After half a century of lawsuits, petitions, letters, public testimony and dozens of radioactive 'oopses' at the Indian Point nuclear facility just 40 miles north of Manhattan, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Eric Schneiderman and the environmental group Riverkeeper struck a deal with Entergy last month to shut down the 2 reactors at long last.
A Victory 50 Years in the Making
Despite expired licenses, the two operating reactors at Indian Point had been hoping to get their 20-year extensions by the time their granted 'grace' period ended, now the plants will be shut down in 2020 and 2021 and will finally stop dumping radwaste on New York City & Megaburb residents and into the Hudson River and groundwater.
Entergy will provide $15 million for 'environmental restoration' of the filthy facility, which won't accomplish much in the way of cleanup. Entergy also said it would offer its employees work at other of its nuclear facilities, or re-train them for renewable technologies. The agreement provides a directive requiring spent fuel assemblies on site to be casked rather than left in their current glorified (and overcrowded) swimming pools. Eventually. This will hopefully end the practice of killing more than a billion fish and their eggs every year by releasing spent fuel heated water directly to the river.
The downside is that Cuomo promised to provide Entergy and Exelon with $7.6 billion in direct subsidies to keep the 2 reactors at Nine Mile Point and 1 each at the Ginna and Fitzpatrick plants on Lake Ontario running. All three facilities were scheduled for closure by their owners last year due to "unprofitability" - the fact that alternative energy sources are now less expensive per watt than nuclear, and the cost of maintaining the aging plants never goes down. Without this infusion of taxpayer's cash they would have been shut down on schedule and be removed from the list of contenders for Next Meltdown/Exploding Nuke.
Indian Point would no doubt have been closed as well by 2020 (if not sooner) regardless of any bailouts offered by the state, as its electricity is every bit as expensive as that of every other nuke in the American fleet. Still, Cuomo apparently felt it was worth the billions to end the nightmare scenario of what happens to NYC if one or both Indian Point nukes melted down and blew up. Apparently he feels that the same nightmare scenario threatening upstaters is fine and dandy. Go figure.