[cdn-nucl-l] INDIAN POINT BLANK

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted in the New Yorker, March 3, 2003 issue, and at:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030303fa_fact
Imagine an artist reading an article written by an engineer subtly
suggesting that staring at art in the Guggenheim causes brain damage.  Okay,
now flip the situation completely and read this article...

Adam

-------------------

INDIAN POINT BLANK

by ELIZABETH KOLBERT
How worried should we be about the nuclear plant up the river?
Issue of 2003-03-03
Posted 2003-02-24

"Emergency Planning for Indian Point: A Guide for You and Your Family" is a
booklet published as a public service by the plant's owner, Entergy Nuclear
Northeast. Part "Hints from Heloise," part "Dr. Strangelove," the booklet
has a cheerful blue cover decorated with drawings of a siren and a reactor
dome. Inside, it is filled with tips like "Six Facts You Need to Know About
KI—Potassium Iodide" (No. 1: it can protect your thyroid if you are exposed
to radioactive iodine) and "helpful answers" to questions like "Could Indian
Point explode like a bomb?" ("No. It is impossible for any nuclear power
plant to explode like a bomb under any conditions.") At the back, there is
an "Emergency Planning Checklist," which recommends, "If you are told to
evacuate, you should bring enough personal supplies for three days,"
including a portable radio, potassium-iodide tablets, and "this planning
booklet."

In total, Entergy printed more than two hundred thousand copies of the
guide, which were mailed to households within ten miles of the plant, in
northern Westchester County. Nowhere does the booklet explicitly mention
sabotage, but this fear was clearly on the minds of the authors:

Q: How can I be sure that Indian Point is secure and well-protected? 
A: Indian Point is defended by armed guards, sophisticated detection
equipment and other advanced protection systems that meet or exceed federal,
state and local requirements. 

An attack on a nuclear power plant would seem to fulfill, almost perfectly,
Al Qaeda's objective of using America's technology against it. In his State
of the Union Message last year, President Bush announced that United States
forces searching Afghan caves had indeed found diagrams of American
reactors. Around the same time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, acting on
information provided by the F.B.I., warned of a plot to crash a commercial
aircraft into a plant. According to the N.R.C., the identity of the plant
was not known; a captured Al Qaeda operative had told the F.B.I. that the
specific target was to be chosen by a "team on the ground." 

As potential targets go, Indian Point seems almost too obvious. It is
situated on the Hudson River, in Buchanan, New York, some twenty miles north
of the Bronx and thirty-five miles from midtown Manhattan. Nearly three
hundred thousand people live within the plant's ten-mile "emergency planning
zone," and another several hundred thousand reside within seventeen and a
half miles, in the so-called "peak fatality" zone. More than twenty million
people live within fifty miles of the plant. A 1982 analysis by a
congressional subcommittee estimated that, under worst-case conditions, a
catastrophe at one of the Indian Point reactors could result in fifty
thousand fatalities and more than a hundred thousand radiation injuries. The
same study calculated the cost of such an accident at roughly three hundred
billion dollars. By an uncomfortable coincidence, American Airlines Flight
11, just minutes before it slammed into the north tower of the World Trade
Center, flew almost directly over Indian Point's twin reactor domes.
Apparently, the Hudson River was the landmark that the hijackers used to
navigate by.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant, or energy center, as it is now called,
is named after the spit of land, once home to an amusement park, on which
it's built. There are two functioning reactors on the site, Indian Point 2
and 3, and a third, Indian Point 1, which has been closed for nearly thirty
years. Recently, I went to Buchanan to take a look around. I had been told
to report to the plant's emergency-operations facility, and when I drove up
to it an armored tank was rumbling across the parking lot. Inside the
facility, I was issued the first of several security badges and was
introduced to Entergy Nuclear Northeast's director of emergency programs,
Michael Slobodien.

Before I arrived, Slobodien had laid out a tableful of charts and diagrams,
one of which was titled "Chernobyl-Indian Point Contrast." On the left side,
it noted that "Chernobyl used flammable graphite for neutron control" and
"did not have a comprehensive emergency plan." On the right, it said, "IP
uses non-flammable water for neutron control" and has "modern emergency
plans." There were also several large black-and-white photographs
chronicling the construction of the reactors' four-and-a-half-foot-thick
containment domes. 

