Last year the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted a request from Entergy that allowed the utility company to change the type of fire safety protection used at their Indian Point Nuclear power plants to a material that resists fire for a shorter amount of time. The request was granted as an “exemption” from Entergy’s operating license.
On Monday, May 11, a case arguing that the NRC lacked the authority to grant the exemption was heard at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City. Arguing against the NRC was Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester) and New York State Assistant Attorney General John Sipos.
Granting an exemption does not require public input but a public hearing is required when amending a power plant’s operating license. Brodsky and Sipos argued that the regulatory agency mischaracterized the request as an “exemption” rather than an amendment to the license and the NRC “failed to consider relevant evidence in making its decision.”
At the crux of the case was the impact of reducing the fire safety protection at Indian Point. If a fire broke out at the plant the new fire resistant materials lasting 24 minutes as a barrier to a blaze, would not be enough time to catch a fire especially with current inspections scheduled every hour, Sipos and Brodsky argued during the proceeding that lasted over an hour. They also argued the dangerous consequences of fires in electrical junction boxes carrying 480 volts of power to cables that control safe, emergency shut downs, if needed.
NRC attorney Robert Rader held that the NRC staff determined there was “reasonable assurance that the fire-protection measures approved by the exemptions would control any credible blaze in affected areas at Indian Point.” Rader held that the agency's rules for granting an exemption are spelled out in the Atomic Energy Act as part of the “comprehensive regulatory framework” and the “ongoing review of nuclear power plants located in the United States.”
The NRC claimed that using lower quality fire barriers have been allowed at many other plants in the country and have granted ‘exemptions’ to certain fire safety standards over the last 8 years.
Yesterday’s hearing marks the first time the NRC’s right to grant these exemptions without alerting the public has been challenged. Of the three judges hearing the argument was the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor who is widely rumored to be on Obama’s list of choices for the Supreme Court. It is unclear when the judges will rule on the case.
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One correction: Tthe fire material that was exemption is not new, but has been in place for over 15 years. It is just that the NRC never bothered to test the material to see if is actually worked, until Congress forced them to a few years ago. At that time they found that the material only worked for 24 minutes, not the 1 hour the manufacturers had advertised.
Additionally other plants have received exemptions but no other plants safety was reduced to 24 minutes with a 1 hour walk around.
Indian Point last year let out a contract to double-wrap the affected areas in a second layer of fire suppressant , thus bringing the safe time back to well over an hour. Moreover, the plant has automatic fire detection systems in place, which initiate automatic fire suppression systems, and has had them for years. The hourly walkaround is redundant window dressing, and has little bearing on plant safety.... but is done anyway.
Therefore the actual S A F E T Y issue is moot, because the plant is safe, has been rated as safe by INPO, a private agency not beholden to NRC, and, of course, by NRC itself.
Mr. Brodsky's brief therefore is an extremely thin one..... does any legal language findable in the Federal Code force NRC into public hearings over small administrative reliefs granted in regard to purely administrative rulings, outside the granting of major Design Basis alterations.
I am familiar with the code,
and the answer is no.
The Code is very spare in its language, and addresses the Commission from an attitude of both technical and ethical trust, allowing it great latitude, provided its decisions are technically defensible.
The very last thing any American living within 30 miles of a nuclear plant should want, is hostile and technically skewed micromanagement of these installations by semi-schooled politikoes wielding harrassment suits. If Mr. Brodsky could somehow gain the political quorum in our Congress necessary to supersede the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, he could perhaps begin writing his harrassments into law. But I doubt the needed political groundswell is present, or even possible. National polls have turned up a near 80% approval rate for nuclear plants. Antinuclears are a minority, and a shrinking minority, to boot.
Since Herr Brodsky is a politically savvy individual, this re-paints his current "effort" as self promotion, plain & simple. Brodsky has had a long, spotty career of doing little for the public, while promoting himself repeatedly. I see that nothing has changed of late.
Was Thermo-Lag mentioned in this suit?
I didn't think I'd see the day I'd be agreeing with a blogger on the other side of this issue like Feed Burner, who is probably nothing more that Harry The Hudson Dog under another guise.
