BY PAUL DERIENZO | A fire that knocked out one of two reactors at the Indian Point plant over Mother’s Day weekend caused oil and fire-retardant foam to spill into the Hudson River. The oily sheen was observed by local fishermen and activists with Hudson Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog group, which posted video of the slick’s deceptively beautiful rainbow on its Web site.
The nuclear plant in Buchanan, N.Y., about 40 miles north of the city, usually provides 2,000 megawatts of electrical power for the city and Westchester County.
The fire began at a transformer roughly 300 feet from the reactor building, and the reactors were not directly affected. Witnesses reported hearing a loud blast, then seeing a huge black ball of smoke rising over the plant, the latter which was also documented on video. Alarms were heard throughout the town and an ominous voice announced, “This is not a drill” from surrounding loudspeakers. Fire trucks rushed in from surrounding communities.
The plant’s owner, Entergy, tweeted, “Indian Point is in safe, stable condition following transformer fire. No danger to community or employees at any time.”
The company said the incident at the plant fell into its lowest of four emergency levels. However, the fire was difficult to fight and the transformer reignited after fire crews had extinguished the initial blaze.
“The history of fire safety at Indian Point is one of mistakes, illegality and failure by both Entergy and the N.R.C.,” said Paul Gallay, a spokesperson for Riverkeeper. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversees and licenses nuclear power plants.
At least one of the Indian Point power plants has operated past its original 40-year license period and has had its license temporarily extended. A similar aging plant at Oyster Creek, N.J., about 100 south of New York City on the Jersey Shore, has had its licensed extended, but after public outcry an agreement was made to shut the plant by 2019.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has long pressed for a shutdown of Indian Point and appeared there on the Saturday night of the fire and again the next day. He said there was no threat from the fire to surrounding communities, but he said it was “inherently problematic” to have a nuclear power plant near the nation’s most densely populated region.
“This was a relatively minor situation,” the governor said, “but when you’re talking about a nuclear power plant, there are no minor situations.”
The state Department of Environmental Conservation said “the verdict is not really in yet” on how much escaped oil was in the river. The oil tank that served the transformer that exploded held 20,000 gallons, but just 900 gallons were found after the fire was put out. According to the state official, most “went up in smoke” or was collected by cleanup crews.
The transformer explosion was the third transformer failure at Indian Point in eight years. In 2000 a more serious “stage 2” event occurred when a pipe ruptured, spilling 20,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson. In 2007, after another fire, The New Times reported the plant’s “history of transformer problems.” And in 2010 Energy paid the state a $1.2 million fine after a transformer explosion dumped thousands of gallons of PCB-contaminated oil into the river. In the same year, 600,000 gallons of radioactive steam was released into the atmosphere when a valve was left open in error.
During peak summer months, Indian Point provides about 15 percent of the electricity used by New York City. Its two reactors have been operating since the 1970s. Another plant at the site, Indian Point 1, was built in 1962 but shut down after a decade because it no longer met safety standards.
New York was once among the friendliest states to nuclear power. In the 1960s former Governor Nelson Rockefeller set up the New York State Atomic and Space Authority to bring in more investment for the industry. However, the intractable problems with the disposal of nuclear waste ended Rockefeller’s nuclear experiment. Now the New York State Energy Research and Development authority, created in 1975, divides its efforts between advocating alternative energy and managing the state’s considerable nuclear waste problems, which date back to the Cold War.
New York State now has six nuclear plants producing 30 percent of the state’s power, making us the fifth-largest nuclear state in the nation.
Indian Point 3 had completed its biannual refueling in March, and had been offline for nearly a month, before going back on line last month. Spent fuel from Indian Point and every commercial nuclear plant in the U.S. must be kept on site until Congress decides on the location for a permanent waste repository, a political debate that has been going on for decades.
Indian Point’s spent fuel is kept in deep pools of water for at least five years as its intense radioactivity cools, then moved to dry casks. The pools are substantially built but are not protected by the thick concrete domes that encase the reactors. Since the Fukushima accident in Japan, in which spent-fuel storage areas were compromised by a massive earthquake, there has been growing concern that a newly discovered earthquake fault line beneath Westchester County might put Indian Point at a similar risk. There has also been ongoing debate over the plant’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack similar to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
Environmentalists had been asking for a summertime shutdown of Indian Point to spare millions of baby fish that are sucked from the river into its cooling pipes and killed every year. Entergy had refused the changes because summer is the time of peak energy demand. But this year the shutdown due to the transformer fire will apparently spare many young fish and reportedly improve the ecological health of the river. The plant is expected to be out for a few weeks.
