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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In a Q. & A., Elizabeth Kolbert discusses Indian Point and the threat it may pose
"Emergency Planning for Indian Point: A Guide for You and Your Family" is a booklet published as a public service by the plant's owner, Entergy Nuclear Northeast. Part "Hints from Heloise," part "Dr. Strangelove," the booklet has a cheerful blue cover decorated with drawings of a siren and a reactor dome. Inside, it is filled with tips like "Six Facts You Need to Know About KI--Potassium Iodide" (No. 1: it can protect your thyroid if you are exposed to radioactive iodine) and "helpful answers" to questions like "Could Indian Point explode like a bomb?" ("No. It is impossible for any nuclear power plant to explode like a bomb under any conditions.") At the back, there is an "Emergency Planning Checklist," which recommends, "If you are told to evacuate, you should bring enough personal supplies for three days," including a portable radio, potassium-iodide tablets, and "this planning booklet."
In total, Entergy printed more than two hundred thousand copies of the guide, which were mailed to households within ten miles of the plant, in northern Westchester County. Nowhere does the booklet explicitly mention sabotage, but this fear was clearly on the minds of the authors:
Q: How can I be sure that Indian Point is secure and well-protected?, A: Indian Point is defended by armed guards, sophisticated detection equipment and other advanced protection systems that meet or exceed federal, state and local requirements.
An attack on a nuclear power plant would seem to fulfill, almost perfectly, Al Qaeda's objective of using America's technology against it. In his State of the Union Message last year, President Bush announced that United States forces searching Afghan caves had indeed found diagrams of American reactors. Around the same time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, acting on information provided by the F.B.I., warned of a plot to crash a commercial aircraft into a plant. According to the N.R.C., the identity of the plant was not known; a captured Al Qaeda operative had told the F.B.I. that the specific target was to be chosen by a "team on the ground."
As potential targets go, Indian Point seems almost too obvious. It is situated on the Hudson River, in Buchanan, New York, some twenty miles north of the Bronx and thirty-five miles from midtown Manhattan. Nearly three hundred thousand people live within the plant's ten-mile "emergency planning zone," and another several hundred thousand reside within seventeen and a half miles, in the so-called "peak fatality" zone. More than twenty million people live within fifty miles of the plant. A 1982 analysis by a congressional subcommittee estimated that, under worst-case conditions, a catastrophe at one of the Indian Point reactors could result in fifty thousand fatalities and more than a hundred thousand radiation injuries. The same study calculated the cost of such an accident at roughly three hundred billion dollars. By an uncomfortable coincidence, American Airlines Flight 11, just minutes before it slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, flew almost directly over Indian Point's twin reactor domes. Apparently, the Hudson River was the landmark that the hijackers used to navigate by.
The Indian Point nuclear power plant, or energy center, as it is now called, is named after the spit of land, once home to an amusement park, on which it's built. There are two functioning reactors on the site, Indian Point 2 and 3, and a third, Indian Point 1, which has been closed for nearly thirty years. Recently, I went to Buchanan to take a look around. I had been told to report to the plant's emergency-operations facility, and when I drove up to it an armored tank was rumbling across the parking lot. Inside the facility, I was issued the first of several security badges and was introduced to Entergy Nuclear Northeast's director of emergency programs, Michael Slobodien.
Before I arrived, Slobodien had laid out a tableful of charts...
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