Antinuclear activists and state lawmakers on Tuesday demonstrated outside the New York governor’s office, demanding that she sign a bill to outlaw dumping of irradiated waste water into the Hudson River from the shuttered Indian Point Nuclear Energy Center.
Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit founded by activist Wenonah Hauter of Virginia, publicized the protest and helped organize it. The group also posted a video of their protest on Facebook.
State lawmakers have sponsored bills in the New York Assembly and Senate that would ban Holtec International, which is decommissioning Indian Point, from discharging plant wastewater into the Hudson.
But the bills have gone nowhere since they were introduced in February and March and the state legislature was set to recess on Friday.
S05181 in the state Senate, sponsored by state Sen. Pete Harckham (D-NY-S40) and A05338, sponsored by Assemblywoman Dana Levenberg (D-NY-A95), would each ban “the discharge of any radiological agent into the waters of the state.” Penalties would range from $25,000 a day for first-time violations to $150,000 a day for every violation after the second, according to a bill summary.
Levenberg’s district includes Indian Point in Buchanan, N.Y. Harckham’s district includes Greenburg, a town of about 95,000 people some 20 miles downstream of Indian Point. The town has been vocal in its support of a discharge ban.
Indian Point shut down in 2021.
Elsewhere on the east coast, antinuclear activists have successfully leveraged the issue of wastewater discharges to delay decommissioning of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Massachusetts, another Holtec project.
