New Indian Pt. Cooling System: Years in the Making, and More to Come
By LISA W. FODERARO
The New York Times
November 14, 2003

A day after New York State laid out rigorous requirements for the Indian Point nuclear plant that were intended to reduce fish kills, environmentalists and other critics disputed the plant owner's claims that a new cooling system would cost more than $1 billion.

Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the owner of the plant in Westchester County, said a "closed-cycle" cooling system, which would reduce fish mortality by 97 percent, could be so expensive as to cause it to close the plant.

On one level, that is precisely what plant opponents would like to see. But the environmental groups and the state legislator who sued the State Department of Environmental Conservation to compel the installation of a new cooling system say that they were not motivated by a desire to see the plant shut down.

Rather, long before Sept. 11, 2001, and the concerns about the plant's vulnerability to terrorism, environmental groups were pushing the federal government and then the state to force Indian Point to install a new cooling system. Such a system would use recycled water and avoid sucking in up to 2.5 billion gallons of water a day from the Hudson River, killing millions of fish and their eggs and larvae each year.

The environmental group Riverkeeper — a party to the lawsuit against the state brought last year by Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the singer Pete Seeger and others — said that over a year, Indian Point's current cooling system withdrew the equivalent of the entire volume of the river from Battery Park to Troy, N.Y.

Riverkeeper's predecessor, the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Scenic Hudson, have worked for 30 years to get Indian Point and other nonnuclear power plants along the Hudson to adopt closed cooling systems.

In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency, in its enforcement of the Clean Water Act, issued a similar draft permit in 1975 calling for the same kind of cooling technology the state recommended on Wednesday.

Years of hearings followed that draft permit; then the issue was formally delayed for 10 years, beginning in 1981. That was the year the groups signed a landmark agreement with several utilities and state and federal agencies that, among other things, stopped a fiercely contested pumped storage plant that Con Edison wanted to build on Storm King Mountain north of West Point, N.Y.

In exchange for the withdrawal of that proposal, the environmental groups and the regulators agreed that the utilities did not have to install the newer cooling technology for 10 years. After 1991 came more studies and negotiations but no action, and Indian Point was allowed to operate its present cooling system even after its permit expired.

So while environmental groups and Mr. Brodsky applauded the state's move this week, they focused even more on what they saw as a lax timetable for implementation, possibly as long as a decade.

Under the draft permit, which will enter a 90-day comment period, Entergy would not have to build a cooling system until it received a license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The license for one of the plant's reactors expires in 2013, while the other expires in 2015. Entergy bought the reactors in 2000 and 2001.

A spokesman for the N.R.C., Neil A. Sheehan, said that nuclear operators must apply for renewal at least five years before the license is to expire. The agency then typically takes two years to grant or deny the license, which in Entergy's case, would bring the process to 2010. The new cooling system would then undergo an environmental review, a process that could take months.

"We've had 30 years of delay," said Warren P. Reiss, general counsel for Scenic Hudson. "This is the last ecological insult to the river. There is a remedy that is known and available, and Entergy should be obliged to implement it at the soonest possible time."

Entergy says the new cooling system would be so costly to build — $1.6 billion by its estimate — that it may opt not to renew its license. Jim Steets, an Entergy spokesman, said the figure included about $600 million in lost revenues from a nine-month shutdown of the plant during construction. "We may or may not apply for it," Mr. Steets said of the license renewal. "An order to install cooling towers may preclude it."

But a consultant hired by environmental groups said such a system would cost far less, $200 million to $360 million, said David K. Gordon, a senior lawyer for Riverkeeper. And the groups argue that a long shutdown would not be necessary.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Riverkeeper has been a forceful advocate of Indian Point's closing. While the group says it is not using fish mortality as another weapon against the plant, it does acknowledge a link.

"They have no right to kill over a billion fish each year," said Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper. "If a new cooling system helps make Entergy's enterprise unprofitable and forces them to shut down the plant, all the better.

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