"This building was designed with the intent to withstand the tremendous
energy of a massive release from an accident of some unknown origin,"
Slobodien told me, picking up one of the photographs. "We really don't care
what the origin is. We just said, 'Let's assume that that happens.' Because
that's kind of the worst-case situation you could envision. And, by the way,
in our business everything is worst case. We always think about what is the
worst that can happen, and we design to accomplish protection for the worst
case." Slobodien told me that he had been one of the "responders" sent by
the N.R.C. to Three Mile Island, outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, after the
meltdown there, in 1979, and later had overseen the cleanup of the site. He
explained, without a trace of irony, that, while one of the lessons of the
disaster had been that "serious accidents can occur," another was that "the
reactor design was successful."

Like Three Mile Island, Indian Point 2 and 3 are pressurized-water reactors.
Each reactor contains a hundred and ninety-three fuel assemblies, and each
assembly holds a hundred fuel rods—skinny zirconium tubes filled with
pellets of enriched uranium. To produce power, the fuel rods must first be
bombarded with neutrons. This sets off a chain reaction, which produces more
neutrons, "fission products" like radioactive iodine, and a great deal of
energy. The energy is used to heat pressurized water to 550 degrees
Fahrenheit, and this pressurized water is then used to heat more water to
make steam. The steam, in turn, powers a set of turbines, which, finally,
generate electricity. (Together, the two reactors at Indian Point produce,
on average, two thousand megawatts, or enough electricity to supply two
million homes.) The chain reaction is carefully monitored and controlled;
however, if, for whatever reason, heat is not carried away from the core,
the fuel can melt and, in the presence of oxygen, catch fire. Depending on
conditions, this can take hours or merely minutes. 

Slobodien took me down to the emergency center's control room, a large
windowless office filled with computers that, ideally, should never have to
be used. (In a truly catastrophic accident, the emergency-operations
facility might itself have to be evacuated, which is why there is a second
command center, similar to the first, twenty miles away, in White Plains.)
On the walls of the room were charts listing possible disasters, like
"tornado strikes a plant vital area." The charts were color-coded by type of
hazard, and each calamity was further specified by a numerical designation.
On a table was a detailed map of the area around the plant.

Slobodien pulled out a set of transparencies illustrating how a plume of
airborne radioactive contamination would travel under various conditions. He
selected one that posited a wind coming from the north with a relatively
high degree of turbulence. It showed the plume travelling south in a
widening band. "The areas that are most affected would be the communities of
Buchanan and Verplanck"—small towns right next to the plant—"and pretty much
the river," he observed, laying the transparency over the map. Slobodien
said that he was distressed by diagrams put out by the plant's critics which
suggest that in the event of an accident radioactivity would drift in all
directions. 

"It doesn't really happen that way," he explained. "The concept that
everything is affected all at once is clearly not true." The control-center
map showed only the area within a few miles of Indian Point, so I couldn't
tell what would happen to the plume once it travelled beyond that radius. I
did notice, though, that as it was widening it was headed toward New York
City. 

Eventually, I tried to steer the conversation around to September 11th. In
the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy and the F.B.I. warning,
public concern has tended to focus on the possibility of another aerial
attack. Whether the containment domes at most plants could withstand the
impact of a fully loaded 767 is a much debated question; the N.R.C. is,
somewhat belatedly, looking into this matter. There are, however, also many
other possible scenarios. To cool its reactors, for example, Indian Point
relies on the circulation of more than a billion gallons of water a day from
the Hudson. Several groups, including the Green Party of New York and the
environmental organization Riverkeeper, have tried to demonstrate the
plant's vulnerability by boating—or, in one case, canoeing—near the
cooling-water intake pipes. One of the groups claims to have made it within
fifty feet of the pipes. I asked Slobodien what would happen in the event
that the pipes were blocked, or destroyed.

"A lot of these things we don't talk about in great detail, for obvious
reasons," he told me. "So, when it comes to the intake, all I will tell you
is that you can block the intake and you still can successfully cool the
reactor. Now, would it be of concern to us? Yeah, it would be of great
concern to us. We would have to shut the reactor down, and we would have to
do alternative cooling techniques, which we have available to us. Yeah, it
would be of great concern. We don't minimize it. But it's not the kind of
thing that leads axiomatically to, you know, the end, as some people would
have you believe." 

