September 1
GUEST: Brian P.J. Cronin, award winning environmental reporter for the Highlands Current in Beacon, NY, and adjunct professor of journalism at Marist College, talks about the troubling decommission of the area's nuclear power plant.
We do not dump to the river
Nuclear reactors have a long shelf-life. In fact, they are permanent. The spent fuel rods will remain in the earth for millions of years after the plants are officially decommissioned. That's because there never was any way to get rid of the rods. That was the logical mistake made time and time again by our media and our politicians.
Nuclear power plants are like burying "dirty" bombs all over the earth and pretending that they will never go off. But experience an earthquake, a tsunami, a military conflict or a terrorist attack, and you are done for. Not everyone, of course. But in the case of Indian Point, it would be 44,000 people, according to Energy Facts, a research project on the consequences of an accident at the nuclear facility.
An accident at one of Indian Point’s reactors on the scale of the recent catastrophe in Japan could cause a swath of land down to the George Washington Bridge to be uninhabitable for generations due to radiation contamination. A release of radiation on the scale of Chernobyl’s would make Manhattan too radioactively contaminated to live in if the city fell within the plume.
Congress and the media.
So now the insanity is that nuclear power will help stop global warming. Forget that nuclear energy it is now way more expensive than wind or solar, and that most of New York City would be uninhabitable after a major spill. But Wall Street hedge funds can handle all that risk. So why should we worry?