Worse case scenario, Entergy has to redo the wiring. Big deal! This is like fashioning a tooth pick to tickle the beast while the rest of the army is sharpening the sword. Just a distraction.
I sadly know first hand of "harrassment suits" imposed by these tireless self-promoters who build their career on other's work, then use such legal tactics to cover their tracks and destroy volunteers who had ideas they wanted to appropriate for themselves.
In this instance, all this has been, is another waste of time. But at least it put Indian Point into the news again with a safety issue. So not all has been lost.
From “Nuclear Witnesses – Insiders Speak Out” by Leslie J. Freeman:
“(Gregory) Minor learned that two technicians, working below the control room of (Browns Ferry) Reactor Units 1 and 2, had been checking for air leaks in the cable-spreading room- the room where electric cables that control both reactors are located. They were doing a routine job – trying to seal air leaks by packing insulation material around the cables – and checking their work as they often did, with a candle held near the cables. If the flame flickered that meant there was still an air leak to plug. What the technicians did not consider, however, was that the electrical cables had been sealed with flammable polyurethane foam. When one of them held a candle too close to this material, the flame was sucked horizontally inward and the insulating material burst into flame. They tried to beat the flames out with a flashlight but were unsuccessful. The fire spread to the cables and then to the reactor itself.
A series of horrifying events followed. Confusion about which emergency phone number to dial for the fire alarm delayed sounding the alarm. A shift engineer tried the carbon dioxide fire extinguisher and found that it was covered by a nonremovable plate. When the alarm was finally sounded, the operators in the plant control room did not shut down the two reactors, but kept them running. By now, the fire was raging out of control and smoke was filling the control room. Control was lost over reactor relief valves and none of the normal or emergency low-pressure pumps were working. The fire chief arrived, but he was not permitted to use water to put out the fire because he was told it was an electrical fire, which was not true. “The problem was to cool the hot wires to prevent recurring combustion," the Athens fire chief explained later. Sixteen hundred cables were damaged, many of them connected to safety devices. With the emergency core cooling system disabled and the core close to being uncovered, the chance of a meltdown was frightening real. For seven hours the Browns Ferry fire was precariously out of control. When the decision was finally made to put the fire out with water, the firefighters nozzle would not stay on the hose. Finally, the day was saved when someone hooked up an auxiliary pump and managed to force water into the reactor. This prevented the core from being uncovered.
That accident just really pulled the rug out from under me. One GE guy said to me, “You know, this is a really serious ting,” and I said, “I can’t believe this happened. “ Then this other guy said, “Thank goodness everything worked!”
They were carefully building up a “non-accident” theory – sure, all the emergency systems were gone, but we didn’t melt any fuel, we didn’t kill anybody – it was a “non-accident.” But to me it was a disaster! All the safety systems were gone! All our backup systems gone! I felt we were very, very lucky that we hadn’t had a major catastrophe. It made me worry about the rest of our GE plants – because I knew that this was the one we had done a “good” job on. We had designed the Browns Ferry plant to be the best.
Shortly after the Browns Ferry fire, Minor decided to leave General Electric. He had worked for the company for seventeen years.”
In fact, THREE high-level GE nuclear engineers resigned – Dale G. Bridenbaugh, Gregory C. Minor and Richard Hubbard – stating that after their experience at Brown's Ferry, nuclear reactors are too risky to operate.
AND THAT IS THE POINT. THAT IS THE ONLY POINT ONE NEEDS TO MAKE. Herr Feeding Burner’s attempt to dismiss Mr. Brodsky as a self serving politician is crap because three high level GE nuclear engineers, all “true believers” in nuclear power QUIT and gave up their high paying careers because they had the integrity to admit that nuclear reactors are too risky to operate. They made a HUGE sacrifice to themselves, their careers, and their families to make this statement.
Herr Feeding Burner claims, “National polls have turned up a near 80% approval rate for nuclear plants.”
First of all, he doesn’t cite a SINGLE source for that statement, but let’s say it’s accurate. It is UTTERLY MEANINGLESS. Why? You give me the millions that the nuclear industry has spent on public relations to mislead, deceive and lie to the public and I bet I can get 80% (or more) of Americans to oppose nuclear plants.