In a practical sense, insuring that Indian Point operates safely is the job
of its owner, Entergy, but in a broader sense this responsibility belongs to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The N.R.C. describes its primary mission
as "to protect the public health and safety," and to this end it not only
licenses and inspects nuclear plants but continually analyzes the risks
posed by them. If it deems a particular risk to be too high, it has the
power to shut down a reactor—or, if need be, many reactors—until the problem
is addressed; in 1975, for example, the commission temporarily closed all of
the nation's two dozen boiling-water reactors—their design is slightly
different from that of pressurized-water reactors—after finding a hairline
crack at one of them. The N.R.C., however, has never defined what
constitutes an unacceptable risk, and critics charge that its judgment on
the matter has grown susceptible to outside influences. Just a few months
ago, the N.R.C.'s inspector general issued a report chastising the
commission for giving too much weight to the financial concerns of a nuclear
operator. The report found that, despite compelling safety concerns, the
N.R.C. had allowed the owner of the Davis-Besse plant, outside Toledo, Ohio,
to delay an inspection for more than six weeks. When the commission finally
performed the inspection, it discovered that acidic water had been eating
through the reactor's lid—a process that, had it been allowed to continue,
could well have produced a disaster.

"You have a very dangerous situation where the industry is calling the
shots," Paul Leventhal, the president emeritus of the Nuclear Control
Institute, a non-proliferation advocacy group, told me.

The N.R.C. began treating sabotage as a more urgent threat after the
terrorist attacks of the nineteen-eighties, which included the bombing of
the American Marine barracks in Beirut. In 1991, it introduced a program of
drills, known as Operational Safeguards Response Evaluations, or osres,
specifically to test plant defenses. In these drills, off-duty security
guards were hired to carry out a mock attack devised by N.R.C. specialists.
For obvious reasons, plant operators were alerted to the osres in advance;
meanwhile, N.R.C. guidelines limited the attackers to three outside
assailants and one insider, whose role was restricted to providing
information. Between 1991 and 2000, the N.R.C. conducted the drills at the
rate of roughly eight plants a year. Indian Point 2 and Indian Point 3 both
passed in 1994. At nearly half of the plants tested, though, guards failed
to repel the assailants before they had destroyed at least one so-called
"target set." In other words, had the attack been real, the terrorists would
have been in a position to cause potentially catastrophic damage.

Many plant operators were disturbed by this result, but not, it seems, for
the reason one might have thought. They pressed the N.R.C. to replace the
drills with more frequent security exercises of the operators' own devising.
In a scathing assessment of this idea, David Orrik, a retired Navy captain
who oversaw the osres and is still a senior official at the N.R.C., wrote
that nuclear operators had demonstrated an "abject failure . . . to be
capable—by themselves—of protecting against radiological sabotage. It took
the threat of an osre to make them prepare to be 'ready,' and 47% still were
not 'ready.' " In spite of this assessment, the N.R.C. was in the process of
moving toward precisely the sort of program the operators were advocating
when the attack on the World Trade Center occurred. At that point, the
commission suspended all anti-sabotage drills, owing, as its chairman,
Richard Meserve, put it, to the general "high level threat environment."

The N.R.C. is now in the process of redesigning the osres, presumably to
better reflect the sophistication of international terrorists. The
commission has said that when the redesign is completed, in the next few
months, it will ask several plants, each in a different region, to volunteer
to try out the new drill. Officials in New York, including Senator Hillary
Clinton, strongly urged that Indian Point be one of them, and recently the
N.R.C. announced that it would be. 

After Slobodien had shown me around the emergency-operations facility, I
continued my tour of Indian Point with Jim Steets, the communications
manager for Entergy Nuclear Northeast. Steets is tall and lanky, with
prematurely gray hair and an easygoing affability. He has worked at Indian
Point for ten years, a period during which the plant has posed more than its
share of public-relations challenges.

In May, 1992, the N.R.C., after having identified a long list of safety
lapses at Indian Point 3, including one that caused a six-month failure of
the backup reactor-shutdown system, fined the reactor two hundred and
twenty-five thousand dollars and put it on a watch list for heightened
scrutiny. (At the time, Indian Point 3 was owned and operated by the New
York Power Authority, and Indian Point 2 was owned and operated by
Consolidated Edison.) Shortly after this fine was imposed, engineers at the
reactor noticed a problem with a set of valves, and rushed to replace them
before an N.R.C. inspection. In their haste, the engineers put the new
valves in backward, blocking the cooling systems. The power authority fired
several of its top officials and voluntarily shut down Indian Point 3 in
order to conduct a safety overhaul. This overhaul was supposed to be
completed in six months but ended up taking two and a half years. One N.R.C.
official compared the reactor to "a plane losing altitude," while others,
with a nod to "The Simpsons," dubbed it "Homer on the Hudson."

