Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 61
If you want a good indication of how far the Hudson River has come in the past fifty years, consider
the one million gallons of radioactive wastewater currently sitting in tanks at the shuttered Indian
Point Nuclear Power Plant.
Located forty miles north of Manhattan on the banks of the Hudson, the plant closed in 2021 at which
point the New Jersey based company Holtec began the long process of decommissioning it. Part of
that process involves figuring out what to do with all the radioactive materials on site, including the
water that had been sitting in the spent fuel pools. Although much of the hazardous materials could
be filtered out, the water would still contain tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that’s difficult to
remove. Nevertheless, Holtec announced in February 2023 that it planned to start discharging the
wastewater into the Hudson River over the summer.
Outrage from the public was immediate, and quickly grew. There were rallies, meetings, and a
petition signed by over half a million New Yorkers. The state legislature, not known for its expedience,
quickly drew up and passed legislation that would prevent the discharge. Governor Kathy Hochul
signed it in August, just six months after the issue had come to statewide prominence.
Holtec’s plan to discharge the wastewater into the Hudson was not unusual. As the company
explained with increasing exasperation in public meeting after public meeting, not only was the
discharge legal, it was no different from the regular radioactive discharges into the Hudson that the
plant had undertaken in its 59 year history. Those discharges had been routine, regulated, and
ignored by most of the public. So why was the reaction to the plant’s final discharge so different?
Some said that the public hadn’t been fully aware of the discharges in the past, although many
activists had been tirelessly warning of Indian Point’s effect on the health of the river for decades.
Others argued that the discharges had been grudgingly accepted while the plant was still providing
power for the region as the cost of doing business. But Richard Webster, who serves on the state
oversight board that’s tasked with monitoring the decommissioning had a different theory. The
discharges hadn’t changed. What changed was the Hudson.
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