How many times going back to the Mexican-American war, the Spanish-American war (the country was brought to a war fever as a result of the circulation battle between the Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer papers, the two largest newspapers in the country at the time, where reporters sitting in rooms fabricated stories about atrocities being committed by Spain), the Korean war (where 80% of the public supported using the bomb - overlooking the fact that the radiation cloud would pass over our own troops), the Vietnam war (the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication that got us into that war), the Iraq war (enough lies and propaganda to fill a book), etc., has the public been duped into supporting something they would later oppose?
And, tell me Herr Feeding Burner, if nuclear power is so safe why does the nuclear industry still insist on keeping the Price-Anderson Act, passed by Congress in 1957, on the books?
This legislation limits the liability of the nuclear industry in case of a nuclear accident and makes the taxpayer responsible for any catastrophic nuclear accident. (A 1982 Sandia National Laboratories study, leaked to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), quantified the consequences of a catastrophic nuclear power accident in the U.S. Besides potentially causing thousands of early deaths and cancers, an accident could cause as much as $313 billion in damages, or about $600 billion today with inflation.)
To support an industry that INHERENTLY cannot be made 100% safe AND can cause THAT kind of death and destruction is an act of INSANITY.
You want to risk your life on the space shuttle and hope that it doesn't blow up, that is YOUR business. You have NO right to put MY life, the country and the environment at risk.
Please don't call me "Herr". I am not German.
The Brown's Ferry incident occurred in 1976.
Simply compare anything available technologically in 1976, with what is available today. Compare TV sets. Compare computers. Compare automobiles. Compare airplanes. And Oh yes, while you are at it, compare electrical generating plants. Compare the general level of knowlege in power plant employees in 1976, with that of today.Compare any aspect of blue collar work life... including inspection methods, and it becomes obvious that 1976 was the dark middle ages.
It was a dark age, because workers were ignorant, and didn't know that they were ignorant. It was a middle age, because new technology, new general knowlege, & new training advances were just entering the pipeline, and were about to change everything drastically, for the better.
By the time you and I write, some 33 years later, everything is radically changed. Nuclear plants in particular have gone from 20% efficiency to 99% efficiency. Nuclear plant workers, who had once been simply coal plant jocks transplanted without any schooling into the far more demanding world of nuclear, (where they failed to make the grade. like the three engineers you mentioned, who failed, knew they could not perform, and so quit)...nuke workers are now the most highly trained profession, doing far more simulator time and classroom hours than either airline pilots , brain surgeons, or NASA astronauts.
Nowadays, the advanced training, the finely tuned safety procedures, the wealth of experience of 33 years, and the hundreds of new regulations all work synergistically with computer controls totally undreamed of in 1976, to create a total revolution, one that was being called for by your three engineers, but one which was never arrived at by them, because they quit.
So, just like Moses, they have to stand on the sidelines and watch those who didn't quit , arrive at the promised land. They might have been right in 1976. I can't really say. But their advice is definitely wrong in 2009. And this phenomenon of maturation is not unique, or unprecedented. When steam boilers went into general use in the 1830's there were thousands of fatal boiler explosions, until the learning process brought about the first boiler codes in 1870, resulting in no more big boiler accidents after the turn of the twentieth century. When automobiles were invented, any owner had to bring a horse along, tied to the bumper, to pull him out when he got stuck. This is no longer the case. I could go on and on.
Propagandists re-tell 33 year old horror stories, and generally embellish them a bit with each telling, until they become community-building cult myth. Surround yourself with such myths, and you build a fence, keeping out the world, keeping out any new or changing reality, while those inside revisit the old ghostie tales over, and over, and over, and over. For some, this makes a fulfilling life. For most people, it does not. The choice is yours. Pick one, or the other.
The Space Shuttle is not something that supports the lives, the health, the safety, and the forward-looking aspirations of millions of accepting citizens, who demonstrate they want the service to continue, by paying an electric bill every month. ( Nuclear plants are).
