In a brutally effective end run around society's best interests, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo installed his own man at the NYS DEC, to make the case against Indian Point that Cuomo was counting on, to lift him out of the Spitzer-Paterson fiasco, and propell him to his long-sought political destiny, using the tightly organized backing of the 20% anti-nuclear minority.
J. Jared Snyder, a Cuomo legal troubleshooter, was installed at DEC, and instructed to trash 20 years of DEC research, and decades of Republican-influenced DEC policy by simply declaring that Indian Point kills fish.
No research was done. Snyder simply declared, on DEC letterhead, that 1.2 billion fish were dying. Snyder ignored all the fossil powerplants which used duplicate cooling methods, focusing on the single entity that Riverkeeper had married itself to in eternal branded opposition, following the Riverkeeper party line that had served RK CEO Alex Matthiessen so well, in growing his 501(c)3 collections house to million-dollar size, largely by including the word "nuclear" as a core branding strategy.
Matthiessen, drafted as an unpaid eco-advisor to Eliot Spitzer, began to craft strategies for Spitzer's (then Paterson's) DEC to pursue , thus wedding Cuomo's DEC to Indian Point, just as Riverkeeper itself had been, since 2001. Accidental governor Paterson, apparently not as focused on future greatness as Mr. Cuomo, has little to say on these issues.
Is the issue real?
It is true that Mr. Snyder has declared against a single plant's cooling system.
Why no other plants were considered, is an artifact of using a Matthiessen strategy, with all its myopia built in. This alone marks the DEC declaration as purely political, in that it makes no statewide policy. It just attacks the famous Indian Point.
But what of the fish?
If you impartially study the state of Hudson River flora & fauna, it becomes clear that the estuary has changed and continues to change, due to the presence of human civilization, and the invasion of once-foreign species. The single largest living organism in the estuary is the invasive colony of zebra mussels, an infestation new since the 1970's , and so large as to food-filter the entire mass of the estuary's water every 1.4 days..(as per Lamont Doherty Lab). Certain invasive plants also clog the estuary, and the once-clean pebble-beds once used by the shad and other historical fish species for spawning, are now forever clogged with invasive non-native plants, man-made silt, and even PCB's from the defunct GE plant upriver. Unimpeded access from the ocean for historical anadromous species is now permanently blocked by the dam at Troy, and without large fish-ladder construction, can only result in old fish species decline (and new invasive species increases). Ammonia influx from dozens of sewage treatment plants has decimated spawned eggs of every species, and has led to a winnowing out of those species most susceptible, with a concomitant increase in foreign, more resistant species. Throughout all of this , Indian Point has been present, not part of any of these processes, a mere bystander to environmental history.
This is what is happening. This is also happening worldwide. It is a phenomenon so huge, that mankind lacks the resources to affect it, and also lacks knowledge enough to know just HOW to affect it. Perhaps the correct attitude would be to accept "Estuary Globalization" as an ongoing Planet-Process, in an acceptance of aquatic diversity, inevitable and even desirable in this new "Age without Borders".
For others' opinions on this topic CHECK THIS LINK
It would be a great crime to misrepresent matters in any more simplistic way, to blame needed local infrastructure installations, for changes that are global, and much too large to be affected either by their closure, or their remaining open, or their rebuilding to accommodate fictional fish-deaths. In my opinion, Riverkeeper's poorly argued case is just such a red herring. If sewage influx is a huge killer, (or the primary killer) and Riverkeeper ignores it, focusing only on power plant input water, we could be left with no electricity AND a dead river, too. In my opinion, this is exactly what we are headed towards, should the courts accept the tunnel vision of Riverkeeper as "truth", and rule against an innocent entity, while allowing the main culprits to continue on their destructive course. But why would Riverkeeper make such claims?
Riverkeeper's focus on Indian Point is based only on their historic coupling with Indian Point (winning $12 million from them in 1981), and is simply a matter of finding a convenient already-branded nearby target for less-than-honest "activism". In short, it is convenient for RK to attack IP again, and may pay off in a money sense, as it has in the past. But envision a dead Hudson estuary, with no local electricity, filled with invasive fish species, and you will see the ghastly picture Riverkeeper is naively leading us into. The survival of a 501(c)3 charity organization is not worth the trashing of needed local infrastructure, and the fish, such as they are, will neither be helped nor harmed by any of it.
Are nuclear plants different from fossil plants, as regards cooling water? The short answer is "no". The condensing steam engine is 214 years old, and in use worldwide. Indian Point is simply one of 20,000 such plants, albeit with a nuclear heat source.
The nature of fish biogenesis is such that the vast preponderance of spawned fry are given up as a sacrifice to other predator species, to water conditions, to accident, and even to predation by adults of the same species. Only the very smallest percentage of spawned fry are expected to survive. The facts as of right now, in the Hudson estuary, are that both shad and bass are stable, meaning that Indian Point is not reducing larval fry beyond the already bio-determined threshold, where species diminution would occur. In other words, compared to being eaten by other fish, and even its own relatives, the chance of being killed by Indian Point is low enough to be statistically insignificant, swamped by other ambient conditions. In yet other words, had those dead fry escaped Indian Point, it would have been directly into the waiting maw of other fish, as kill.
In a politics-neutral interpretation, this very clearly paints once-through heat exchange as benign. (Indian Point is flanked, as I said by the Wheelabrator, LaFarge and Bowline plants, all once-through water cooled units.)
