design approach and regulatory framework in this industry, I will step across the isle and agree with the authors here in that ideally we should be siting nuke plants far enough away from major population centers to essentially make a catastrophic accident a negligible event compared to one sited within 50 miles of Manhattan. I also agree it doesn’t make sense to run an NG pipeline that close to the plant boundary.
However, to paint the entire fleet of operating plants or the technology in general with a broad, scornful brush only facilitates more un-balanced one-sided thinking. Just as we require coal supporters to explain their interpretation of the economic and societal risk of man-made climate change, so too should the anti-nuke contingent have to address a cost-effective replacement to 2,000 MW of generation.
Any respectable nuke supporter will grant that meeting society’s energy demands today is a simple matter of picking your poison. Nobody wants to add the risk of radioactive release to an already strained environment, but unfortunately it’s by far the best risk to accept in the early 21st century. Nuke power to me is the chemo therapy to lung cancer while fossil fuels are the cigarettes the patient smokes to feel better. And today’s renewables? Unfortunately right now they are nothing more than a healthy, low-carcinogen diet. Hopefully we can see all of this change within our generation, but we need to get started today on making the carbon transition.
Virgil Fenn says
I fully support Joris van Dorp, MSc reply of April 6, 2016 at 13:39 in all respects.
It appears that the editor, Karel Beckman, is trying to push an agenda.
Joris did not say “that since all possible criticisms of nuclear power have been debunked on The Energy Collective, there is no need anymore to respond to arguments from critics” as you tried to attribute to him. I am sure that he would love to respond to any new criticism of nuclear power if you could find one that has not already been debunked.
Karel Beckman says
Virgil, you don’t seem to be reading what was actually said, but you’re not the only one. My original response was to Dan Yurman who commented on the article merely by linking to a six-year old article he had once written on The Energy Collective. I pointed out that comments are meant to relate to the article in question and the arguments presented there.
Then Joris van Dorp wrote: “If you are going to publish blatant antinuclear scare scories on energypost.eu (the NRDC is a hard-core antinuclear propaganda outfit, which you should know by now), then I think people like Mr. Yurman who spend a lot of time and care in debunking such stories should be allowed to post links to where these stories have been debunked. Concerning the response you linked to, please read the comments to that response, and you will see that the response is misdirected and weak, and has itself been debunked. Lets stop giving to much air time to these antinuke scaremongers.”
In other words: no need to respond to the article, all arguments have been debunked anyway and anyone who dares to be critical of nuclear power is an antinuke scaremonger. If this is the level of debate you can manage, then sorry I fail to be impressed.
You write that “I am sure that he would love to respond to any new criticism of nuclear power if you could find one that has not already been debunked” – well, exactly my point: no argumentation, case closed.
I wonder why you even bother arguing when there is nothing to argue anymore?
Andrew Daniels says
How exactly could a “major accident at this plant could make the entire area of New York City uninhabitable”? That doesn’t jive with what we know about Chernobyl or any meltdown ever.
the IAEA does not say 4,000 cancer deaths from Chernobyl – the UNSCEAR estimates about 20-30 cancer deaths, with a HYPOTHETICAL potential limit of 4,000 cancer deaths.
It seems the author does not understand what they are talking about in regards to Indian Point on numerous points, saying 5 inches of water would cause a meltdown isn’t disingenous, its a blatantly manipulative mislead. How would a pipeline explosion cause a meltdown exactly? Facts are completely incorrect!
Whats going on on this site?
total nonsense!
Karel Beckman says
Andrew, I have always made it a rule in my life that when I encounter nonsense, I don’t spend time on it. If you think it’s nonsense what we publish, please go on to websites that you find more interesting.
As to a hypothetical potential limit of cancer deaths, this is what it says on Wikipedia: “The scientific consensus on the effects of the disaster has been developed by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). In peer-reviewed publications UNSCEAR has identified 49 immediate deaths from trauma, acute radiation poisoning, the helicopter crash and cases of thyroid cancer from an original group of about 6,000 cases of thyroid cancers in the affected area A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region.”