The Space Shuttle is a useless government boondoggle, and has already killed too many brave people, for no reason. It should be retired.
American nuclear plants have never ever killed a single person.
My, my, my. Let me put my boots on, it's getting deep in here. Such lyrical praise of the nuclear industry coupled with so many off topic comments could only signal the return of Harry Dirty Dog Springer.
I would recognize that style anywhere. I thought you were banned by Entergy from this sort of nefarious postings, Harry. Is that why you are not using your real name? I think a word limit might be needed - just to allow enough air for others.
My point was....
Being afraid of locomotives in 1830, or of steamboats in 1865, or of nuclear power plants in 1973.... were all logical, prudent attitudes.
Likewise, being afraid of locomotives in 1900, or of steamboats in 1950, or of nuclear power plants in 2009 are all quaint, anachronistic (and wrong) attitudes.
Time, and what goes on during that time, changes the rationality of any long-hewed-to stance. What would you think of a person who feared President Hoover was destroying the banking system? Would it be worth it to explain the twentieth century to him/her In 75 words or less?
{106 words, 623 characters}
Why Harry, how nice to have a fan club that keeps such close tabs on my personal life. And how convenient for you to restate your "point" in a mere 106 words. It saves us all so much time.
Will you ever learn to FOCUS? From Hoover to the Brooklyn Bridge to the Newbergh 5 is a stretch that, like most of your writing makes no rational sense. Right now you generate enough hot air to be classified as an alternative energy source.
If you ever want to have a sensible dialogue on nuclear power try using some facts and staying on topic. And do let me know should you ever find a factual error in anything I post.
I am really not interested in your opinons or rants. Just the facts please. You might even try using your real name for a change.
Who knows, stick to the 100word formula and you might even get a few readers...
Marilyn Elie
Actually, I did mean you. Your tone and the personal details of my life that you and others insinuate into these posting are inappropriate and rude.
Service is the rent we pay for living on the planet.
The service I have choosen, among other things, is to speak out against Indian Point in particular and nuclear power in general. It is a personal choice and strictly a matter of volunteering for what I think is right.
The author of The Truth Twisters made the same bizarre accusations about NIRS and WISE as you are repeating. All of them false. Sorry, but there is no grand international conspiracy. No money pouring in from abroad or anywhere else. No master minds directing the action. Just a few local volunteers doing what they think is morally right for their community.
At this point in the relicensing process all opinion polls and most citizen based actions are immaterial. The proscribed meetings will roll on to their arcane conclusions. After that - no matter what the result -there will be a court case.
Like it or not, that is how the process is destined to unfold. I intend to be around for the happy and sensible conclusion - the closing of the reactors at Indian Point.
Marilyn Elie
Overly personal posts seldom edify readers, and are justifiably removable by a blog administrator. (Several deleted posts veered into personal animus, and did not inform about Indian Point, which is the stated topic of this website.)
That said, the question must be asked: Where are the clarification reports, setting the community background ? Polls have been taken showing great regional and local support for the plant, and the remission of thousands of electricity bill payments each month with no complaint, could tend to cast the reportage of only legal maneuvers to harrass the plant, and/or only routine maintenance activities at the plant in a manner tending to imply that something was wrong, as disingenuous at best, or even as misleading, when taken in the aggregate.
From the point of view of someone well versed in common industrial practice, I can attest that the routine breakdowns , replacements, and upgrades reported here are simply evidence of a robust maintenance program, and not evidence of any "impending catastrophe".
From the point of view of someone who actively researches these issues worldwide, I can attest that the use of this power source is on the ascendant, especially in Asia, where dozens of new plants are in either construction or final planning.
From a historical point of view, I can attest that the "book was written" at Indian Point....meaning that the genesis of accepted safety and procedural best practices now mandated around the world by IAEA in their INSAG-7 standard, are simply whole-cloth repetitions of insights developed at Indian Point by Hudson Valley residents justifiably proud of their contributions to the wellbeing of future world civilization.
From the viewpoint of an environmental advocate, I can attest that this installation is the most benign, least harmful means of upholding the region's power needs.
