THE FOLLOWING LETTER APPEARED IN A RECENT EDITION OF THE GAZETTE
To the Editor:
The closing of the Indian Point nuclear plant has been a boon to fishing in Cortlandt. According to Riverkeeper (Jan 9 2024 webinar), the plant “killed over a billion fish every year” – so every single day, 365 days per year, more than 2,739,726 fish were killed at Indian Point. I was equally surprised to learn that Hudson River water is unique: Riverkeeper tells us “we know water is… a hydrogen with two oxygens” and “once tritium gets into water it basically behaves like a water particle.” Hydroperoxyl may be bad for the ozone layer, but apparently it supports a billion fish in the Hudson.
I like Riverkeeper. They have a history to be proud of. Without Riverkeeper, the Hudson would not have been cleaned up as quickly or as thoroughly as it was. I also realize that Riverkeeper nowadays is composed of a bunch of lawyers, and they don’t test chemistry on the LSAT. But is it too much to ask when you are drafting legislation regarding tritiated water that you know the molecular composition of water? And know what an isotope is?
Tritiated water “behaves” like a water particle because it is a water particle. Anyone of a certain age can recall watching old movies about the attempt by Nazi Germany to make a nuclear bomb. They made a whole movie centered around heavy water (The Heroes of Telemark, 1965). Because the number of neutrons are not the same, isotopes can be differentiated based on variance in mass (hence the adjective “heavy”), but water is still water.
It is possible to de-tritiate water, but it is expensive and energy-intensive. There is a company which claims to be pilot testing a cheaper alternative, but this still requires disposal (presumably by venting) of the oxygen and hydrogen and disposal of the tritium concentrate. The oxygen and hydrogen are perfectly safe, but this would have to be something Supervisor Becker and others would have to explain to their constituents. My guess is that if Holtec proposed this without politician buy-in, there would be outrage over the oxygen and hydrogen venting.
Riverkeeper complains that Holtec now seeks to delay the decommissioning by eight years and “refuses to seriously consider possible solutions to tritium.” At the same time, Riverkeeper has proposed a solution which is quite simple: store the water onsite at Indian Point for the next 12 and a half years. After that? Well…. cross our fingers and hope that someone comes up with a solution.
Why 12.5 years? Because that is the half-life of tritium. What is magical about half-life? Well, nothing from a scientific standpoint. But it sounds impressive.
At the risk of ascribing precision to a probabilistic function, lets do some quick math. If in 2024 you have 400 isotopes with a half-life of 12.5 years, then in 2049 (after 2 half-lives) you have 100 and in the year 2099 (75 years, or 6 half-lives) you still have 6 or 7 bad isotopes. Even if decay progresses below the point where your measuring devices can detect, you can still compute the probable number of radioactive atoms remaining.
The language of the “Save the Hudson Act” is explicit: no radioisotopes can be discharged from the Indian Point plant. So even as Cortlandt prepares for Party of the Century 2100, that water will still be sitting in storage tanks, slowly rusting away on the banks of the Hudson.
Holtec provides a vital intangible. For decades we have sinned against Nature, poisoning her with radioactivity. Now having repented, we have piled the consequences of sin (tritiated water) upon our scapegoat (Holtec). It is all very biblical. Vital as that psychic balm may be, at the end of the day Holtec is hired to clear the Indian Point site including the tritiated water. When Riverkeeper brags that their slogan about Holtec is “Lies, bribes, and risk-taking” it is not conducive to resolving the question of how to dispose of the tritiated water now sitting at Indian Point. Indeed, it seems a lot more risky to keep the water sitting in Buchanan hoping for new technology to solve the problem. Even “Buchanan water” with two oxygen molecules attached to a hydrogen has been rumored to leak from storage tanks.
Cortlandt Supervisor Becker, Sen. Harckham, Mayor Pugh, and every other politician within driving radius was willing to show up for the strident rallies, with speechifying and media coverage galore. But now the hard work comes and there is radio silence. The folks at Riverkeeper may not know the composition of a water molecule, but at least they came up with a solution—kick the can down the road.
From a logical standpoint disposal of the water is not a difficult problem to solve: there are a finite number of options and the science is settled. But it does require political fortitude, and our current crop of officeholders are sorely lacking in that regard.
The first decision is whether to get the water offsite or leave it where it is (at least for the time being). Riverkeeper proposes keeping the water onsite for at least the next 12 years. Does Supervisor Becker agree or not? The residents of Cortlandt (and particularly Buchanan) deserve a direct answer. If the water is to be kept onsite, then a decision needs to be made as to how to store the water. That decision may depend on the length of time the water will remain.
The proposed 12.5 years is an arbitrary number gussied up in scientific garb, and Riverkeeper has not provided any details as to current detritiation research which warrants confidence in a technical solution coming up in the next 12.5 years. It is important to remember that disposal of nuclear waste is regulated by federal and state law. So even if a solution is developed, it will still need to be acceptable to the bureaucracy and that takes time.
If the water remains in Buchanan, this is going to delay remediation and development of the site. Having lost the tax revenue of the operating plant, residents of Buchanan are still going to have property values impacted by tanks of radioactive water in their midst. This is exacerbated by the alarmist uproar fueled by the same politicians who now don’t want to discuss the matter but who have left an internet trail telling potential home buyers that tritiated water at Indian Point will kill us all.
If the decision is made to get the water offsite, there are only four options: in the water, in the ground, in the air, or truck it somewhere else.
Disposal into the Hudson would require changing or repealing the law, and that is not going to happen. Disposal into the ground would make the problem worse and likely violate a host of laws and regulations. Disposal into the air can be done within federal safety guidelines, but would be much more concentrated than the diluted water option which caused such an uproar.
That leaves us with only one option: use our privilege and crap on poor people. There are places where people are so desperate that they will take radioactive waste that rich people want to get rid of.
One place already used by Holtec is Andrews County, Texas (Household Income $34,000), and one of Holtec’s competitiors (NorthStar) dumps in Owyhee County, Idaho (HHI $28,000). Not only are both counties poor, they are both hotbeds of Trump support (84 percent and 80 percent in 2020 respectively). As wealthy progressives concerned about “environmental justice” we would normally be troubled by getting decades of electricity from Indian Point and then dumping our radioactive waste on poor people. But these two possible dumping grounds are home to baskets of deplorables. Supervisor Becker and Senator Harckham aren’t going to hold rallies in Verplanck for such detritus.
Here in Croton, we are woke fonts of progressive environmentalism…. Or at least, we talk that way. And we elect politicians who talk that way. Even so, there is no way we are going to keep the waste generated by our decades of electricity use. For half a century we diluted tritiated water and dumped it in the Hudson. But that was when Indian Point was giving us electricity to power our Nintendo and hi-def video. Those days are gone. Someone has to bear the burden and it ain’t gonna be us.
It is lots of fun to bash Holtec. It is evil, corporate, and all that stuff. They probably even know the molecular composition of water. But Holtec did not generate this waste—we did, and railing against the Holtec boogeyman is not going to get rid of the tritiated water. I say we load it up in some tankers, drive it to Texas or Idaho, and do our part to make the deplorables a bit more deplorable. After that, we can come back home and hold a concert and cookout in Verplanck.
--Paul Steinberg, Croton-on-Hudson
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Thank you Paul.
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