The article says: “The International Atomic Energy Agency’s estimate of the expected death toll from Chernobyl was 4,000.”
This seems to me carefully worded. If you don’t agree, explain, but don’t call it nonsense.
You write “how a major accident at Indian Point could make the entire area of New York City uninhabitable? That doesn’t jive what we know about Chernobyl or any meltdown ever.”
I don’t know on what planet you live, very funny statement.
For the record, I am not an opponent of nuclear power, but I do feel it’s good that there are people like these authors or other environmentalists who make us aware of the risks involved. That might well prevent accidents by keeping everybody on their toes.
Joris van Dorp, MSc says
Karel, while I think TEC and EnergyPost.EU are two of the best places to gain insight on the crucial subject of energy and society, I do not agree that the authors of this post are making us aware of the risks involved with nuclear power. The authors have not described the mechanism by which a pipeline rupture could cause a meltdown. They appear to be counting on the reader to imagine such a development by themselves.
This is a classic example of fear mongering. It is classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
If the authors were bona fide, they would have explained the following key issues:
1. What would be the physical characteristics of a plausible conflagration resulting from plausible pipeline burst. (e.g. the maximum explosive power, heat emission, size and shape of the fireball).
2. What plausible impact would this have on the power plant. Specifically what systems at the plant are likely to be disabled by the shock and/or heat from the fireball.
3. How would the disabling of any or all of the plausibly affected systems impact the ability of the power plant to enter into and maintain a condition of shutdown.
4. How does this accident scenario relate to accident scenario’s which have (for example) already been analysed by regulatory agencies such as the NRC.
If the authors had stated their reasoning more clearly, by providing their reasoning concerning the above points, then a productive discussion of risk (if any) could have developed.
But such as it is, this article appears to have only one purpose: the creation of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Don’t you agree?
Karel Beckman says
Joris, now I am reading real arguments. Fine. Do I agree? No, I don’t. The article is by no means only about the risk of a gas pipeline explosion. That is just one of the risks mentioned. I also believe it is not possible to foresee what could happen as a result of a gas pipeline explosion. Major disasters are usually the result of a combination of factors. You can’t take them in isolation. Other factors are mentioned in the article, such as the risk of flooding, and several knowledgeable people are quoted. I think what the article does is raise questions, alert people to new risks. Practical experience has shown that it is necessary for outsiders to question corporations and regulators about this. Of course this is not the end of the debate. But it’s a necessary part of it.
Joris van Dorp, MSc says
Concerning the flood risk mentioned by the authors, about which they quote David Lochbaum, I’ll briefly mention that the NRC has already determined that such a flood would *not* cause a meltdown (for the very simple reason that the affected systems are *not* safety critical.
David Lochbaum left out this NRC conclusion from his (antinuclear) article about the flood risk of Indian Point at the time. That is perhaps why these authors here have re-used Lochbaum’s misleading suggestion that a flood could cause a meltdown (which it cannot, according to the NRC).
I suppose this misunderstanding about the flood risk underlines once more why it is so important to urge authors to be careful about the information they are publishing. People who read this article (and not the comments) will be left with the impression that there is a serious flood risk at Indian Point. In fact, there is none, as the NRC has determined very clearly.
If David Lochbaum had been careful at the time to inform his readers that the possible flooding of Indian Point would *not* in fact cause a meltdown, then the authors of this article might not have repeated this falsehood in this article.
The mechanism of propagation of misunderstanding about nuclear is clear: someone apparently respectable like David Lochbaum writes a misleading article about flood risk. Other people read Lochbaum’s article, believe it to be accurate, and then repeat the false claim. And on, and on it goes.
Editors like yourself can do society a great service by demanding higher standards of evidence from authors. Yes, we need people to inform us about risk. No, we do not need authors who simply regurgitate falsehoods which do nothing but mislead us into extraordinary fear, uncertainty and doubt about non-existent risks.
