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 Download and/or Print Article The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy. “He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers. “They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we us

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article To the US Government, Operation Tomodachi was just another big humanitarian aid and rescue mission in which the nearest Navy fleet and  many land-based personnel rushed to the aid of an ally in need. In this case, the northeast coast of Japan had been flattened by a massive earthquake and tsunami which destroyed infrastructure and killed some 20,000 citizens. Operation Tomodachi – named after the Japanese word for Friend – be

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 For the past decade, Entergy and supporters have proclaimed that its twin Indian Point reactors are all that keeps the trains running, the street lights on and school buildings operating throughout New York City and neighboring Westchester County. Entergy, which actually provides about 5 percent of the electricity used in the area, can get away with its misleading advertising for only one more year.  The New York Power Author

The statistics of nuclear reactor meltdowns are stark. Despite improvements in technology and upgrades in safety, on average one of the world’s 500 or so  nuclear power plants suffers a full or partial meltdown every other year. For the millions of people living within a 50 mile radius of a nuclear installation, their odds are 1/1000 of being affected by spreading radiation from an out of control reactor. Last June, as the world watched the metastasizing radiological disaster

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Entergy Nuclear has asked federal regulators to override New York State’s weapons law to allow Indian Point guards to carry heavier weaponry on the nuclear site than standard commercial security guards. The request comes ten years after terrorists flew a hijacked plane directly over the twin containment domes on the Hudson River en route to a suicidal dive into the World Trade Center 25 miles to the south. In the interim, Ent

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article All six nuclear reactors in the New York/ New Jersey metropolitan area are operating “in a manner that preserved public health and safety” and therefore will receive the minimal oversight during the coming year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared in its annual assessment. In separate reviews, the NRC concluded that New Jersey’s Hope Creek, Oyster Creek, and twin Salem Generating Station plants and the two Indian Point

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article A federal court suit challenging the right of nuclear plant operators to store high level radioactive waste on site for 60 years or more was filed yesterday by the attorney generals of Vermont, New York, and Connecticut. The suit, filed in the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC., seeks to overturn a temporary storage rule adopted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Dec. 23, 2010. The NRC’s order, formally known as the Was

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Federal regulators have fined Florida Power & Light $70,000 for improperly maintaining hundreds of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel at their Turkey Point 3 power plant near Homestead, in violation of their operating license. The fine concludes a  six month investigation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission  into the degradation of chemicals in the spent fuel pool designed to prevent fission between the thousands of 12-fo

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article For the past 20 years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has used an epidemiologically invalid study to reassure the public that the continuous release of radioactive material from power plants into the surrounding regions did not contribute to increases in cancer. To correct that unsubstantiated claim, the NRC has contracted with the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a two year study of both cancer incidence and mortal

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Nuclear safety experts warn that a proposal to increase profits at the Hope Creek nuclear power plant by adding cobalt fuel rods to its 100-ton uranium fuel mix could jeopardize the structural integrity of its entire spent fuel pool and should be changed or scrapped. In addition, the presence of Cobalt could complicate the delicate balancing of heat within the reactor core which is essential to ensuring the even burning of th