"Basically, it boiled down to poor management," Steets told me. "You could
write a book on it, in all honesty." 

In the late nineties, as Indian Point 3's record finally seemed to be
improving, Indian Point 2's went into decline. In 1997, the N.R.C. found
that electrical breakers at the reactor had not been properly inspected or
maintained, and imposed a fifty-five-thousand-dollar fine on Con Ed. A year
and a half later, the breaker problem still hadn't been fully resolved, an
oversight that, thanks to a string of related errors, one day left the
control-room alarm system without power. The N.R.C. was still figuring out
the proper penalty for this incident when, in February, 2000, a tube in the
reactor's steam generator ruptured, spilling twenty thousand gallons of
radioactive water. The reactor received a "red finding," the N.R.C.'s lowest
safety rating, and spent most of the rest of the year out of operation. 

Entergy had completed its purchase of Indian Point 2 and 3 by the summer of
2001. At that point, many people at the plant, Steets told me, were hopeful
that a new era was beginning. To celebrate the event, the company put up an
enormous tent by the river and threw a party. "We had a great, great day out
here," Steets said of the party, which took place just four days before
September 11th. A month later, four of the seven control-room operating
crews at Indian Point 2 failed an annual relicensing exam. Four months after
that, also at Indian Point 2, a security guard was fired for pulling a gun
on a colleague in an argument over a glass of orange juice.

Steets had promised to show me whatever there is to see at a nuclear
reactor, and so we got into his car and drove down to Indian Point 3. The
area right around the reactors, called the "protected area," is much more
heavily guarded than the area around the emergency-operations center, which
is called the "owner-controlled area." On the drive, we passed a tall
chain-link fence rimmed with concrete barriers and topped with motion
sensors. A truck was idling at the gate while a guard inspected its
undercarriage with a mirror on a long pole.

Before I could enter the plant, I had to get a badge from a guard carrying a
semi-automatic rifle and pass through a metal detector, an explosives
detector, and, finally, a radiation detector. Next, I had to go upstairs to
get a dosimeter, as well as a brief, government-mandated lecture from a
radiological engineer named James Barry. On the way to Barry's office, I
passed signs printed with slogans like "star: Stop, Think, Act, Review" and
"step: Safety Takes Employee Participation." One poster said, "IP3 Practices
alara," which stands for "as low as reasonably achievable" and refers to
radiation exposure. Another urged employees to "Save an mrem Today." (One
millirem is equal to a tenth of the amount of radiation a person would be
exposed to in a typical chest X-ray.) Barry told me how to respond in the
event of an alarm—"the one thing we don't want you to do is run or
panic"—and informed me that if I saw anything that I thought constituted a
hazard to myself or anyone else I had "the right to go to the N.R.C." Then
he took Steets and me over to a bank of computers that read our dosimeters,
through a set of doors of the sort typically seen in prisons, and down to a
huge concrete tub filled with water. At the bottom of the pool, metal racks
holding spent fuel rods were just barely visible. 

For more than three decades now, the federal government has been planning to
construct a repository for spent uranium, with limited success. (The
repository now under construction at Yucca Mountain, in the Nevada desert,
will not be open until at least 2010, if it opens at all.) In the meantime,
like every other reactor in the country, Indian Point has been obliged to
store its spent fuel on-site. By now, Indian Point 3 has collected six
hundred and twenty-four tons of the stuff, and Indian Point 2 has amassed
eight hundred and eight tons. Although the fuel is of no use in generating
electricity, it is still highly radioactive and produces a great deal of
heat, which is why it must always be kept submerged. Two years ago, after
much prodding from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the N.R.C.
released a study looking at the risks of a spent-fuel fire. While the
commission concluded that the risk of such a fire was low—the fuel would
have to be left out of water for several hours—it acknowledged that the
consequences "could be comparable to those for a severe reactor accident."
This finding is frequently cited by critics of Indian Point, who note that
the spent fuel is housed outside the containment domes, in buildings that
are comparatively vulnerable, and that it contains a host of extremely
dangerous "fission products," including radioactive iodine, radioactive
cesium, and strontium. Gazing down into the pool, I couldn't help
wondering—even though I realized that this was not the issue—what would
happen if someone fell into it. There was a lot of noise from water rushing
around, and a sign that said, "Do Not Linger." Before turning in our
dosimeters, we all had to have full-body radiation scans, a process that
involved climbing into a closetlike structure, first frontward and then
backward. I set off an alarm during mine but was assured that it didn't mean
anything. 