Tilleul says
Well, at least we have an historical example of what can do a voluntary attack on a gas pipeline…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/02/opinion/the-farewell-dossier.html?_r=0
I’ll let the nuclear expert debate on whether a nuclear reactor can operate safely after a 3 kiloton explosion…
Andy English says
Since your headline was presented as a question, I will phrase my comment as an answer: Definitely Not…
ChrisB says
If this FUD piece is an accurate representation of TEC’s editorial team, the publisher has made a mistake in hiring them.
It’s the old-school environmentalists who are not mired in hyperbole that understand the big picture. Lovelock, Brand, etc.
Karel Beckman says
Chris, I hope you are not as ill-informed about energy issues as you are about TEC and Energy Post. The article was published on Energy Post, not TEC. It was not written by “TEC’s editorial team”, but by two freelance journalists, and is republication fro the website Tomdispatch.com. The publisher, that is me. Get your fact straight before you respond please.
Michael Mann says
This article starts with a misleading title, rolls into a poor description of the abomination known as Chernobyl which it links to Fukushima because both resulted in irrational fear which in turn prevents residents from returning. I further attempts to exacerbate that fear and bring it to New York with scary stories about inconsequential tritium and nearby explosive natural gas pipes which do not threaten Indian Point. Congratulations you’ve managed to bring the most devastating part of the a nuclear accident to New York, the fear, without the hassle of an actual accident. In every case so far the health effects of the fear of radiation has far exceeded health effects of radiation of any commercial nuclear accident. In answer to your initial question, NO there is no Fukushima on the Husdon.. just irresponsible authors looking to capitalize on fear.
Aloysius Fekete says
This article has listed several specifics. I haven’t done the due diligence on it so cannot vouch for it, but they appear to be well referenced and verifiable. It behoves anyone taking issue with this article to challenge it with an equal or greater level of specificity. Simply dismissing it as anti-nuclear propaganda and fear mongering is not credible.
I think nuclear could potentially be an excellent complement to renewables. But, the nuclear industry has a serious credibility problem. And permitting the siting of a 42 inch gas pipeline (anyone who measures their waist knows – that’s big!) within 105 feet of critical plant structures doesn’t help. 105 ft?! You cannot fit a baseball diamond in 105 ft (distance from home to second is 127 ft). And all this in proximity to one of the largest and arguably most important metropolitan areas in the world? Are these guys mad?!
Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns and there are known unkowns, but it is the unknown unknowns that he struggles with. It seems the nuclear industry is still struggling with known knowns.
Hans Hyde says
All,
I take issue with this article, not solely as it built a scare mongering narrative based on Fuskishima & 3-Mile Island, that have nothing to do with Indian Point, from the very beginning, but that it completely ignores the other four nuclear reactors in New York State and that New York State is importing electricity from Ontario which derives most of its electricity from nuclear power.
It would appear, by and whole, the majority of the argument for the closure of Indian Point is not so much on safety concerns of nuclear in general, but rather the quintessential and largely baseless NIMBY factor.
As it stands currently, NY has no tangible plan for generating its electric needs from within its borders and it will ramp up its import of natural gas fired turbine electricity from “out of state” just so it can NIMBY nat gas also.
There have always been two New Yorks, one that is the city, and one that is the remainder of the geographic boundary of the state itself. The other NY has always been at the disposal of “the city” right or wrong, but there is no urgency to close the upstate reactors. In fact, 2 of those 4 reactors want to close, but that will not be allowed because of “jobs” and “need of electric generation” which doesn’t seem to have the same level of “necessity” when it comes to Indian Point.
Hans Hyde says
I’ll add this article as it discusses multiple ‘conflicts’ occurring concurrently in New York, from coal to natural gas to nuclear.
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2016/02/cuomo_targets_power_plant_that_closed_after_110m_subsidy_by_national_grid_custom.html
I’ll also add, in Somerset, NY there is a coal fired plants that has been limping along for the past 10 years or so. There is a proposal to build a wind farm, 70 units with hub heights at 570 ft called Lighthouse Wind. To be honest, I am unaware there are any wind turbines in the US over 100m, although Ibedrola (who also owns 1 of the two upstate distribution utilities, the other the UK’s National Grid) is planning to build the first 140m turbines down in the Carolinas. There is existing transmission (same as the coal plant), but it is receiving much opposition and the American Bird Conservancy has listed it as #7 worst proposed or under construction wind farm in the US due to migratory bird concerns.
