This might be the first official call to separate the church from chernobyl.

Nice.

Seperation of Church and Chernobyl?
What next you'll want me to get rid of the uranium rod I have dressed as a goat sitting in the kresh I set up inside the city court house in honor of the holidays.

How dare you!

Hope Spitzer closes the plant down when he comes in to office. Any word on that?

The US needs more nuclear power. The only alternative is increasingly expensive oil/LNG which will further enrich unreliable and undeserving foreign sources.

I hadnt heard of Indian Point before; but, it seems to represent a serious threat to NY and to nuclear power's safety record. Unless the public has confidence in clean, safe nuclear energy, there will be tremendous back pressure to the buildig of more nuclear plants.

What is wrong with NY politicians and the Federal Government? WHy the hell havent they come down like a load of uranium on Indian Point management?

I thought this blog was just great. You made your point and gave me a laugh at the same time. It seems we can market everything these days. We need to teach our kids how to distinguish between facts and advertising.

I may be even more cynical than you are. I would assume that the lady-minister-saint-nuclear employee is a paid actor. In this business-oriented environment, in which WalMart features happy employees talking about the WalMart culture, it's pretty clear that much of today's advertising is just plain fabrication.

An evacuation plan for the NY metro area ???? Fuhgeddaboudit. Ever see the L.I.E. or any of the river crossings on a weekday morinng ? Shut the plant and buy the electricity from Enron. Oops; can't do that. OK, then; buy it from Quebec. Nice, clean hydro power. And they can take all the money we'll pay them and buy more New York real estate.

Quoting James Lee Witt, whose company wrote the farcical New Orleans Evacuation Plan
that resulted in 150 deaths, is not recommended among knowlegeable commentators these days.
Not only was Witt's FEMA AWOL during the 1995 heat wave that killed 700 poor, elderly black people,
but after Katrina, Witt had the gall to show up in Louisiana in a half-million dollar 45foot luxury recreational vehicle to push Verizon phone contracts on local municipalities, municipalities whose constituencies were at that time living on the streets..

Your entire article timewarps us back to 1991, when hysteria was fashionable,
paranoia seemed not insane, and nobody knew anything.

I guess you are counting on a few anti-knowlege hardrock holdouts STILL knowing nothing,
and that might work, among the ladies-afternoon-tea "activists" in Beverely Hills & Scarsdale,
but fact is, the Indian Point myths cooked up by the pathetic Marilyn Elie and her
Green party hystericists were nonsense when cooked up in 2001,
and are accepted everywhere as obvious , proven nonsense today.

Good luck re-pushing them in 2006 and beyond.
Its a bit like seeing the 1918 temperance movement revived.
Very Quaint.

That's nice Harry. Those various other serious failings of one of the critics of the plant have nothing to do with the danger of the powerplant itself and the failed evacuation plan.

Does that evacuation plan actually appear workable to you? That number of people, in that time frame on those roads?

What of the fact that the 1 trial run was labeled a failure?

And please, so much snide sexism so early in the morning is likely to give you indigestion.

The essence of humanity,
as opposed to mere hominidry,
is the control of difficult scenarios,
such as fire,
mines,
cities,
political groups,
etc,
etc.
We have mastered the use
of the self-smelting metals,
and mankind's future
depends almost entirely
on maintaining that edge.
you can't go back.

In 2006, to be human
is to be nuclear.

But not to worry...
we are retiring that phrase
to be kind to you.

Actually Harry- the whole point of the post was that Entergy is NOT controlling Nuke Power safely. That Entergy is giving Nuke power a bad name by being irresponsible in their actions.

Nowhere does it say that all nuke power should cease.

If you want to make nuke power more popular, you need to regulate it and make it safe. You need to hold companies accountable for their disposal practices, for developing emergency measures and for protecting their facilities. You also can't leave the burdon only on certain kinds of communities.

