Indian Point's license renewal battle will take plenty of resources and time

Indian Point's license renewal battle will take plenty of resources and time
By GREG CLARYTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: July 29, 2007)
BUCHANAN -Indian Point's license renewal battle will likely not suffer from lack of troops or expert field generals - on either side.
The clock began ticking Wednesday on a 60-day period for the public to raise and substantiate environmental and safety concerns at the nuclear plants, but whether Indian Point will be granted a 20-year extension to produce electricity until 2035 won't be decided for nearly three years.
Getting two licenses renewed - Indian Point 2's expires in 2013 and Indian Point 3's in 2015 - will cost Entergy Nuclear between $10 million and $20 million per reactor and will require some pretty deep pockets from those who line up to stop the renewal.
The opposition has been mobilizing since the voluminous application was first posted on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Web site. The leaders know there isn't much time to waste.
"We have already retained the services of Diane Curran, a nationally recognized attorney on nuclear regulatory issues who was successful in winning a case in California," said Lisa Rainwater, policy director for Riverkeeper, an environmental group that is working to close the nuclear complex. "We have identified our contentions and our experts and we will in fact be ready within the next 60 days to submit our petition."
Rainwater said Riverkeeper is expecting the renewals to take five years with legal challenges should the renewals be approved. Of 48 renewal applications accepted, none has been denied.
The 60-day period may seem to pass too quickly for those anti-nuclear activist organizations stocked primarily with volunteers.
Getting a handle on the details involved in such a highly technical process is a full-time job for many people on both sides of the issue, and average Joes may end up having to rely on the better organized and better funded.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan has already heard from a resident requesting more time to prepare, citing the size and complexity of the application. That request was not granted.
"Folks knew this was coming," Sheehan said. "The application's been posted since it was delivered."
Entergy won't lack for expertise in pushing its application. The man behind its fleet of 12 nuclear-plant renewal efforts has already supervised two successful extensions and has three others in various stages of development.
Though each application and reactor is unique, the company is using whatever resources and expertise it can share across the entire company.
"As far as doing the technical and environmental reviews, we use a fleet approach," said Garry Young, Entergy Nuclear's top license renewal official. "We have a team of people that does all our plants."
Young said Indian Point will have between 20 and 30 people working on its two license renewals, not including those workers with specific operational roles who will be brought in to help in their areas.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said last week he was still sorting out what his options were and hadn't made a decision on what role his office would play.
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently signed on as a supporter of Westchester County's federal lawsuit to tighten the relicensing criteria and include such elements as emergency planning, but his office did not respond to a reporter asking if Cuomo would intervene in the renewal process as currently constituted.
Sheehan said a strategy the agency has seen in some other renewal applications is for a person or party to petition the agency to join with others that have similar contentions to avoid being kept out of the proceedings.
He said by the end of September it will be clear what safety and environmental issues will be considered and a few months after, the agency will make a final determination about what exactly will be reviewed.
A final decision on the renewal for both plants is due by the summer of 2010.
Reach Greg Clary at 914-696-8566 or gclary@lohud.com.

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Did somebody take a poll, and find out people don't want Indian Point relicensed? If it happened, could you provide some web links to it? If it did not happen, could you maybe stop referring to it?