From the point of view of a lifelong Hudson Valley resident, I can attest that the Lamont/ Hogarth/ Brodsky attitude concerning Indian Point is insular in the extreme, and not representative of the communities with which I deal, day in , & day out.
If a person were to reside in Peekskill, Buchanan, Cortlandt Manor, Stony Point, Haverstraw, Putnam Valley, and other nearby communities, the reality would be self evident, that an attitude opposing an installed functioning infrastructure linchpin was a luxury, one not affordable to the great majority, and less and less affordable as one considers the less moneyed residents in the area.
From an Environmental Justice point of view it is, to me, self evident that a jobs provider who contributes a billion dollars of redistributed wealth into local households each year, while averting the infusion of CO2, NOX, mercury, ash, and other poisons released by fossil plants, is a great hero of the community.
Viewing such an appropriate, beneficial, accepted contribution to our lifeways through the narrow tunnel of wanting it to disappear can seem a meagre and self-deluding stance, especially to those who know it best : the working people of the Hudson Valley.
I would advise all researchers to consider these facts, or at least to not suppress them.
Have a nice day.
I appreciate your thoughtful post that attempts to reflect the thorny problem of Indian Point through the lens of different points of view. Since I did not find my viewpoint reflected accurately, here is my take. I can only speak for myself.
As a retired resident of Cortlandt who lives two miles from Indian Point I concur with you that all of the studies and information about the reactors at Indian Point needs to be made public in a way that we can all understand. There is a real lack of reporting on the complex issues that come out of Indian Point.
Furthermore, everyone needs to understand the full cost of generating something we all take for granted - electricity. Our strong and reliable power grid, the best in the world, has allowed us to ignore the costs that do not appear in our monthly bil.
Let's take just three:
1. Massive changes of the Hudson River ecosystem - nine out of twelve signature species are endangered because of thermal pollution, entrapment and entrainment
2. Deadly high level radioactive waste has built up in the spent fuel pools over the years and is now slowly being transferred to dry cask storage - while the casks are estimated to last 500 years the waste is deadly for hundreds of thousands of years and Buchanan has become a defacto nuclear spent fuel dump.
3. Environmental impact of the nuclear fuel cycle which releases significant green house gasses, just not in the Hudson River Valley, and the profound impact on the communities where the ore is mined.
If the industry would solve these problems I could happily stop working for the closure of Indian Point. (Actually, the solution for the first problem is already available and is standard industry practice in some parts of the country - closed cycle cooling. Entergy, however, prefers to avoid the cost of implementation.)
I suspect that the conclusions a person comes to depends on theier mind set and the part of the problem they look at so chances are good that the most we can do is agree to disagree. However, here is a larger picture here; issues that are bigger than the "working people of the Hudson Valley" who may or may not agree with either thee or me.
Indian Point is a business, part of multinational, multibillion dollar corporation. Business have closed in the past, undergone changes and will undoubtedly do so in the future. It is impossible to avoid change. A carefully developed plan can help mitigate the impact on the people and communities most affected. The site can be cleaned up and returned to electricity generation and its proper place on the tax rolls. The free market can provide us with clean electricity in the mean time.
We have an opportunity to take responsibility for the way we generate our electricity and to stop leaving a mess for future generations to clean up. It's the adult thing to do.
Marilyn Elie
Now for the externalities.
You invested a lot of time since 2006 trying to say the externalities attached to uranium use made it a net carbon producer. But others had got there before you, and done high level research, and found otherwise. The Extern-E project took the best scientific teams available from 51 separate national labs across Europe, and investigated all the power technologies, for their external costs, including carbon footprint.
The externalities of nuke power production, were found to be on a par with those of wind power. ( Very Low).
I know you know this.
So why keep bringing it up?
It seems disingenuous to keep harping on it, when all the resources of the European Parliament, over an eight year effort came to an opposite conclusion. Were all the 150,000 scientists involved corrupt? I doubt that highly.
