U.S. court asked to block restart of aging, damaged Indian Point nuclear reactor

In response, Friends of the Earth, joined by the Nuclear Information Resource Service and Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, have filed the emergency petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for writ of mandamus (agency action unreasonably delayed) to prevent restart of the flawed reactor while the NRC considers Friends of the Earth’s request for the NRC to determine whether the unit can be made safe to operate. Given concerns that Entergy is racing to restart unit 2 in the face of mounting opposition, the petition asks that the Court issue an order directing the NRC to compel Entergy to power down reactor unit 2 pending final adjudication of the petition, in case the reactor has been rushed into service already.

FOE says that neither Entergy nor the NRC has provided a root cause analysis of the unprecedented degradation of bolts at Indian Point 2. Entergy hypothesizes that the bolts became brittle because of exposure to radiation and a hostile high temperature environment, but it offered no analysis to support it. In fact, Entergy has simply replaced the bolts  without providing an analysis of why so many bolts were degraded at Indian Point (one-third) compared with other similar reactors (average less than 3 percent), or whether the remaining 557 bolts can be expected to hold, despite being exposed to the same environment. The company’s objective is to restart the reactor in June, in time for the profitable peak summer air conditioning season. It has said that it will conduct an analysis of why the bolts broke or disappeared, but appears not willing to delay restarting Unit 2 under such a review has been done.

“This is a matter of common sense denied: if a machine breaks, you have to figure out what is wrong and then fix it,” said Damon Moglen of Friends of the Earth. “Instead, at Indian Point, Entergy has decided that the priority is to get the damaged reactor up and running by summer to protect their profits. And the NRC is acting like a lap dog and not the watch dog assuring that the reactors are safe to operate. It has been repeatedly suggested that the NRC is a ‘captured’ agency, captive of the very industry they are directed by Congress to regulate.  This is a disgraceful and shocking example of that corporate capture.”

“In my day, the NRC was a real, independent regulator,” said Dave Freeman, who was the head of the New York Power Authority in the mid-1990s, which operated the Indian Point nuclear reactors at that time. “Now the agency seems primarily concerned with facilitating rather than regulating the nuclear industry.”

FOE says that just as the Space Shuttle Challenger was brought down by a seemingly minor faulty O-ring, Indian Point is in danger from untimely degradation and damage to key bolts. Located a mere twenty-six miles from New York City, a radiation release at Indian Point could reach Times Square in as little as ninety minutes in the right weather conditions, making evacuation of New York City impossible.

The Indian Point reactors’ licenses expired in 2013 and 2015, respectively, and the plant is operating beyond its 40-year life span while the NRC considers whether to extend the license for an additional twenty years.