By Roger Witherspoon For more than a decade, it has been impossible for operators of the Indian Point nuclear power plant to stop highly radioactive reactor and spent fuel pool coolant from leaking into the groundwater and migrating to the Hudson River. And despite assurances from Entergy that this time will be different, there is no indication that the company has developed the ability to prevent the latest uncontrolled leaks from following the underground waterway into the

By Roger Witherspoon New York State is prepared to close 40 years of intermittent and costly legal wrangling over the annual destruction of billions of fish by the twin Indian Point nuclear power plants in the productive Hudson River estuary if the plant agrees to shut down during peak spawning and hatching seasons for the river’s major fish populations. But such a deal, if ratified, would mean the plants could be shut from 13 weeks to 32 weeks, an enforced idleness which cou

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article William Holston was obviously exasperated. For nearly two hours he had fielded the brunt of increasingly detailed queries from the three Administrative Law Judges, on the adequacy of a deliberately vague set of guidelines to oversee the operations of the Indian Point nuclear power plants for the next 20 years.  And though Entergy had four of its own experts on the extended witness stand, most of the judges’ queries were direc

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Robert Aleksick was emphatic. “FAC is like roaches,” he said, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of exasperation. “Where you see one, there are bound to be more hidden away.” Aleksick should know about these hidden pests. As president of CSI Technologies, Inc., he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on FACs, or Flow Assisted Corrosion, a condition of degradation on the inside of pipes carrying superheated, radioactive w

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Killing the chickens was the worst. For a 53-year-old organic farmer like Sachiko Sato, killing a chicken was not a novel event.  “We kill chickens for food. We sell chickens. We raise chickens to eat,” she said. “But this was different. This was too much.” She was sitting in the sparse conference room in the Ossining, NY headquarters of the environmental group Riverkeeper, having lunch and recalling the life-changing events

By Roger Witherspoon In an unprecedented move, the environmental agencies of New Jersey and New York have begun forcing scores of their largest water users to either retrofit their plants with modern cooling systems which won’t kill billions of fish annually or cease operating. Environmental analysts in the two states have found that these facilities kill more than 20 billion juvenile and mature fish annually in New York and another nine billion in New Jersey.  These operati