Indian Point’s two reactors that continue to function were built in 1974 and 1976, which means that they are old, hence prone to cracks, leaks, fissures, wear, deterioration, and the like. It also means that they were built to less stringent safety specifications than newer reactors.
At one time Indian Point had three functional reactors. In an October 2001 article (entitled America’s Terrorist Nuclear Threat to Itself) long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote, “Indeed, Indian Point Unit One was shut because activists warned that its lack of an emergency core cooling system made it an unacceptable risk. The government ultimately agreed.”
In 2006 the NRC fined Entergy Corporation, the owners and operators of Indian Point, $130,000 for problems associated with its system designed to warn nearby residents to evacuate in the event of a nuclear crisis.
Until they finally began moving them to dry casks in January of this year, Indian Point had 1500 tons of spent fuel rods stored in temporary pools. These pools have been leaking tritium and strontium-90 (both highly toxic substances) into the groundwater and the Hudson River since 2005 and are demonstrably vulnerable to sabotage or attack. And as Wasserman elucidates in the previously cited article, these pools (not to mention the reactor cores) are horrific accidents waiting to happen:
“Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson.”
Indian Point Energy Center manifests nearly all that is inane and insane about humans shattering atomic nuclei and hubristically believing we can play with the fires of hell without getting burned…..
Yet there’s at least a “little” Eichmann in all of us as we faithfully participate in our ecocidal “American Way of Life.” So what do we care about a little radiation here or a few meltdowns there?
Remember, “Killing is [our] business…..and business is good!” Just ask a member of that species that will be extinct in about 15 minutes….
Jason Miller is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor.
For those of you refusing to bow at the altar of Thanatos, click on the links below to find out what you can do to help IPSEC shut down Indian Point:
http://www.remyc.com/rockthereactors/gameplan.html
http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaign_indianpoint.php
http://greennuclearbutterfly.blogspot.com/
http://www.petitiononline.com/cipn2002/petition.html
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