Early last month, Governor Eliot Spitzer and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo—both New York Democrats—asked the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reject Entergy Nuclear’s application to extend the operating licenses of Indian Point Units 2 and 3 for 20 years. The units, each rated at about 1,000 MW, are a major source of power for New York City, 35 miles to the south, and points north. Unit 1 was decommissioned in 1974.
Citing numerous potential safety issues and past safety problems at the nuclear plant, Spitzer and Cuomo said they don’t just want the two units to be shut down when their current licenses expire in September 2013 (Unit 2) and December 2015 (Unit 3). Cuomo said, “Indian Point should . . . be closed now . . . in my opinion, [it is] a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
The Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB), comprising three administrative law judges, is expected to decide by March 2008 whether New York State can intervene in the relicensing process by raising issues it thinks the NRC should consider.
Bait the hook
The Cuomo-Spitzer petition was second-page news for most of the country, but the announcement drove energy and environmental bloggers on both sides of the political see-saw into a frenzy. Opposing Indian Point is a perennial favorite for local and state politicians pandering for votes. But I suspect Cuomo and Spitzer know the ultimate fate of their 313-page petition.
Indian Point Energy Center, originally owned by Consolidated Edison (Unit 2) and the New York Power Authority (Unit 3), was purchased by Entergy Nuclear Northeast just over six years ago. After Entergy submitted a relicensing application covering both units in May 2007, Cuomo’s lawyers began working overtime.
But their efforts may have been in vain because the NRC has approved every one of the 48 nuclear-unit relicensing requests it has received to date. The process typically takes 22 to 30 months and includes parallel-track reviews of whether the reactor can continue to be operated safely and whether the plant can continue to protect the environment over the 20-year license term. By law, those are the only two areas that the NRC is required to review.
Although the agency prepares an environmental impact statement (EIS) for each license renewal, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), it’s not a full-blown EIS. The NRC has prepared a Generic Environmental Impact Statement for License Renewal of Nuclear Plants (GEIS) that assesses environmental issues common to all 104 nuclear stations operating in the U.S. Entergy must assess environmental issues at Indian Point that are at odds with the GEIS as well as other site-specific issues.
What’s more, NEPA does not require the NRC to perform an environmental review of a unit’s existing operating license. It does, however, mandate that the NRC make a studied assessment of “reasonable alternatives [including] those that are practical or feasible from a technical and economic standpoint.” NEPA says this assessment must be developed “using common sense rather than [being] simply desirable from the standpoint of the applicant” and must “include the alternative of no action.” In other words, the process takes into account how a unit will be expected to perform in the future, not how it has performed in the past.
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