See....http://www.externe.info/......results
Let us deconstruct the magic phrase " Deadly Radioactive Waste". First let us look at the "deadly" part. If I were living in 1835, sitting in front of a wood burning fireplace, I would be killed if I were to crawl into the fire, and lay there while it burned around me. Fire, mishandled, is deadly, even in small portions. In big portions, like the fire bombing of Dresden, fire is the most deadly force on earth. More Japanese citizens were maimed, killed, and made homeless by General Curtiss Le May's firebombing raids on Tokyo in 1945, than were killed by the two superbombs at Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
If we were to count the number of wounds inflicted on human beings since the discovery of metals, by implements of steel, or iron, the total would be astronomical. Modern war is unthinkable without steel. The guns, tanks, planes, bayonets, helmets and missiles would not exist, had steel not been discovered, and pressed into use for evil ends, by arrogant humans. The bunkers, the coastal defenses, the physical habitations favored by the Hitlers & the Saddam Husseins among us inevitably depend upon steel for their existence. Without steel to hide behind, the level of evil open to such psychopaths would be orders of magnitude reduced.
So shall we ban fire, for all eternity? Shall we ban steel? We would be fools to even suggest it. Yet hundreds of millions have been killed, maimed, enslaved, and made miserable by the misuse of these two deadly phenomena . It is a quandary.
It is a quandary, but only if we miss the point that the deadliness , even though inherent in these things as a potential, does not affect anyone, until the meme is misused.
Evil resides in humans, not in things.
A sword that stays sheathed, is innocent. A fire in the stone hearth, cooking dinner, is a good thing.
In Gabon , Africa natural U235 reactors were created about a billion years ago by natural forces, and burned for several hundred million years, without any human participation, since human beings would not evolve for another 985 million years.
Consider the "deadly radioactive waste" produced by the planet itself at Gabon. Is it evil? Can nature be evil? I say no.
So why is the "deadly radioactive waste" produced by Indian Point different in any way from the "deadly radioactive waste" produced by the earth?
Answer: it is not. It is not evil, and is no more deadly than fire, or steel, or concrete, or lies spoken in false witness.
So much for "deadly"
Consider the smallpox virus locked in a deep freeze at the CDC HQ in Atlanta. It will remain smallpox for eternity. A half-life of forever. A single molecule of this viral material has the potential to infect the entire human race (if transmitted from victim to victim). If divided into equal inoculations, it could infect 100 million people. Yet we do not campaign to ban the CDC. Undoubtedly CDC has some compensating benefit to offer us all, making the risk acceptable. Surely CDC is trustworthy enough to rely upon their due diligence in protecting those vials. (RFK jr thinks not)....but most of us trust them to do the right thing. They are, after all, the best people this society has produced, to do this work.
Mistrust T H E M and where do we turn next? Another big quandary?
And so it goes, in advocacy. Unreal positions are championed, as recruiting posters.
We ought not run our world via half-true recruitment exaggerations.
The warming of the Hudson River that you so pointedly mischaracterize as: "thermal pollution" is N O T in any sense nuclear. All condensing steam plants contribute to the warming of the river. Although you might argue that Indian Point is a large plant, it might be pointed out that the other steam plants in aggregate are larger than Indian Point, yet you say nothing about closing them. That is what I meant by the phrase "obsessive focus". Obsessive focus on the removal of Indian Point can blind otherwise reasonable people to real-world consequences of their partially thought-out agendas.
Shall we remove A L L condensing power plants from the Hudson? How could that be accomplished? Would it be a wise course of action, or would it truly bring a collapse of the regional lifestyle, as blackouts, trebled electricity bills, and the inevitable atmospheric degradation from replacement power units ( almost certainly to be rented marine diesel units) drives commerce elsewhere, ruining tax bases, closing schools & malls, stopping progress in its tracks, leaving the unfortunate survivors with a society more akin to Mexico City, than to Cortlandt Manor of today?
If we don't close A L L the condensing steam units, then closing Indian Point will have done nothing to solve the problem as stated. A quandary , indeed !
Now, that phrase "thermal pollution". The sun, and the seasons have a much greater effect on river temperature, by a factor of hundreds of thousands, than all the condensing steam plants do, taken together. A warm day will raise the river temperature ten or fifteen degrees along the entire 300 mile length of the estuary, from east shore to west shore. The natural swing of estuarian temperatures from 33 degrees in January to 88 degrees in late August is a huge change, far , far larger than any 3 degree rise, contained to the east shore, for about one mile south, that can be measured near Indian Point.