As Steets and I were leaving the plant, we passed the control room. It was
filled with visitors from an international nuclear operators' association,
so Steets offered to take me to see the control-room simulator instead. The
simulator is an exact replica of the control room, with glass replacing one
wall to allow observation of trainees. When we arrived, a large white-haired
man was leading two nervous-looking younger men through a training exercise.
The older man told us that the younger men were trying to keep the reactor
from overheating despite eight simultaneous malfunctions. I asked him how
the exercise was going to end.

"Oh, I'll be a nice guy and give them a pump back," he said, adding that
before that he would probably let the temperature of the reactor core get up
to eleven hundred degrees. (The tubes holding the fuel start to crack at
twelve hundred degrees.) For the first time during my visit, I thought
Steets looked discouraged.

After the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the N.R.C. resolved that every
nuclear power plant in the country had to have an evacuation plan. Indian
Point's was put together by Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Putnam
Counties, in conjunction with the New York State Emergency Management
Office. It details everything from the routes that buses should follow to
the intersections where police should direct evacuees. The section of the
plan devoted to Westchester County alone runs to two volumes, each several
hundred pages.

Last summer, in the midst of his reëlection campaign, Governor George Pataki
ordered an independent evaluation of the plan. (At the time, Riverkeeper was
running a series of ads showing the plant in the center of a bull's-eye and
calling on the Governor to "get the target off our backs.") The study was
conducted by James Lee Witt, a former head of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, and ran to more than five hundred pages. When it was made
public, in January, the plan documented what just about everyone who lives
in the region suspected: that there are simply too many people and too few
roads around the plant for the area to be evacuated effectively. In an
accident, only those people living in the expected path of the plume would
be ordered to leave their homes; however, as the report noted, inevitably
people all over the region would try to get away—a phenomenon known as a
"shadow evacuation"—which could produce chaos. The report called the plan
"not adequate . . . to protect the people from an unacceptable dose of
radiation." 

The release of the Witt report, as it has come to be known, triggered—or
perhaps just provided the excuse for—a political shift in New York. The
Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Putnam county executives all declared
that this year they would not sign off on the evacuation plan, as they are
required to do annually. Subsequently, the state, which is supposed to send
on its approval to the federal government, announced that it could not vouch
for the plan, either. By now, dozens of elected officials in the region have
come out openly against Indian Point, including Representative Sue Kelly and
Representative Nita Lowey, of Westchester, and Representative Eliot Engel,
of the Bronx, who have called for the plant to be shut down, at least
temporarily. 

What happens next is largely up to the N.R.C. Under its own rules, the
commission would seem to have grounds to close Indian Point—the very groups
that are supposed to carry out the evacuation plan have now deemed it
inadequate—but that seems unlikely. (The last time the N.R.C. ordered a
plant shut over its owner's objections was back in 1987, when inspectors
arrived at the Peach Bottom Unit 3 reactor, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
and found the control-room crew fast asleep.) Indian Point supplies ten per
cent of New York's power, and while this electricity could be purchased
elsewhere, it is estimated that utility bills in the state would rise by a
billion dollars a year if the plant were closed. Meanwhile, whatever
decision the N.R.C. reaches is bound to have ramifications far beyond New
York. Because of the number of people who live around Buchanan, the risks
may be quantitatively higher at Indian Point than at other reactors, but
qualitatively they're really no different. In this sense, shutting down the
plant would, effectively, be acknowledging that in a post-9/11 world nuclear
power just isn't worth the gamble. Two weeks ago, in the middle of a
heightened terrorism alert, Richard Meserve, the N.R.C.'s chairman, faulted
the Witt report for giving "undue weight" to the risk of a terrorist attack.

Along with helping to distribute "Emergency Planning for Indian Point,"
Westchester County recently held several potassium-iodide giveaways and
invited members of the public to pick up free tablets for their families.
Even though I live on the other side of the county from Buchanan, more than
ten miles outside the evacuation zone, I kept thinking that I really ought
to go to one to get some for my kids. (Children are particularly vulnerable
to thyroid damage.) A few weeks ago, I decided to visit a local drugstore
instead. By that point, a lot of other parents had evidently made the same
decision, because the pharmacist told me that I was getting his last three
packages. They came in a thin cardboard folder marked "thyroid blocking in a
radiation emergency only."