Indian Point

It is no secret that Indian Point, the nuclear power plant in Buchanan, NY is located in a bad place, namely a county of one million people and in the northern region of a 20+ million person metropolitan area. It is no secret that it is slowly leaking radioactive water into the environment. It is also no secret that many people want it closed. Since I have grown attached to being alive, I'd be just fine with the thing gone, all things being equal. However, I'm a little spoiled. You see, I like having electricity.

Among the most vocal critics of our poor exit strategy in Iraq are people who have no exit strategy for alternative energy sources to Indian Point, which makes it's closure, in my view, a pipe dream. I asked an advocate today what Plan B would be for energy, and he admitted that there really isn't a magic bullet, which I suppose is the polite way of shrugging his shoulders. I'm all for conservation, reducing waste, consumption, and streamlining distribution. However, those things don't produce a watt of juice to power my computers, copiers, fax, or phone. We could all have airtight houses with R-120 insulation ratings and furnaces that are so efficient that they recycle newspaper into Jello, but the fact remains that electrical use will always rise due to technology, not fall.

If you are uncomfortable with being within 50 miles of nuclear fission I can relate. It is one town away from me. But if you want to remove our power source and have no other feasible means of producing clean energy, I think you'll lose my support.

Comments

[Dave]

RFK Jr. is an idiot who should be consigned to the same fate as his father. His Riverkeeper initiative is flawed in its assumptions, devoid of alternatives, and contradicts US interests.

He should be shot, along with the rest of the antinuclear agitators.

As for "radioactive water": there is no such thing; only elements can be radioactive. The water used in nuclear power plants is used as coolant and is never in contact with radioactive waste.

There is some concern, probably legitimate, about waters warmer in temperature than the rivers into which they are poured, harming the riparian ecosystem. But that hardly seems reason to shut down nuclear power, any more so than the specter of Chernobyl.

If Chernobyl were sufficient reason alone to eliminate nuclear power, as the enviornmentalist tree huggers would have it, then it should follow that, at the instance of the first car to blow up (say, a Ford Pinto), no more cars should have ever been made.

Now, of course, there would be some good to come out of a ban on cars: people would be forced to live in cities. But it is hardly my place to tell people where they should live, or whether they should own a car. Similarly, enviros have no place telling Americans that they need to rely on fossile fuels.

Enviros are abject idiots.

[tom faranda]

Indian Point supplies 7% of the power to NY State

[Andrew]

Does Dave mean to suggest that the future stadium in Washington be named after RFK, Jr.? :) On a more serious note, this issue is a perfect illustration of the American people's "cognitive dissonance" on the energy issue: They are vaguely aware that current consumption levels are having negative consequences on the environment, but they refuse to bear the cost of cleaning up the mess created, whether smog or radioactive waste. "Make the big corporations pay!" Hence the preference for silly, arbitrary regulations such as "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" standards (an abomination), rather than using tax policy to create the proper market incentives to conserve without artificially constraining consumer choice. As Rush Limbaugh notes, those environmentalists who grab the headlines are in fact closet Marxists who miss the U.S.S.R. Some of us, however, are actually pro-free enterprise.

[Harry Springer]

The presence of Indian Point accounts for the current pristine eco-situation on the Hudson. IP gave the $12 million stipend which changed Riverkeeper in 1981 from a fisherman's club, to an effective cleanup force (at least while Mr. Cronin was in charge). Now Entergy steps up to remediate Con Ed's micro leak (do you realize "pico" is one millionth part of one millionth?- the so called leak is a merest dribble).

Had the Neo-Riverkeeper celebrities succeeded in shuttng IP in 2001, Spano would be in charge of fixing the leak (a shudder of horror is appropriate here)

So, in direct logical reduction, Entergy stands as an environmental godsend to the Hudson (not to mention all the cheap, clean electricity, and the 8 billion fish IP hatched in their fish-farm).

Face it, its good for you.
Learn to give credit where credit's due.
Don't be a knee-jerk hotbutton slave.
Think for yourself for once.

[scott]

Dave you are a fool. You actually advocate the killing of someone because they disagree with your point of view? You dont deserve to call yourself an American...oops, maybe you are not, maybe you are Iranian.

Ever seen the children who 'survived' Chernobyl Dave? Blind, limbless, riddled with tumors, what sort of life do they have? One Chernobyl= one Chernobyl too many.

Friday March 16th, BUCHANAN — Radioactive water moving toward the Hudson River may be traveling along tiny cracks in the bedrock created decades ago by explosive charges used during a construction project, Indian Point engineers and federal regulators say. Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Entergy acknowledged that the isotope tritium probably was reaching the Hudson River.

Hmm, good science on your part Dave,

[antiscott]

Scott mentions the fictional Chernobyl babies.

They do not exist, scott.

31 workers died fighting the Chernobyl fire.
500 young people in Belorus had thyroid cancer since
(they might have had it anyway--records were not kept before)
All were cured.

Zero birth defects, zero cases of cancer,
people have moved back in to pripyat as squatters , with no nbad effect,
and enviro-activist TOURS of the Chernobyl area are a hot item these days.

It was a real accident
Its results are highly fictionalized

Scott cannot tell the difference.