Petition Filed to Keep Indian Point from Restarting

A petition has been filed with U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations today asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prevent Indian Point nuclear reactor from being restarted.

The NRC has said the nuclear reactor’s Unit 2 is safe to restart.

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Friends of the Earth have been joined in the petition by the Nuclear Information Resource Service and Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

They said in a press release that they felt neither the NRC nor Entergy has provided a “root cause analysis” of the bolt degradation at Unit 2.

"This is a matter of common sense denied: if a machine breaks, you have to figure out what is wrong and then fix it," said Damon Moglen of Friends of the Earth in a prepared statement. "Instead, at Indian Point, Entergy has decided that the priority is to get the damaged reactor up and running by summer to protect their profits. And the NRC is acting like a lap dog and not the watch dog assuring that the reactors are safe to operate. It has been repeatedly suggested that the NRC is a 'captured' agency, captive of the very industry they are directed by Congress to regulate. This is a disgraceful and shocking example of that corporate capture."

A spokesman for Entergy said that the lawsuit by a long-time anti-nuclear organization was not a surprise.

"Rigorous technical analysis conducted by Entergy and outside engineering experts demonstrates Unit 2 and Unit 3 can continue to operate safely," said spokesman Jerry Nappi. "Highly qualified experts at the NRC are fully aware of this analysis, and Entergy is proceeding according to NRC process and under the watchful eye of this regulator. NRC monitors our performance in this and other areas to ensure the plant is safe now and on an ongoing basis."

"The issue of baffle bolts that degrade over time is a known issue in the nuclear power industry, which is why we performed comprehensive inspections while Unit 2 was shut down for a planned refueling outage," he said. "Entergy replaced all identified degraded bolts at Unit 2, and moved up the date of the planned inspection of Unit 3’s bolts from 2019 to 2017 out of an abundance of caution."