There's a papier-mache' mockup of Indian Point, faithful in few details to the real original Indian Point, and it lives in activist's communal psyche as a dependable victim. Write a few words about troubled, aging, ailing, leaking, distressed, woeful, etc., and you've got yourself a story. The story need not be true.It's not even required to leave one's chair to investigate,.... all the needed parameters spring right to hand, out of communal myth and blink on the page, obligingly, for our writer, drawing attention, readership, and the satisfaction of having served up a spicy piece of work. Phish bloggers have even begun to insert the two words "Indian Point" in their blogs, just to attract readership.
The only drawback, is that the evil purple papier mache' model is not the real Indian Point.
The real Indian Point is apparently wearing a cloak of journalistic invisibility, kind of like Harry Potter.Who built the cloaking device? I must state out front, that I don't believe journalists began the deception on their own... (except for one poor schmuck, who was fired for it). The list of perps is short, 2 organizations, and maybe 8 or 10 individuals, but buoyed by internet chumminess, and the active trading of techniques for capturing press attention, they hovered around their phones, and their letters-to-editors keyboards, and carefully applied papier mache',-- bit by bit, slopping on the bogus concern, the overdrawn and bathetic complaints, until the purple model of the domes rose high enough to obscure the real place ,and a journalistic staple, a dependable hot-button brouhaha, was hatched out of thin air, and activist chutzpah.
Not many people are falling for it any more, mainly the very young & gullible, seeking a "radical" rap to spice up their Myspace profile, and a few lost fifty-something loners, hoping to piggy back their confused way into any kind of relevance.
Here is the factual situation:
We need an affordable Hudson Valley. That need, slipping ever so steadily out of our grasp, ought not be forgotten by our oh-so-ethical (they say) new Democratic administration, despite Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list,....... 5,000,000 of the rest of us need to hold the line, AND DO THEY CARE? Maybe not... you see, we are not pre-captured for them into a convenient voting bloc, like those 5000.
We need the power that the real Indian Point provides us, and I hear no construction plans coming out of Cuomo junior's lips, or new Governor Spitzer's planning office, so I know they have no plans for new power plants.Tell me--- HOW DO YOU ETHICALLY PROPOSE CLOSING INDIAN POINT WITHOUT BUILDING NEW PLANTS?
Short answer--you don't.
Even the National Academy of Scientists told us just that last year,.... but for Democratic officials, pandering to papier-mache', and an activist mailing list seems much easier than actually DOING SOMETHING , while the real Indian Point hums away quietly, powering the last days of Hudson affordability.
If we stripped away the papier mache'---what would we see? We would see an environmentally proactive Entergy Corporation, remaking, improving, and cleaning up the mess Con Ed left here, gathering their national expertise to provide us what we have almost forgotten that we need, helping our communities with charity, volunteers, and positive interaction, maximizing power, minimizing damage, maximizing security, minimizing hype, maximizing value, minimizing loss..... in short..... doing a lot of the functions local and state government might be doing for us---if they were not blinded by a mailing list, and the need to pander to a small vocal minority that hates so passionately, that they've frightened away good sense on the Hudson for years..
However people are starting to wake up.
It started with Al Gore's admission that only nuclear + wind power could avert global catastrophe. Now more and more are realizing that global warming is here, now, and without Indian Point we are not only screwed, we are possibly doomed to a horrible set of consequences stemming from whatever replaces it.
Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance
