Local Officials Take Steps to Respond to Indian Point Incident as Federal Agencies Bide Their Time
By Paul Ziobro
WASHINGTON – Less than 30 miles from Norwalk’s City Hall lies the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which, in the case of an accident or even a terrorist attack, could spew out radioactive materials over hundreds of miles.
As federal agencies pore over the plant’s emergency preparedness plans, some local officials are taking their own precautionary measures, and the members of at least one family have taken action to distance themselves from the plant’s potential threat.
Concerns about the Buchanan, N.Y., plant were among the reasons Evelyn Cunningham and her family moved to Wilton last summer from Ossining, N.Y., which is less than 10 miles from the plant. Now that she is living more than 30 miles from Indian Point, Cunningham said, she is more concerned with her husband’s commute to New York City than with a nuclear accident. Nevertheless, she said, she still thinks the plant should be closed.
“If something happened at Indian Point, everyone would be in danger. There’s nothing that could keep everyone safe,” Cunningham said.
Connecticut residents have two related concerns about Indian Point: first, that a nuclear accident or terrorist attack could threaten all of Fairfield County; and second, that the absence of an adequate emergency response plan could lead to clogged roads that would endanger the safety of a wide swath of Connecticut and New York.
The plant’s spent fuel storage pools-which store radioactive fuel after it is removed from the reactor core-are attractive targets for terrorists, said Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, a Cambridge, Mass., think tank. The pools store the cesium-137 from the two pressurized water reactors. But if the pools were drained of water, radioactive material would be released into the air that could cover all of Fairfield County, Thompson said.
“These pools are packed so tight with radioactive material [that] if water was lost, the fuel will catch fire, burn and release large amounts of radioactivity,” said Thompson, who has over 25 years’ experience in assessing risk and security at nuclear sites. “If wind is moving toward Connecticut, it will affect a substantial portion of the state.”
If the fuel pools caught fire, the radioactive cesium would settle on land, vegetation and buildings and emit high doses of gamma rays for decades, Thompson said. Residents living hundreds of miles from the plant, depending on weather conditions and the size of the plume, could experience a two percent increase in cancer rates if they did not abandon their homes and render the area “uninhabitable.” he said.
A recent New York state report conducted by James Lee Witt Associates, a consulting group headed by the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), concluded that major flaws in Indian Point’s emergency response plan could threaten the safety of the 20 million people within a 50-mile radius of the plant.
As for concern about inadequate emergency preparedness plans, some towns have already taken precautionary measures-just in case.
Westport and New Canaan have passed resolutions calling for further scrutiny of the evacuation plans at Indian Point and urging the plant’s closure, and a host of communities have looked inward to strengthen their own evacuation plans.
Westport and Weston have distributed and stockpiled potassium iodide pills, which prevent the thyroid gland from absorbing radioactive iodine, “just to prepare for a radiological event that might happen,” said Diane Ferrell, First Selectman of Westport.
And Norwalk soon expects to hire a full-time emergency management director and is moving toward installing a dispatch system that both police and fire departments can use, said Councilman Kevin Poruban, chairman of the Norwalk Common Council’s Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee.
Many public officials and opponents of the plant are accusing FEMA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of taking too much time to assess Indian Point’s plans and thus postponing any improvements to them.
“As state officials, we need federal help,” state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said. “We need it in resources. We need the science that federal officials can make available to us. We need it now.”
A major concern of lawmakers is that the emergency plans could not handle a spontaneous or “shadow” evacuation by masses of residents who had not been advised to leave.
“I think you need to take a closer look at the challenges created by Indian Point’s location in a high-population area and the possible problems created by both shadow and spontaneous evacuations,” New York Rep. Sue Kelly said to NRC and FEMA representatives at a February congressional hearing on emergency plans at Indian Point. Kelly’s district includes the power plant.
A March 2002 Marist Institute for Public Opinion poll conducted for Riverkeeper, a New York-based environmental group pushing to close the plant, found that 60 percent of residents within 50 miles of Indian Point would attempt to evacuate in the event of a major accident. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4, who lives within the 50-mile radius, has said he would attempt to evacuate even if not told to do so.
“I believe that if you are anywhere near that plant, you’re leaving,” Shays, chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, said at a March 10 hearing in Washington. “And I will tell you this, if I had a child, or my wife and I were in New Canaan, and there was a problem at that plant, I’d be leaving New Canaan faster than you could imagine.”
Another major criticism has been that federal agencies fail to distinguish between the implications of an accident and those of a well-coordinated, terrorist attack on the plant. During his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush said diagrams of American nuclear plants were found in Afghanistan.
“I think we’re in the Stone Age of planning for security against terrorist attacks on our nuclear facilities,” said Blumenthal, who supports closing the plant until emergency planning deficiencies are addressed. “And, in a sense, Indian Point is just a poster child for the lack of planning and safeguarding of these facilities across the country.”
FEMA is now waiting for New York state and several of its counties to submit by May 2 parts of their emergency plans, such as letters of agreement with response groups and local schools’ evacuation plans, before determining whether there is a “reasonable assurance” of public safety. Otherwise, FEMA and New York have 120 days to correct any major deficiencies or submit a plan to do so before FEMA sends its evaluation to the NRC for another review.
If FEMA rejects the plans and the NRC concurs, as it has always done before, Entergy Nuclear Operations Inc., the New Orleans-based owner of Indian Point, would have 120 days to correct the problems or “there could be actions taken to protect public health and safety,” including closing the plant, NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said. None of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors has been shut down because of inadequate emergency plans.