Posted by: VP_VP on Sun Jul 29, 2007 4:22 pm

Hey everybody. V.P. must be caught in some sort of time warp. He's repeating almost the same exact post that he offered on JUN 26 2007 7:12am . I guess he finally ran out of anything new to say. His brain must have suffered a meltdown . Really short term memory. That's what happens when you live so close to Indian Point. Check it out for yourself, what a phony. Oh and Howard, you got me all wrong. I don't hates ya' I loves ya! PLUTONIUM IS FOREVER!Posted by: ball on Sun Jul 29, 2007 4:21 pm

Of course it's not ethical to exploit the emotional weaknesses of non-rational bloggers, unless they happen to be involved in a vested campaign to spread non-truth. The Ball identity has seemed content to stalk the VP ID, and point out its inconsistencies. As such, I regard that as mere confusion.... not malicious per se, even though using malicious language, and I will therefore not respond in kind. I re-iterate that the entire talking heads Indian Point issue is a Fenton Communications/Riverkeeper creation, to boost Riverkeeper donations, and that aside from the 2000 names on the IPSEC email list, the public at large would prefer the entire issue to go away , leaving their electrical supply, and electricity payment rates unchanged. I chide Gannett and TJN for stoking dissent here, and instructing the discontented on just how to harrass NRC. However, not being hired as an NRC consultant, It's no skin off my nose if TJN even puts out "Suggested complaints for an NRC hearing application", and puts up a $250 prize for the most compelling complaint. It's their newspaper. It's their reputation. It's their code of journalistic ethics, and it would be their own abrogation of that code. I would not dwell on it. (Maybe). And in the case of those who flail about so irrationally that they pass out....we offer smelling salts.... a smidge of ammonia in a bottle, whiffed lightly under the nose to wake you up. remember: Don't go peeing in your pants! AMMONIA SMELLS FOREVER
Posted by: VP_VP on Sun Jul 29, 2007 1:39 pm

OF COURSE NONE OF THESE POLLS ATTEST TO THE FACT THAT 61% OF THE PEOPLE DO NOT WANT THE NRC TO RE-LICENSE INDIAN POINT AND 31% DO. 61% DO NOT. The 3 faces of HOWARD, VP, RSVP. Just like a 3 headed dragon ,all one in the the same. Just like INDIAN POINT, ENTERGY AND BURSTON MARSTELLER, one in the same. If you check back you'll see Howard pretending he doesn't have ties to IP. Now he admits to attending a rally in 2002. I guess being a liar is a pro nuke requirement. Gee V P , are you sure you were counting heads and not busy giving it? Were your sweethearts Steets and Fred Docimo ( hi Freddy) standing at attention? OR ARN'T YOU THE TYPE WHO KISSES AND TELLS?? " TERROR IS A WANING CONCERN." That statement is almost as damaging as Indian Point! I almost spit out my coffee when I read THAT! Have you abandoned the issue ? Better alert George Bush. I'd hate to think that Americans were loosing their lives over something silly, like oil. I pray Osama didn't read that statement. Honestly do we need any more reasons to ignore this fool? Yes mistakes do happen and repairs are made but when you deal with a substance that causes CANCER and expires in 2000 years you should at least do everything possible to vanquish the public's fears. That's why an independent examination of the entire plant is a must. Maybe they have nothing to hide. Saddam refused inspections. That was his mistake and Indian Points. How do we know what's going on inside that place? Do we want to become another Bhopal, or Chernobyl ?? I'll be back soon with some sites you can Google that contain REAL horror pictures. With ghost towns, and physical monstrosities and cancer ridden victims . Maybe not reliable unbiased sites like nuclear butterfly but small seldom heard of sites like the B.B.C. WARNING these pictures are not suitable for small children and the faint hearted. As for you pee-wee, or pee-pee or pepe Run out and fetch me six feet of stanchion cleaner....PRONTO! YOUR DISMISSED, MAGGOT! PLUTONIUM IS FOREVER!
Posted by: ball on Sun Jul 29, 2007 12:46 pm

Hi Greg An epic battle.....33% of the people, attacking the 67% majority. Laying at the center of opposers' contentions about Westchester's only baseload electrical provider , is a negative PR myth, nurtured and elaborated for decades. This myth, which is proven wrong in fact each and every day, was elaborated to its maximum outreach by the Riverkeeper advertising blitz of 2001-2002. In concert with the multibillion dollar Fenton Communications empire, celebrity RFK jr went so far as to commission a movie, a pure fright movie, designed to spread fear of the unlikely, and to make the impossible seem, in cartoon form, to perhaps be remotely possible. During that time the local Richard French RNN media mini-empire was stridently against Indian Point, and the local Gannett outlet was saddled with an environmental beat reporter, who was in fact, covertly a member of several opposer organizations, and who skewed facts wildly, until his demise. To those who were only reading media throughout all this, it might have seemed as if a huge political wave had arisen, against Indian Point. However, several telling incidents belie this characterization. A rally was held in 2002, in Peekskill by opposers, and a counter rally was arranged that same afternoon by pro-Indian Point supporters. I attended, and I made a point of taking a personal headcount of both sides. I counted about 200 antis and about 2500 pros. This was later reported by media as "about an equal number on both sides". For whatever reason, those media people covering the event had skewed their own perceptions of it, and suppressed the fact of deep regional and local support for the plant. The second telling incident was the battle of the petitions. A media executive in Croton began a "Close Indian Point" petition in late 2001, and many anti organizations took up this cause , hoping to demonstrate the reality of public opposition to the plant. Volunteers took to the streets, and walked store by store down Main street in dozens of towns, collecting signatures. Teams camped out at Grand Central Station, and all the Metro North commuter stations, gathering signatures. A website was begun, where computer users could sign up remotely. This went on for weeks, and in the end, produced some 8000 signatures. I myself was involved in gathering support for a counter petition, which was hurriedly patched together well after the anti petition campaign was in full swing. Even though we had started about 6 weeks after the antis, our petition very quickly (and rather easily) amassed 13,000 signatures. Amazingly, with all the big guns lined up on the side of the fear pogrom, the public at large did not buy in. Make no mistake, this was only months after Entergy had bought Indian Point, and they were at that time very naive about local politics. The Entergy top level management had not a clue about what to do. Plant supporters began a true grassroots organization, individual by individual, and got those 13,000 signatures without Burston Marsteller being anywhere in the picture. I consider the 8000 plus the 13,000 to be a kind of social barometer, a core of citizenry, 21,000 strong, willing to publicly commit to the issue, either way. It is also telling to me that the numerical breakdown of 13,000 divided by 21,000 comes to about 61%. Using that 61% as a starting point, we may now bring in the Manhattanville poll, and the Bisconti poll. The Bisconti poll was done nationally, and queried residents living within 10 miles of nuclear plants. 70% of those nearsiders, or downwinders, declared their lack of any concern with the plants. The Manhattanville poll randomly queried Westchester residents, and once again got a figure of 67% who either supported the plant, or at least had no opinion in the matter. 61.....70.....67. Burston Marsteller no doubt often lies. Media types at the rally in 2002 very definitely lied. Alex Matthiessen has publicly admitted that he lied. (on his resume). But the widely gathered set of numbers, collected by widely differing agencies, at widely different times, do not lie. The public does not wish to lose Indian Point. The public is not afraid of Indian Point, and considers its positive contributions far outweigh any negatives. The public needs Indian Point, to maintain the hard won local lifestyle, a lifestyle more comfortable that that in almost any other comparable region. Is it ethical for 33% of the populace to politically engineer 67% of the population out of a dearly needed resource? Perhaps..... in an emergency, or in dire need. So allow me to search for the emergency. (It is real, real hard to find.) Indian Point's guard force is the third largest police force in the area, after Yonkers and the Westchester county police. The national guard and the State Police are onsite 24-7, the Buchanan Police are on hand outside the plant, the place has been made into a highly defensible military fort, and the Coast Guard defends the river side, and does air flyovers. No second 9-11 has happened in the US, and none of the terror attacks overseas has ever targeted a power plant. Airports are secured, cockpit doors are reinforced, pilots are armed, and air marshals covertly ride in the planes. FBI stings have repeatedly entrapped domestic terror-talk instigators, and have made terror talk very unlikely at US mosques. Terror is a waning concern, and the public has abandoned the issue, with regard to Indian Point. The Hudson estuary is overrun with non native species and with the bass hatched by the Indian Point hatchery, but even so shad have stabilized at a steady population and are not declining. The nature of fish biogenesis, is to lay billions of eggs, in the expectation that only a few thousands will survive and breed. The forces which reduce eggs, and adolescent fry, are very diverse, and almost entirely natural. Other species prey on immature fish. Other species eat spawned fisheggs. Zebra mussels, an invasive species, (here only about 10 years) filter the entire mass of the estuary's water once every 1.5 days, winning the champion's crown as the new top biota in the Hudson food chain. In this filtration, they feed on microscopic and immature biota in a massive way, sterilizing the estuary of most of its life, which becomes food for the zebra mussel conquest. Within this vast feeding, Indian Point (and a dozen other local riverside plants) use river water as cooling water. Within this cooling water flow, despite elaborate fish diversion machinery, to prevent any mature fish being drawn in, no doubt some number of immature individuals are killed. The size of this manmade kill is orders of magnitude less than any simultaneous natural kills, as described above. With this situation happening on a constant basis, Riverkeeper has crowed (describing their own accomplishments) that fish have rebounded in the Hudson.... and they have. Therefore any intervenor-speak from Riverkeeper about river fish populations, is strictly tongue in cheek, concocted as a political argument against Indian Point. Every nuclear plant adds tritium to the environment. Tritium occurs naturally, and is harmless. Archaic tritium in the world's oceans was at a level of 0.3 bequerel per liter, pre 1945. This figure has increased to about 10 bequerel per liter today, worldwide. Were every nuclear plant simultaneously closed, in 12.5 years the figure will have fallen to 5 bq/L, and in 75 years, back to archaic levels once again. The contained, subterranean tritium below Indian Point is not increasing tritium levels in the Hudson Estuary beyond those levels permitted by NRC, and is locally undetectable by current technologies. Repeated studies of tritiated water have found it to be not harmful, even when ingested pure. (A woman worker at a chemical plant broke a vial of pure tritium, and accidentally breathed it in. She was hospitalized, and treated by drinking large amounts of pure water, and released. Followed up for years, she is in good health). Tritium is used in rifle sights, watch dials, and exit signs, and although mildly radioactive, it gives off only alpha particles, which cannot penetrate human skin, and travel only about 1/100 of an inch. Tritium is not a concern in a real sense. If mentioned, it is mentioned only as an argumentation point. Positional talk about operating records "repeat failures" , etc., are a concocted faux reality, produced by misreading the normal maintenance activities at Indian Point as a series of mock calamities. Power plants have parts which wear out, fail, and are routinely replaced. Every part in Indian Point is redundantly backed up by a second line of duplicate parts, thus rendering normal "failures" into non-failures, when one is considering the safety of the process, and the safety of the public. Indian Point is inspected on a constant basis by NRC, and has a greater online capacity factor than 99% of America's power plants. (of all types) The scenario concocted at Riverkeeper's behest by Edwin Lyman of UCS, utilized discredited, obsolete assumptions and mathematics, assumptions and math expressly rejected and currently forbidden for public use, assumptions and math long superseded by more accurate computations, to declare, tongue in cheek, that 44,000 people could die from an Indian Point accident. Lyman knew exactly why his published figures were wrong, but took the low road, and publicized them nonetheless, in a major instance of "Politics trumps Ethics", no doubt internally rationalizing his scientific ethical lapse, by telling himself anything was fair in love, war, and antinuclear activism. The public, though, instinctively sensed his inflation and rejected it, partially , no doubt, because "Order of Magnitude" calculations never provide an exact figure (like 44,000), and a true calculation would have only been able to say "Between 40,000 and 50,000, with an error margin of 6000". It is obvious to all, that Lyman sold his soul, and lied, to forward the campaign. If you can't trust Union of Concerned Scientists, who can you trust? A respected figure of note (Dr. Hershel Specter--- who invented the math) wrote in a New York Times article, that his mortality figure for the same event, was 3 deaths, plus or minus two deaths. Therefore do not let public policy be determined with a fantasy scenario in mind, at the wishes of at most, 33% of the public. If we do allow cartoons and lies to run 67% of the people out of town, and thus destroy our region, the calamitous result will be far worse than any Edwin Lyman cartoon, and we will deserve exactly what happens to us afterwards.Posted by:
VP_VP on Sun Jul 29, 2007 5:28 am
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Application timeline
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's tentative schedule for Indian Point's license renewal application:
- Overview meeting - June 27
- Application accepted - July 25
- Public meetings on environmental issues - Sept. 19
- Environmental scoping ends - Oct. 12
- Draft environmental impact statement due - July 25, 2008
- Public meeting on draft environmental impact statement - September 2008
- Tentative report on safety evaluation - September 2008
- End of comment period on draft environmental statement - Oct. 20, 2008
- Outside advisory committee on reactor safeguards discusses application - October 2008- Final safety evaluation - March 2009
- Final environmental impact statement - April 2009
- Full advisory committee on reactor safeguards - May 2009
- Without hearing - agency decision expected in July 2009.
- With hearings, the five-member NRC is expected to render a decision by June 2010.