“Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list,” concluded Leuren Moret, a radiation specialist trained at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., in an op-ed piece that appeared in The Japan Times in 2004.
A growing number of scientists and emergency planners are calling on federal and state regulators to shut down the Indian Point nuclear reactor about 40 miles north of New York City, on the Hudson River in Buchanan, New York. While many of Indian Point’s critics have expressed concerns about safety at the nuclear plant for years, the nuclear crisis in Japan has caused their ranks to swell over the past several weeks.
“Whether you’re for or against re-licensing Indian Point, we can all agree on one thing: Before dumping radioactive waste at the site for at least 60 years after it’s closed, our communities deserve a thorough review of the environmental, public health, and safety risks such a move would present,” said Schneiderman in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
To put this in perspective, the U.S. government has invested $9 billion developing a storage site for reprocessed nuclear spent fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which is perhaps the most studied geological structure in the world. Despite this enormous investment in building an underground, secure storage site, Nevada’s less than 3 million residents have refused to endorse the project as a result of safety and environmental concerns. If storing spent nuclear fuel in deep inside a mountain surrounded on all sides by about 100 miles of empty desert is unsafe, it seems odd that the NRC would endorse a plan to store the same nuclear fuel within a stone’s throw of roughly 15% of the nation’s entire population.
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