One other note on the article, are the authors unaware the nuclear event at Hiroshima was the result of the US dropping a weaponized nuclear device on the city to force the Japanese to concede WWII? ‘mini-Hiroshima’, what does that mean or imply, a towering mushroom cloud and the immediate area being vaporized if a meltdown occurred at Indian Point? Is there any evidence to support this type of event happening at a commercial US reactor???
Stephen Williams says
As I wrote on the Energy Post Facebook page:
Wow. Incredibly bad article, unless the whole point of it is science-free fear mongering. In that case, it has done a wonderful job. This is right up there with anti-vax articles. Lots of innuendo; no understanding of nuclear power and ionizing radiation.
It is particularly disheartening to see anti-science articles on a page called “Energy Post”. Just when the IPCC, IEA and most climate scientists are trying to get people to understand that we will fail to address climate change if we don’t ramp up nuclear power, Energy Post tries to scare people into being afraid of the very thing scientists are advocating.
I could write an entire article about all the things wrong with this article, so I’ll just pick a couple of the most egregious points in the article for now.
The authors wrote: “The International Atomic Energy Agency’s estimate of the expected death toll from Chernobyl was 4,000. A 2006 Greenpeace report challenged that figure, suggesting that 16,000 people had already died due to the accident and predicting another 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus still to come. A significant increase in thyroid cancers in children, a very rare disease for them, has been charted in the region – nearly 7,000 cases by 2005 in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Notice how the authors easily dismiss the IAEA’s figure of 4000 potential deaths in favor of a Greenpeace report’s claim of 140,000 potential deaths. Why? What are the scientific credentials of Greenpeace that would make a better report than the IAEA’s? We know that Greenpeace is anti-nuclear power. How could they be trusted to provide objective evidence.
I suppose the authors could try to claim some similar bias by the IAEA. But that should require a lot of proof, as the objective of the agency is “the safe, secure and peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology. Its key roles contribute to international peace and security, and to the world’s Millennium Goals for social, economic and environmental development.”
But, of course, there is also the Chernobyl Forum, with representatives from the IAEA, other United Nations organizations (FAO, UN-OCHA, UNDP, UNEP, UNSCEAR, WHO and The World Bank) and Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Over 100 scientists from numerous countries participated in the study of the results of the Chernobyl accident. The results are the same–up to 4000 premature deaths from exposure to ionizing radiation back in 1986.
So why on earth would the authors treat Greenpeace’s numbers as superior to the peer-reviewed work of over 100 scientists from across the globe? I can only guess it is to stir up fear in their readership.
The authors also wrote: “In both Chernobyl and Fukushima, areas around the devastated plants were made uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.”
This is simply not true. It is the type of fear mongering by the authors that made Fukushima “uninhabitable.” People have been very afraid, but they need not be. People living in Finland, for example, are exposed to more radiation that people living in Fukushima. Is Finland “uninhabitable”?
The authors make no attempt to delve into the facts. Some people continued to live in Chernobyl after the accident and they are still alive today. And because so many people left, the area is now a thriving wildlife refuge. It is certainly not uninhabitable.
Again, I could go on and on. I hope the Energy Post will consider NOT publishing such anti-science trash in the future. We need to educate people about nuclear power, not make up scare stories.
Not a single human being has died in the U.S. due to a civilian nuclear power accident. World wide, over the past 40 years, less then 100 people have died directly as a result of civilian nuclear accidents, and perhaps up to 4000 will die prematurely due to the Chernobyl accident and zero deaths from Fukushima.
STOP THE FEAR MONGERING. Help the IPCC, IEA and climate scientists get the word out. We need nuclear power (in addition to renewables) if we are to succeed at stemming climate change).