![]() ![]() The operating license for Indian Point 3 expired in December. Incidents such as these are among the reasons Cuomo wants it closed, and Indian Point is now in a vulnerable position. Fortunately a second backup worked.īecause the plant is cooled in large part by water from the Hudson – up to 2.5bn gallons a day – it kills about 1 billion fish and other aquatic organisms a year. Patricia Kakridas, a spokeswoman for Entergy, said the source was likely “water which exited a temporary filtration system that was set up and dismantled in late January 2016” in preparation for refueling the company said radioactive material won’t leach into drinking water.Īnd in March, when the plant was being refueled, a breaker tripped and cut power in one of the reactors when the diesel generators kicked in, they died while trying to restart the first electrical system. In February, radiation levels at three monitoring wells around the plant spiked, in one spot by 65,000%. “A station blackout led to the meltdown of three nuclear reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-ichi in 2011.” “Had the flooding not been discovered and stopped in time, the panels could have been submerged, plunging Unit 3 into a dangerous station blackout, in which all alternating current (AC) electricity is lost,” the report’s authors wrote. ![]() Last year near misses occurred at eight nuclear facilities in the US. The Union of Concerned Scientists classified the incident as a “near miss” in its annual review. In May 2015, an electrical transformer in the reactor called Unit 3 exploded, causing water to flood a room near the explosion where electrical distribution panels are housed and pouring 3,000 gallons of oil into the Hudson. Many of those people live and work in the plant’s shadow with growing unease. The population density around Indian Point is of more than 2,100 people per square mile, by far the greatest for any of the US’s 61 nuclear power plants. It’s easy to see the source of his concern. In February the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, called its operation “unacceptable” – he wants the plant closed. Five years ago the New York Times wondered if it was “ America’s Fukushima” – the Japanese site of the world’s worst radiation crisis since Chernobyl. Indian Point’s two working reactors opened in the early 1970s and have had a lot of people worried for a long time. ![]()
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