Locals and activists this week renewed calls for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to sign the legislature’s ban on radioactive wastewater discharges into the Hudson River, but the governor made no move.
In a meeting this week of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board, state officials got an earful from locals and activists who want Hochul to step in and stop planned discharges from the three-reactor plant, which started producing electricity in the 1960s.
“There are hundreds of bills passed last month,” Tom Congdon, executive deputy New York State Department of Public Service and the chair of the New York State Decommissioning oversight Board, said during this week’s meeting in Cortland, N.Y., just east of Buchanan. “All of them are being reviewed by the governor’s office.”
The legislature in June easily passed a bill that would forbid discharge of any radiological substance into the Hudson and fine anyone who breaks the law. Repeat offenders would face larger fines. The Hochul administration has so far refused to say publicly what its position on the bill is.
The legislation is aimed squarely at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y., about 50 miles upriver from downtown Manhattan. Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., bought the plant in 2022 from Entergy to decommission it. Decommissioning should be mostly done by the 2030s, Holtec estimates, at a cost of $2 billion or so. The site could be released for other uses by the 2060s.
Holtec, in a statement last month, told the Exchange Monitor that even if Hochul does sign the bill, it would be preempted by federal law, which says that only the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can regulate discharges.
Further north, the idea of federal preemption did not stop Massachusetts from legally prohibiting the discharge of irradiated wastewater from another Holtec-owned plant, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. There, the administration Gov. Maura Healey (D) has tentatively determined that such discharges would violate existing state law.
Meanwhile, the next meeting of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board was scheduled for Sept. 21. The board had not announced where it would meet as of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
