The company that owns the shuttered nuclear plant that once provided the bulk of New York City’s zero-carbon electricity is suing the state over a law passed last year specifically to block the Indian Point power station from carrying out routine releases of treated wastewater into the Hudson River, HuffPost has learned.
He pointed to a 1983 Supreme Court decision that ruled in favor of California regulators’ right to restrict nuclear power plants based on the economic toll that the facilities could take on the surrounding area. While he said locals only learned about the tritium discharges after Indian Point shut down, “once they found out there was enormous outcry.”
Compared to the amount of electricity fission produces, managing long-term nuclear waste is a relatively minor problem. But the federal government is currently hamstrung. Federal law stipulates that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain serve as the first permanent site for nuclear waste. Congress hasn’t amended the law since the Obama administration mothballed the project more than a decade ago, preventing federal regulators from considering alternative locations for a nuclear waste dump.
A turbine generator used to produce power is seen at Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York, on April 26, 2021.At a decommissioning hearing last year in the Hudson Valley suburb where Indian Point’s employees once lived, one anti-nuclear protester ― a Manhattan lawyer who left the city after the Sept. 11 terror attacks ― blamed errant radiation from the power plant for the cancer she developed a few years ago.