So who is kidding whom? Were a river to encounter some geothermally warmed rocks in its transit to the sea, would that be "thermal pollution"? If a salmon encountered rocks & shoals, how would that differ from "entrainment"? There IS no entrapment. Fish are hosed away, and simply swim away unharmed.You have accepted the bias imparted to the political catchphrases you have borrowed, without ever investigating whether the original authors were leading you to truth, or instead, leading you into a delusive corral, the pen into which the helpless human cattle known as "followers" or "true believers" gets led, by canny truth-twisting political adepts.
The Helen Caldicotts, the Harvey Wassermans, the Michael Marriottes, and the Paul Leventhals of this world are very pointedly N O T scientists. Yet it is T H E Y who have set all the agendas for you. No one can argue against you following an earnest belief, which you truly hold...... but why ask an eskimo where the road to Constantinople is? Will you get a useful answer? I doubt it highly! By accepting agendas which I claim are nothing more than the self-serving career vehicles of duplicit professional misanthropes, and N O T truth as I define it, You have distanced yourself from the truly important needs of society as it really is, in search of an idealistic chimera, wondrous in aspect, but unattainable, and false at center.
This is my opinion. I offer it to you without malice. Think it over some time.
Any eco-changes on the Hudson are 15,000 years in the making. I read accounts from 1830, bemoaning the disappearance of the shad. Mankind is here, and has been since 13,000 BCE. You can't hang wordwide eco-change on IPEC, as a convenient scapegoat. IPEC is innocent.
Do your reading assignment, and report back to me Monday.
http://fishinfo999.blogspot.com/
To "Susan", let me say this: The citation of a rulemaking for one plant, has no bearing on a rulemaking for any other plant. NRC, and its founding law (The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974) builds in no such "evenhandedness" or "equalizing" doctrine, such as you seem to imply ought to hold sway. Difficult as it may seem to both Susan, and Rep. Brodsky, the NRC is given absolute latitude to make unique decisions, and conversely is given no guidance to act otherwise. Rather than this being some errant, or frivolous omission, it is an acknowlegement of the licensing structure, which is based on the 104 unique Final Safety Analysis Reports submitted by each operator uniquely committing to protect the public in 104 detailed unique ways.
NRC is a technical regulator much more than it is a legalistic regulator. In its guise as techno-regulator it handles amazingly dense, challenging masses of mutually interacting data at the limits of modern science, and therefore could not possibly be aided by a straightjacket of bumbling congressional technical mandates, from the usual cadre of legalistic legislative writers, who are the only staff available to create the imaginary new law that both Susan, and Rep. Brodsky wish for in their failed legal action.
This disconnect is at the heart of Brodsky’s misread of current US law, and is the reason the suit had no standing from the outset.
As far as The Indian Point Hemyc situation…. IPEC has contracted to double-wrap, and thus double-protect wiring made vulnerable by any Hemyc shortfalls. Thus the supposed “essence” of the Brodsky claim is old hat - proactively mitigated by responsible corporate policy , rendering Brodsky’s entire gambit superfluous.
As far as Brodsky’s implied “chiding” of NRC for its style of regulating…..simply have Congress pass a new law providing the desired behavioral guidelines for NRC, and cases such as these will be rendered unnecessary. Absent new law, Brodsky simply wasted everyone’s time.
Its ludicrous. Brodsky fails to act in the Legislative chambers, but seeks attention in the judicial chambers, in an irresponsible, bumbling attempt at breaching the separation of powers, or a cynical grab for headlines, via the use of a hopeless nonsense-brief in the courts, depending on how you look at it.
I understand it perfectly. A particular brand of marginalized, ineffective local legislator has discovered the public relations gold inherent in a good windmill tilt.
Meanwhile, the government they purport to be a part of, sits gridlocked.
What are we paying for, in hiring such people?
Drama episodes, on the public’s dime?
Apparently.
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