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The Baltimore Sun
September 9, 2004
Examining Risk of Indian Point
By Stephen Kiehl
Sun Staff
The terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001,
used the Hudson River as a navigational point to find New York. They flew
over fields and farmland and past the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35
miles north of midtown Manhattan, on their journey to the World Trade
Center.
A
new documentary by Rory Kennedy asks: What if the terrorists following the
river had banked left and hit Indian Point?
Kennedy's film, Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable (8 tonight on HBO),
examines the vulnerability of Indian Point to an air or a ground attack,
finds its defenses inadequate and argues that the health risks posed by the
plant are so grave that it should be shut down.
Indian Point will be immediately followed on HBO by Chernobyl Heart, a
powerful and painful film that focuses on the legacy of cancer and disease
left by the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant on the
Ukraine-Belarus border. Even today, just 15 percent to 20 percent of the
babies born in Belarus are healthy, doctors say.
The specter of Chernobyl hangs over Kennedy's film, aided by a graphic
showing the extent of Chernobyl's radiation hot spots superimposed over a
map of the Northeast United States. The hot spots spread through six states:
New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont and Massachusetts.
Experts say that what went wrong at Chernobyl could never happen at Indian
Point because of its safety controls and other preventative measures in
place. But Kennedy says the point is not the cause but the effect - the
radioactive release that could threaten the 20 million people who live
within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point.
In
a recent phone interview, Kennedy, the youngest daughter of Robert F.
Kennedy, said she had not thought much about that possibility until Sept.
11.
"I
lived in New York City and was here on that very tragic day, and in the
weeks and months that followed, as we were trying to make sense of what
happened, inevitably the question came up of what was going to be the next
target," she said. "On the short list was always Indian Point."
The nuclear reactors at Indian Point are housed in two containment domes
with cement walls up to 5 feet thick. The question of whether those domes
could withstand a direct hit by a 767 with a full tank of fuel cannot be
definitively answered. The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says in
the film that such a breach is highly unlikely.
A
more pressing issue are the pools of water containing 1,400 tons of spent
nuclear fuel rods. Those advocating to shut down the plant, including Rory
Kennedy's brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., say the spent fuel is highly
vulnerable and not well protected.
The film describes a nightmarish scenario in which a terrorist group manages
to drain the spent fuel pools, perhaps by firing an explosive device at
their base. Then the metal cladding on the hottest spent fuel rods could
ignite, starting a fire and the release of the radioactive waste Cesium-137,
leading to the formation of a radioactive cloud that could float downriver
to New York.
"Imagine a world without New York City," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says in the
film. "The terrorists already have."
Rory Kennedy says she went into the film without an agenda. But she came out
of it believing that even though there are ways to make Indian Point safer
and better protected from terrorists, there are no absolutes.
"I'm not saying it's likely there will be a major radioactive release, but
the fact that it might happen is just not worth it," she says. "It's not
worth killing all these people and causing billions of dollars of damage and
making an area of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable."
Following Indian Point with Chernobyl Heart, which won the Academy Award for
documentary short last year, makes a persuasive and disturbing statement.
The film follows Adi Roche, founder of Ireland's Chernobyl Children's
Project, on a tour of hospitals, orphanages, mental asylums and evacuated
villages in Belarus.
Standing near the remains of the Chernobyl plant, where a handheld
radioactivity meter is measuring radiation levels at 1,000 times the normal
level, Roche is asked by filmmaker Maryann De Leo if she feels afraid.
"I'm terrified. I really am. I really am," Roche says. "But I'm actually
more emotional than terrified, to think that innocuous little complex over
there, that building, has caused the destruction of 9 million lives, half of
which are children under the age of 5."
The images in the film are heartbreaking - children with brains growing
outside of their heads, with deformed arms and legs they cannot use, with
multiple holes in their hearts, lying helpless in beds and cribs - and they
are backed up by awful statistics.
According to the film: In Gomel, a city less than 50 miles from Chernobyl,
the rate of thyroid cancer is 10,000 times greater than before the accident.
In Belarus, congenital birth defects are up 250 percent. The infant
mortality rate is three times that of the rest of Europe. Some 7,000
children with heart defects are on a waiting list for cardiac surgery needed
to save their lives.
A
team of American doctors travels to Belarus to perform the operations. After
saving the life of one young girl and receiving the thanks of her parents,
Dr. William Novick says, "I appreciate this is a bit of a miracle for them.
... But we have a certain responsibility to these kids."
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