Schumer signs on to Indian Point bill
This week’s shut down of Indian Point 2 has convinced Sen. Charles Schumer to add his name to a bill requiring a thorough and independent safety assessment at the nuclear plant.
Schumer, in a press release just sent out by his ever-active communications department, said he will cosponsor legislation offered by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to require the assessment within six months.
“The NRC has been dragging its feet on the safety issues at Indian Point for far too long,� Schumer said. “When it comes to nuclear safety and security, we expect the highest standards. Safety must be the number one priority. There must be an independent vigorous investigation so that we can get to the bottom of what is going on at Indian Point – and fix it.�
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Welcome to the Democratic panacea bandwagon. Don’t know whether your local highly rated electric plant is a covert volcano like Rory Kennedy claims, or a simple well run electric plant like NRC says?
Easy solution—- hold a press conference, and seek to pass a bill to inspect Indian Point within 6 months. Assuming you get out of committee in about 3 months, to the floor in another 3 months, past a certain Bush veto, and back to the floor in another month or so, that means NRC will have to come back in about January (they just left), and that ought to get them in here the same week they were scheduled to come back anyway.
Nice going Chuck!
Enjoy all the press you garner (such as this) by hopping on board. Oh by the way, when NRC rates the place as safe, I guess you and the usual cast of Democratic suspects can seek to impeach the NRC.
I can’t wait.
Happy Speechmaking!
What a charade. The only “fix” the anti-nuke hucksters (including Upchuck Schumer, Hillary, John Hall, Spano, etc.) will ever accept is shutting down the plant altogether. No nuclear plant will ever be found safe enough for this crowd. And why should they? It is much more convenient to use the utility as a whipping-boy and nuclear power as bete noir to rail against.
Ms. Clinton, and now Mr. Schumer have misled themselves on the facts, in claiming NRC has “dragged its feet” in any way shape or form. These ultra-press-conscious elected types have always sought some way to seem relevant on Indian Point, but have rejected everything NRC has told them, and have thus attempted to politicize what ought to be a public-safety oriented pursuit (NRC’s inspections) , and now intend to fully and maliciously abuse “inspection”, as a personal press-exposure tactic. To this end, they have focused on a phrase they know the public will not understand, because they know that they themselves do not understand it.
What is an “Independent Safety Assessment”?
Is it something not being done right now, at Indian Point?
In point of fact, the NRC long ago adopted a series of such in-depth assessments as its regular methodology, routinely done since 1996 under its “Reactor Oversight Process�. One such inspection, called a CDBI inspection, was just completed at Indian Point #2. A CDBI is scheduled shortly for Indian Point #3. They occur regularly, along with a host of other inspections, and the results are all in the public domain. Perhaps an uninvolved civilian might be ignorant of the ongoing inspection process. An activist, anxious to skew reality towards the negative, might pretend not to know of the positive results obtained. And finally, political figures, who ought to act responsibly, are misled by bad intel served up by staff misled in their turn by activist sources, and so propose grandly that NRC do, what it is in fact, already doing.
Its ludicrous.
What I’ve written here, is much like what NRC itself has recently said, when it ruled on Feb. 15 that the ROP (reactor oversight process) is a much more probing investigation than the ISA inspection, because it monitors ongoing performance, while the obsolete ISA provided only a snapshot, the single time it was done in 1996. Now our congresspeople reject the perfected system, and want to go back to the inept 1996 prototype? Actually the concept of ISA was perfected, and written into policy by NRC in 1997, and its name was changed at that time INTO “Reactor Oversight Processâ€? (ROP). It is the self-same investigation, renamed, and done on a constant basis. A great deal of salesmanship has been wrapped up in the seemingly innocent, off-the-mark call , for an Independent Safety Assessment. Salesmanship to imply uninvolved politicians are more cognizant of public safety, than the corps of professional inspectors actually performing the work. It is as if Mr. Hall, or Ms. Clinton had appropriated for themselves, the honors due to NRC, in a kind of backhanded public flim-flam maneuver. Where else, in the matter of advanced subject matter, do we hear the call for “Anyone but our best experts” to determine the adequacy of our national policies?
Its an overt plea for a witch hunt., a seeking of the dumbest course, because the smartest course seems politically distasteful somehow, or headed for known results.
Welcome to the dark ages!