Even in a politically skewed view, painting the heat exchange losses, although insignificant to the species, as significant in some sense to human advocates, it would be impossible to decouple the Bowline, LaFarge and Wheelabrator heating contributions from Indian Point's. Therefore, even in an "All Fry Are Sacred" religious space, the advocate would needs choose either to remove all three power plants, one gypsum plant, and Westchester county's only means of bulk waste reduction, or else let them all be, and accept that humanity, and its activities DO affect spawning, and that the new reduced-but-stable fish populations bespeak an organic whole, Man, Fish, and River, adjusting itself to each other's presence.
In a holistic sense, seeking satisfaction with the inevitable, the most elevated perspective would obviously be the view that what is , has evolved, and has therefore the right to be, and to be accepted. Preferentially seeking to remove, or alter humanity's evolution, is not only impossible, but deluded in a Darwinist sense, a form of misdirected hoped-for partial autogenocide. Even the Jains do not recommend autoeradication (or autoreduction). I myself would find it difficult to preferentially worship just those species prone to entrainment in Indian Point's once-through. It would seem too small, as a belief, and thus stand exposed as a mere rationalization, for narrow political preference. But this is the stand that Andrew Cuomo has ordered Mr. Snyder to take.
The bass population is up, and actually feeds on the shad. The shad is stable, despite being heavily fished now on the Atlantic banks, by automated factory ship fleet operations out of Russia, Portugal, and Japan. (these fleets having fished out previously preferred species, concentrating now by default, on the shad). Therefore absolute shad reduction is not a function of once-through Hudson cooling, but actually a decimation perpetrated by others, on the high seas. Add to this the repopulation of the estuary by invasive species supplanting, in the main, indigenous species, and we see a decried "insult" to the river,(supposedly by Indian Point) as nothing more than a skewed misinterpretation of a greater global change, inducing new conditions as a vast evolutionary mass adjustment, one not addressed by Snyder, Matthiessenm, or Cuomo, because it does not fit Cuomo's agenda, which is to infer all change is bad, all change comes from nuclear, and that therefore Indian Point should be selectively blamed, and closed as a notoriety stunt, for political gain.
For those unafraid of detail, I offer this:
According to the State University at Stony Brook, at URL
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/marinebio/fc.1.estuaries.html
The majority of water flow in the Hudson estuary is tidal, amounting to some 425,000 cubic feet per second at the Battery. Fresh flow is much less, reaching a maximum of 30,000 cubic feet per second in April. The estuary flushes itself every 126 days. That is to say, after 126 days, all the water is new.
At its maximum, 425000 plus 30000 gives 455000 cubic feet per second total water flow, fresh plus tidal. 126 days contain 10,886,400 seconds. Therefore a rough calculation of the total mass of water in the estuary equals: (455000 cubic feet/second) X ( 10,886,400 seconds) = 49,533,122,000,000 cubic feet of water.
Indian Point's circulating Water Pumps are 140,000 GPM pumps. There are 12 pumps ( all 12 are seldom used at once). 140,000 GPM is 2333 gallons per second. (2333) X (12 pumps) = 28,000 gallons per second, or 3740 cubic feet per second intake water for both units running at ultra maximum capacity. If all 12 pumps are run for the entire 126 days needed to replace the estuary water, (one flush) they will process 40,715,136,000 cubic feet of that water.
(40,715,136,000) divided by ( 49,533,122,000,000) = 0.008
At its maximum capacity, Indian Point touches less than one percent of the Hudson estuary's water.
That means that 99% of the estuary's water mass never encounters Indian Point. To a fish, or an egg floating in the estuary that means more than 99% of them live their entire lives as if Indian Point did not exist.
To give up the 2000 megawatts powering New York's stock exchange, Metro North, Yankee Stadium, the Meadowlands, Madison Square Garden, every single shopping mall, and all the local airports to save 1% of the fish larvae may seem worthwhile to dedicated career ecologists, who want to see every egg miss Indian Point, but it may not be worthwhile to anyone else, not even to the fish.
Fish lay eggs in a vast overkill, to compensate for predation and bad luck. Fish eggs are in no way comparable to human babies. Fish eggs are more accurately compared to human spermatozoa, the vast majority of which is expected to die, and which does die off, in a very normal and natural process that leads to a stable and healthy population.
Moreover, Indian Point has a Fish Return System in place, which guides anything swimming in that 1% of the estuary's water at the intake, along an escape weir that returns fish to the river downstream of IPEC, so that in effect far, far less than 1% of the estuary's swimming inhabitants ever encounter Indian Point's machinery, just the fish weir.
Standing at Indian Point's dock, one can see the ripples in the surface where a great gathering of creatures seek out the warm water flow from IPEC's discharge. Gulls, herons, and other birds hover there, and underwater species such as the blue crab are allowed to live in this part of the Hudson, which otherwise would be too cold for them to survive. (Without IPEC, they would not be found north of the Chesapeake). So IPEC is supporting a flourishing micro-ecosphere at its discharge, one never mentioned by ecological opposers.
Add to this, the recent invasion of the Hudson by non-native species via the great lakes shipping lanes, and it becomes unclear just what ecologists are striving to "protect". Are we to give up our electricity, so that a melange of invasive "bum fish", swamp grass and imported Russian zebra mussels can be more at home in their newly stolen North American habitat? Are some ecologists simply pandering for grant money? Is their focus unnaturally narrow and negative? Is it all just politics?
The native Shad and Bass species are stable but inedible, because of mercury and PCB contamination endemic to the Hudson, and having nothing to do with Indian Point. Many of these fish are lineal descendants of the billions of fish hatched at Indian Point's own fish hatchery over 25 years. So does IPEC threaten the Hudson biosphere, as some claim, or has it instead become an integrated, supportive part of the ecological mix now found in the estuary?
