New York tells Indian Point to retrofit cooling towers

In a huge victory for environmentalists, the State of New York has ordered the Indian Point nuclear power plant to retrofit cooling towers or shut down because the present "once-through" cooling system is too destructive to the Hudson River ecosystem. The State said that the Indian Point plant, just 35 miles from midtown Manhattan and situated on the shores of the Hudson river, kills so many fish, and consumes and contaminates so much water, that it violates the federal Clean Water Act. Indian Point owners, Entergy, already embroiled in a license extension battle in Vermont where the State recently voted not to extend its Vermont Yankee plant's operating license beyond the March 2012 expiry, may fight the New York decision in court. The company faces the prospect of a more than one billion dollar bill to retrofit the plant and a long outage. Indian Point, like Vermont Yankee, has also leaked tritium (as well as Strontium 90) into the Hudson. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation said that the  power plant’s water-intake system kills nearly a billion aquatic organisms a year. The New York Times as well as other media outlets reported the decision in depth on April 3, 2010. For more about the damaging effects of the once-through system, see our landmark 2001 report, Licensed to Kill.