Local officials upset about uranium 235 at Indian Point

Local officials upset about uranium 235 at Indian Point
By GREG CLARYTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: July 25, 2007)
WHITE PLAINS -Local emergency officials are angry that they were not told that federal regulators will require Indian Point to verify that a tiny quantity of weapons-grade uranium 235 is properly stored and documented at the nuclear plant.
"I'm more than a little upset," said Anthony Sutton, Westchester County's commissioner of emergency services. "It's a little disconcerting to open the newspaper (yesterday) morning and read this and then find out that they briefed the congressional delegation on (Friday)."
Sutton said he was writing a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission noting his dissatisfaction with the agency for not sharing with the counties information like this when local emergency officials would be the first responders in the event of an emergency.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency notified only the congressional offices representing the district because NRC officials considered the information of a sensitive nature.
"There's a security component to this because it involves special nuclear material," Sheehan said of the uranium 235, an unstable radioactive isotope that has been used in much larger quantities to make bombs. "Certainly we're not trying to deprive the counties of any essential information regarding Indian Point. We've gone to great lengths to keep them in the loop on significant developments there."
The agency told Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns and operates Indian Point, that the company needed to open a stainless steel box that is bolted shut and expected to house 32 broken pieces of old mechanisms used by the plant's previous owners to check the power levels of the nuclear reactor.
The pieces are about 2 to 3 feet long, said Entergy spokesman Jim Steets, and contain 8/10,000s of a gram of uranium 235 each. Steets said the company is confident the rods are inside the container, located in the spent fuel pool of Indian Point 3.
Because of the small amount of uranium 235 and the complex process of opening the container, the company opted to check the contents during its annual inspection next month.
"On a scale of safety significance, this is near zero," Steets said.
Entergy officials said they were not aware that the container - stored since 1988-89 - needed to be inspected annually.
The NRC has not cited Indian Point on this issue and Sheehan said the agency would wait until the container is opened next month before deciding on possible enforcement. Even if the pieces are missing, Sheehan said, it would constitute the lowest severity enforcement on the agency's scale.
Dan Greeley, Rockland County's top emergency official for Indian Point, sat in on a 90-minute conference call yesterday between the counties and the NRC and was also upset about not being told of the latest development.
"If this stuff is not there, they might as well just bury themselves at sea," Greeley said of Indian Point. "It would be easier to be eaten by sharks. But my bigger question is what are they going to find when they turn the next stone over?"
Attempts to reach emergency and elected officials from Putnam and Orange counties late yesterday were unsuccessful.
Reach Greg Clary at gclary@lohud.com or 914-696-8566.

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Dear "Ball" , I hate to always have to address your childish non-issues, while the true issue is whether a Gannett outlet is catering to hype cooked up by witless, visionless politicians needing the antinuke email lists of a couple of thousand names to keep them in office...... and the issue is whether Gannett, and the TJN editorial board have become too insular, too cozy with White Plains thinking, too dependent on newsless dissemination of anti-nuke boilerplate, and thus become more retellers of Democratic party myths, than in touch with on-the-ground events. ("Events"...as in "News"..... not Lowey press blurbs) But now on to your non-issues. As far as I am aware, Burston Marsteller doesn't write any blog comments. All they put together are some pretty adverts and some artistic brochures at the corporate level. They have no connection whatsoever with either Entergy's employee grassroots organization, the many local and vocal supporters of Indian Point in Northwest Westchester, or with the scads of independent citizens attempting to break the hysteria chokehold a few agitators have on local media. So you can stop squealing irrelevantly about Burston Marsteller, they are in fact, nowhere to be found. Now on to why I post here. I hate unresearched misleading hysterical bullcrap that is aimed cluelessly at making my existence as a homeowner unsustainable here. Take away Indian Point, and I guarantee a tripling of whatever your current electrical rates are. Of course if you are a dependent minor, that's of no concern to you. Take away Indian Point, and Linda Puglisi has stated that Cortlandt taxes would rise by 100%. You and I both know that every other municipality around here would kick their rates up in concert with Cortlandt. Take away Indian Point, and the local avalanche of power use by new development, Peekskill, White Plains, route 6 businesses, the JV mall, etc, Yonkers, and NYC would cause recurrent brownouts and blackouts, reducing business viability, losing jobs, and tipping the 4 county region over the edge into sprawl-blight.... the suburban povertization evidenced by abandoned malls, decaying unbought housing stock, foreign illegal minority influx, squatting, crime, gangs and decay. (Check out Spring Valley if you are wondering what I'm talking about.... or go visit Prince George's county in Maryland, or even Yonkers, sad to say). You cannot afford NOT to have Indian Point. And as far as "gibberish", please tell us all just what a "nuclear yoke" is. The concept of a "nuclear yoke" is a sort of cult-talk, junk sloganism, sort of like "Ammonia is Forever", or whatever your other meaningless puerile yelp is. (That so called yoke is upholding every lifestyle within 150 miles, and paying a billion dollars in taxes, so you and I don't have to make up the shortfall when its gone.) The fact that NRC asks Entergy to do a nuclear materials inventory update, is a trivial interchange between regulator and owner. It is NOT news. Nor has Kashiwazaki plant in Japan any lesson to teach America, except the lesson that the nuke plant was the strongest building in Kashiwazaki prefecture, and survived better than any other comparable structure. Yet we find TJN mewling "could it happen here?" Could WHAT happen here? An Earthquake? Sure it can. And if it does, Indian Point will stand tall, while the TJN building falls on its derrier. If it DOES happen here, just don't get caught in Hartsdale, White Plains, Scarsdale, Bronxville, or west Mount Vernon, because the 110-year-old mortarless unmaintained Kensico dam will come tumbling down, and a 300 foot high tsunami will zoom down the Bronx River valley at about 400 miles per hour, and wash Gannett's building (or what remains of it) up onto Riker's Island about 20 minutes later. But they aren't worried about THAT. They just worry if a teacup of radioactive orange juice might tip over, and maybe irritate a cockroach or two on the Kashiwazaki cafeteria floor. It's myopic agitprop-inspired bullcrap. When the Westchester mall takes a Richter 7 quake hit, and 10,000 shoppers are buried alive, what good is Nita Lowey's self serving antinuke "outrage" then? No country has nuclear power , or indeed any other kind of power, without incident. Each and every power plant has about 500 to 1500 workers, hundreds of whom are maintenance specialists hired to fix broken stuff. Stuff breaks all the time, everywhere, and especially in high energy factories like power plants. Its not news, and its of no concern to the customer. However, local pols have no comparable high profile issue, and depend on leveraging Indian Point as a boost for their own visibility, and so they drill down into internal IPEC trivia, and exclaim "Oh dear--- I am Sooooo Outraaaaged!" Its electoral histrionics, and unfortunately, it is 180 degrees counter to the wishes of the local populace, and to the needs of the local taxpayer. Gannett should definitely not become its purveyor, even on a slow day. So Who is going to alert everyone to all this? Answer: I am.
Posted by: VP_VP on Wed Jul 25, 2007 1:16 pm

