Indian Point evacuation plan criticized

Indian Point nuclear would have to close if the United States required a plan to evacuate 20 million people within 50 miles, two U.S. lawmakers said after touring the plant Tuesday with the chief nuclear regulator.

Entergy Corp., which owns Indian Point, is seeking 20-year extensions of licenses that expire in 2013 and 2015 for two reactors at the site.

The renewals would be rejected if Entergy had to submit an evacuation plan that includes residents of Manhattan, 35 miles south of the nuclear plant, said Rep. Nita Lowey (D-Rye).

"When this plant was built, you didn't have 20 million people within a 50-mile radius," Lowey said. "To evacuate people from Westchester, Rockland, people from New York City, east and west, is, in many of our judgments, an impossible task."

The evacuation plan for Indian Point covers a 10-mile radius.

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended that Americans within 50 miles of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant evacuate after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan set off explosions and the release of radiation.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who toured the plant with Lowey and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx) said the 10-mile zone could be extended under certain circumstances. An internal NRC task force is reviewing the events in Japan.

"I expect that there'll be some changes to our requirements as a result of that," Jaczko said, referring to the nuclear plant crisis in Japan.

"The decisions ultimately about what we would do in the event of an accident are based ultimately on what information we would get if there were, even in the very unlikely event, to be an accident. If we needed to take action beyond 10 miles, that's certainly what we would be recommending."

Eight years before Japan's catastrophe, the evacuation plan for Indian Point -- which combines procedures developed by Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam counties -- was deemed inadequate to safeguard residents in a state-funded study by a firm run by James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The first reactor at the plant in Buchanan, Westchester County, opened in 1962.

"If Buchanan, New York, was being considered as the site of a new power plant today, it would be unequivocally rejected," Engel said. "The citizens that live around this power plant should not be stuck with it or saddled with it because of something that happened 40 years ago."