| Review: Rory Kennedy’s
Indian Point
Kennedy Maize
Electricity Daily
September 13, 2004
While both are left-oriented documentary filmmakers, Rory
Kennedy is no Michael Moore. And while both films address
issues resulting from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center in New York City, Indian Point:
Imagining the Unimaginable is no Fahrenheit 9/11.
While Moore,
whatever you make of his extreme politics and personal
characteristics, is a creative, lively, antic guy
whose films are worth seeing for their craft alone, Kennedy
is plodding, unimaginative, a practitioner of video hackery.
Her 42-minute film, which ran for the first time last Thursday
evening on HBO, is basically an infomercial for her brother
Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his environmental group, Riverkeeper,
which has been trying to shut the Indian Point nuclear
plant for years, to no avail.
So 9/11 provides another hammer to
swing at the nuclear power nail. No new names or faces
here, except for an unpersuasive
whistleblowing former plant security guard. Kennedy was
unable to get any New York politicians on camera, including
Sens.
Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gov. George Pataki,
or Mayor Michael Bloomberg. So who do we get? Rep. Ed Markey
(D-Mass.), long the antinuclear stalwart in Congress (who,
by the way, is looking a little
old and tired these days). Bobby Jr., displaying his rhetorical
skills by posing worst case scenarios with vanishing probability
and saying, “It could happen.” David Lochbaum
of the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressing concern
but not much else. Helen Caldicott, the Aussie anti-nuke
physician describing the nauseating symptoms of radiation
poisoning.
But how in the world does comedian Al Franken qualify
as an expert on terrorism, or anything else? That’s
right, Al Franken; he wasn’t even funny.
On the other side,
Entergy ducked the camera, leaving the field to NRC Commissioner
Ed McGaffigan and Marvin Fertel
of the Nuclear Energy Institute. They did their best, but
were overwhelmed by the suppositions, what ifs, and probability-empty
scenarios designed to scare (but which I found boooooooring).
There
were also more than a few non-sequiters. For example, early
in the film, Bobby complains that there is not a “no-fly” zone
over the plant (for perfectly understandable reasons). Later,
in a chopper flying over the plant, he notes that he’s
getting no attention from any kind of security. Maybe that’s
because there isn’t a no-fly zone over the plant?
Also,
disparaging Sandia tests years ago that flew a fighter
jet into a simulated containment and found no significant
damage to the concrete (but plenty to the jet), the film
makes the point that a fuel-loaded 767 is a lot bigger
and
potentially more damaging. Could we elaborate on the forces
involved? Then, during one of the chopper sequences, Bobby
notes that if they were in a Cessna 172, they could fly
it into the nuke in a matter of seconds. But a Cessna 172
is
a butterfly, compared even to the Sandia fighter.
The whistleblower
claimed that Entergy wasn’t spending
enough on security, saying “There’s no budget
for training,” implying that the guards aren’t
trained. But the film describes him as a former trainer of
the guard force at the plant, and even shows film taken during
force-on-force training exercises. The film argues that 20-25 percent of the guard force – accompanied
by shots of a grossly overweight guard – are so obese
and out of shape that they have trouble going from prone
to vertical. Yet the training exercise video doesn’t
show that at all. The guards are all mobile, agile, and hostile.
The film, while hostile to Indian Point, is neither agile
nor
mobile.
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