Anyone who reads the Journal News can see with their own eyes that Playland does not get a free ride. If they can't do the job right, shut them down. I'm not sure if I'm all for shutting down Indian Point just yet. Several foreign countries have nuclear power without incident, why can't we? Perhaps if Entergy spent more time and effort making sure IP really was safe and secure they could spend less time playing kill the messenger in regards to so many unflattering newspaper stories. Just ask yourself, if Entergy is doing such a good job why would they spend millions of dollars to hire the public relations firm of Burston- Marsteller to spin their dirty laundry clean? Ever wonder why there are so many vocal pro Entergy supporters? ( After all, being a pro Entergy supporter is kind of like reading the collected works of Charles Dickens and coming to the conclusion that Uriah Heep was his greatest protagonist.) Please go to Google and put in Alter Net : How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups. It might make some sense out of all the gibberish our friend VP is spewing. I sincerely hope my comments and observations are reaching more than just the usual collection of pro Entergy/nuclear power flacks. Not being part of any organization pro or con the only feedback I get is right at this sight. I hope we don't spend another twenty years under Energies nuclear yoke. No matter how hard you try, you'll never convince a snake to take a walk.
Posted by: ball on Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:46 am

Today's Episode Of:..... "One Nuke to Bash" As in all soap operas, each and every actor gets to pose, and mouth a few lines on the pages of Gannett, changing nothing, assisting nobody, making no one either more or less safe in any way, but Gannett will have the honor of having featured each one, and allowed them to publicly pose....And of course, as I pointed out yesterday, to truly have an activist press blitz, one needs to have a story yesterday, a story today, and a story tomorrow, and maybe a feature on Sunday, all about minor trivialities at Indian Point. Then maybe next Tuesday, a feature recapping all of this week's stories. That's how agenda PR works, basically. This particular episode is very much like the time Geraldo Rivera had a big raveup about opening Al Capone's safe in primetime. (It was empty). Bummer, Geraldo. In his case, it looks like no news at all was the big news, huh? Hey!....In this case too, actually! Now....Let me see how those exciting rods could have left the box, the pool, and disappeared like scarface's big stash. First, A diver would have to suit up, and swim among hot uranium fuel rods, all without anybody noticing, and no motion detectors going off. Then he would have to handle the box, absorbing whatever zoomies he would get while opening it. Then he would obviously put the 32 rods in a Walmart's bag, ignoring the radiation burns beginning to appear on his hands, and just simply walk out through all the radiation-sensing portals , none of which would catch a single alpha particle, clanking, and dripping, and glowing ever-so-slightly, until he could get the rods out to the Peekskill farmer's market, where he would sell them as "souvenier glow-sticks". Makes sense to me.....Right? Oh well, you gotta have "nuke" stories each day, right? Forget about checking the safety devices in Playland, or the level of supervision on the rides. That's not worth any reportage is it? Its just a Westchester County-run slaughter house that kills young people with sickening regularity, having killed and injured many more folks than the entire American Commercial Nuclear industry in all of its history. But it's owned by our Gannett buddy Andy Spano, and we gotta cut him some slack, or he won't grant us any more phone interviews, right? Better to Bash the Nuke. Gets us in with the local bigwigs, and we all look good. Its tough being an activist newspaper. There's so much you have to leave out!
Posted by: VP_VP on Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:05 am