Indian Point: The Next Fukushima? via New York Times

NINE months after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan and set off the world’s worst radiation crisis since Chernobyl, the Japanese government finally announced on Friday that the plant’s reactors had been stabilized.

But federal regulators have yet to absorb the lessons from this crisis. The owners of the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County, 25 miles north of New York City, are asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend their operating licenses for 20 years. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo strongly opposes those renewals.

However unlikely, the possibility of a major meltdown at a plant in the United States can’t be dismissed. And yet Gregory B. Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Bloomberg last week that there would be enough time for millions of people in the region to get away “because nuclear accidents do develop slowly, they do develop over time, and we saw that at Fukushima.”

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