For Want of a Nail: Emergency Preparedness at Indian Point

The issues facing Entergy's nuclear plant are fixable. Why shut it down?

What happens when law, technology, and politics collide? It's anyone's guess.

On May 2 the Federal Emergency Management Agency is scheduled to make a report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that may well determine whether Entergy's Indian Point nuclear plant, whose two reactors have been supplying the least costly 20 percent of New York City's electricity for two decades, continues to operate.

The bottom-line finding of FEMA's report on the status of offsite radiological emergencies preparedness for the plant will turn on whether New York state and the four counties in the 10-mile radius Emergency Planning Zone around the plant have submitted to FEMA certain updated information, recertifying their participation in offsite emergency preparedness. With a favorable FEMA finding, the plant continues to operate; without it, the plant goes onto a down-ramp to shutdown.

Indian Point, located 35 miles north of New York City, has the highest surrounding population of any nuclear plant in the country (300,000 people within the 10-mile emergency planning zone [EPZ]) and a chronic abundance of opponents. Opponents fanned post-9/11 unease about the effects of terrorism. As a result, New York Gov. George Pataki last summer commissioned James L. Witt, director of FEMA during the Clinton administration, to prepare a report on offsite radiological emergency preparedness for the plant. The final version, issued March 7, finds the current state of offsite emergency preparedness at Indian Point to be inadequate in an environment that includes terrorist threats.