Jim Steets, communications director for Entergy, defended the plant’s emergency plans. He said the largest possible release from the plant would be narrow, “like a plume out of a chimney,” and would diminish to only a trace beyond 10 miles. There would be little, if any, impact on Connecticut, he said.
“We’re too far away from the Connecticut line to have any ramifications other than maybe some,” Steets said. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario that would cause anyone to do anything.”
Steets said anti-nuclear groups, in drumming up support to close Indian Point, have circulated misleading information to stir emotions. “You’ve got a staunch anti-nuclear group that has existed since the plants were built who have used every method at their disposal to scare people, with some success,” he said.
Indian Point, which provides 2,000 megawatts of energy-enough to power almost 2 million homes-to Westchester County and New York City, has had incidents in the past that threatened its license. In 1993, the NRC fined the New York Power Authority, which owned the plant at the time, $300,000 for safety violations. In 2000, the plant accidentally released a small amount of radioactive steam, and the NRC gave Indian Point the first-ever “red” designation, one step from being shut down.
Indian Point boasts a laundry list of security measures: razor-wire fencing, surveillance cameras around the full perimeter, FBI background checks for employees, “hand geometry” sensors that scan handprints for admission to certain areas, explosive detectors, metal detectors and X-ray machines-all before anyone could reach the reactors, according to Steets.
The reactor core — which would emit radioactive material if it were breached and its contents were exposed, for example, to a chemical explosion or fire — sits low inside a containment building surrounded by four to six feet of cement and six inches of steel to ensure minimal release during a meltdown, Steets said. Even then, backup cooling systems, pumps and power supplies are available and the entire reactor can be shut down “instantaneously” if needed, Steets said.
Steets said the core could withstand a hit from an airplane, much like the one that flew over the plant on route to crashing into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. But structural tests on containment facilities to determine their ability to withstand such impacts have yet to be completed, the Congressional Research Service reports.
In any case, critics of the plant say the spent-fuel pools, which house used radioactive rods, pose a greater threat than the reactor since they are enclosed in less-protected structures. The two pools cool 1,400 tons of spent fuel rods under at least 20 feet of water, which, if drained, could cause a zirconium fire and render up to 37,000 square miles uninhabitable, Riverkeeper executive director Alex Matthiessen said at the March National Security Subcommittee hearing.
Although Indian Point’s security measures meet NRC and FEMA requirements, the Witt report said the federal standards need revision to achieve a higher level of public protection.
John Wiltse, director of the state Office of Emergency Management, recommends creating basic regional evacuation plans adaptable for use during natural disasters, such as hurricanes and floods, or man-made threats, such as terrorist attacks or a nuclear meltdown. “I think that’s practical, realistic and achievable,” he said in an interview. He said that he could not give a timeframe for setting up a regional plan but that implementing it would require federal dollars to coordinate efforts among federal, state and local emergency planning officials.
Wiltse said Connecticut would create an evacuation plan specifically for a threat at Indian Point only if the federal government mandated it by expanding the emergency planning zone to towns more than 10 miles from the plant-a decision, he said, that “needs to be based not on emotion or fear but on scientific evidence.”
The 10 and 50-mile emergency planning zones have different requirements to ensure public safety from radioactive releases based on the immediate risk to the public, according to testimony of Donna J. Miller Hastie, an emergency preparedness specialist, at a congressional hearing last June.
To prevent immediately life-threatening exposure to the radioactive plume, people within the 10-mile zone would be evacuated and possibly also given potassium iodide pills to minimize radioactive exposure, Hastie said. While there are no evacuation plans for the area between 10 and 50 miles from the plant, she said, officials would have to monitor water and food sources to prevent “ingestion exposure” of radioactive products.
The Marist poll last year found that 77 percent of the people surveyed who lived within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point felt there should be an evacuation plan for where they live.
Wiltse said, however, that applying the emergency preparedness requirements for the 10-mile zone to a 50-mile radius would be a massive undertaking and possibly an unnecessary one, considering that during the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, there was no mass evacuation from New York City.
“People are under some impression that it’s magic, you click your fingers and people just evacuate and then they’re taken care of. It’s a little more complex than that,” Wiltse said.
“Evacuation itself, if not done correctly and if not done in an appropriate scope, can be more dangerous than what you’re evacuating from,” he added.
Sgt. Paul Vance, a spokesman for the State Police Division of Homeland Security, said since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Connecticut developed emergency plans providing assistance and evacuation routes for emergencies in New York City. Vance said these plans could be applied to an incident at Indian Point.
“It’s a matter of taking those plans, tweaking them and improving on them to make them workable in the event of an emergency at that facility,” Vance said.
Weston First Selectman Woody Bliss said the town used last summer’s distribution of potassium iodide pills to test its disaster distribution system and to look for ways to improve its emergency plan.
“It’s a working process you keep working on, you keep testing it, what-if-ing it and looking for ways to do better,” Bliss said.
Wilton has not been focusing on an Indian Point threat, according to First Selectman Paul Hannah, who called it a regional issue and said that the town’s response plans are part of the work it does to prepare for terrorist attacks. Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy said the plant is not “a front-burner issue.”
Jackie Horkachuck of Norwalk, who put her name an on-line petition to close the plant, said she thinks local precautions are lacking, and that makes her feel uncomfortable even though she lives nearly 30 miles from the plant. “I know we’re outside of the 10 miles,” she said, “but that’s still too darn close to me.”
Published in The Hour, in Connecticut.