So if you're looking for a ludite to attack, you might want to read elsewhere.

If you had any facts on your side about supposed bad practices by Entergy,

as opposed to nuclear power in general,

your last post would make some sense.

However, Entergy is one of the industry leaders in doing things right,

and manages ailing plants for less responsible owners (Cooper Plant in Nebraska, for one),


improving them, and teaching best practices to those who need the coaching.

No.

I think you've accepted the Riverkeeper public relations blurbs as bible,

and cannot now get around an "accepted movement stance",

that Indian Point MUST be bad in some way,

otherwise why would Riverkeeper bother?

Why, really!

They needed a cause.

Robert Boyle, the founder quit

over irregularities perpetrated by RFK jr,

and the organization had a choice--grow or die.

Their growth choice

was to attack a plant they had coexisted with

since Indian Point provided

the $12 million seed money to found Riverkeeper in 1981.

It worked.

Riverkeeper revenues peaked at $3 million in 2003,

ten times their previous top.

But they were scientifically very weak. No real expertise.

The workup upon which you base your position....

that of a huge result emanating from a damaged
nuclear American energy station,

is myth.

It was a useful myth, to its promoters,

who granted themselves creative license,

or rather the specious license of overconcern.

Let me explain.

Feeling strongly about their cause, their campaign,


they jettisoned balance at every turn,

opting
for the bizarre, the grotesque, the lurid,


entertaining the maximum dosage of cynicism,

skepticism, and yes, exaggeration.

They courted fear, wherever it could be created.

Painting the degreed peer community empowered
by association with nuclear energy as inherently corrupt,

(on no evidence, I might say),

they granted themselves license to reject
the stated opinions of the only experts
our society has in this area.

Inexperienced pseudoexperts or counter-experts were
given hero status for making baldly false assertions,
assertions which granted personal fame,
tax free foundation work, and lecture work,
but a person on the dais at a rubber chicken conclave
is most definitely NOT simultaneously
in the laboratory or power plant, assessing first hand,
the adequacy of the current protective technologies.

Meanwhile, those who WERE in the labs & power plants
were given no credence. Do you see what I see here?
It has the look of an anti-science cult, does it not?

And indeed, that is what it is.

Quoting its own mock-science, it fills you with
ire about the mundane-as-apocalypse,
and you accept it, because it empowers you
to gather listeners.

It is also entirely false.

All these demonizing negative-imagination pieces
are based, each and every one,
on the gleaning of a single factoid,
and its spinning up to misrepresent
some non-existent whole.

The issue-dredging tactic which gleans
all these pseudofacts is not based
on any true familiarity with the process
which is to be "exposed", but consists
of he-said she-said chains of immense
length, mythoids retold & retold
in non-technical rumor blogs until
by the normal process of
exaggeration-for-effect, they balloon
to really useful public relations proportions,
just as their bloated and imaginary untruth
loses any connection with the thing talked about.
You know this, I know this,
and any reader above the age of 12 knows this.

And yet, blogs being just blogs,

you play for the cheap seats,

repeat & embellish what you've been told,

and seek common sojourners, with common dreams,

common paranoia, common neurosis.

But..you will note the tongue in cheek aspect
of almost all the replies posted.

Your readers , just like us,

also know what you are about.

So there it is.

A quaint retro outreach,

a lust for the 1970's, when everything was simple,

and mixing up nuclear weapons (bad)
with
nuclear generated electricity (humanity's hope)

was forgivable somehow.

This sly conceit, this refusal to learn,

when transported into a new century,

takes on the aspect of a major crime of delusion,

a baldly evil false belief.

The only ethically defensible position on nuclear energy,

is to encourage its use worldwide, ending global warming thereby,

ending thereby our imperialism in the mideast,

harnessing the nature-given free heat provided by the planet,

using it to elevate & liberate mankind.

If we do not do so in the West, other players, less progressive than we

will run away with world history, and the fault will be ours.