Roughly 45,000 gallons of radioactive water from a defunct plant north of New York City will be discharged into the Hudson River after a federal court ruling struck down a state environmental law.
US District Judge Kenneth Karas sided with company Holtec International over New York State in a ruling issued last week that reversed the 2023 “Save The Hudson” law which sought to prevent the company from muddying the Hudson’s waters.
Holtec sued the Empire State last year, arguing that only the federal government had the right to relegate discharge of the Indian Point plant’s nuclear waste, which amounted to the 45,000-gallon sum, The New York Times reported.
Judge Karas agreed, writing in his decision that the 2023 law “categorically precludes Holtec from utilizing a federally accepted method of disposal.”
The company further argued that Indian Point had routinely made similar discharges while operating for over five decades in the downstate power plant.
Holtec praised the ruling and assured worried New Yorkers that the radioactive dumping will be conducted according to federal regulations.
“We will continue to decommission the Indian Point site in an environmentally responsible manner working with local, state and federal stakeholders,” the company said in a statement reported by Reuters.
Indian Point, which sits on the Hudson River about 35 miles north of Manhattan, was closed in 2021 after years of public outcry from the local community over environmental concerns.
Despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s celebration and signing of the “Save The Hudson” law, she slammed the closure of Indian Point as short-sighted while announcing plans for a new nuclear facility.
“Let’s be honest. In doing that, we turned off one quarter of New York City’s power and it was almost all clean energy,” Hochul said at a June 23 news conference.
“Overnight, without an alternative, we’ve had to burn more fuel. More fossil fuels have been burned. greenhouse emissions are up in downstate New York because of that,” the governor added.
Holtec has a seemingly similar outlook — toying with the idea of reopening Indian Point to meet surging power demands, Bloomberg News reported on Sept. 10.
“Most of the interest has come at the federal level,” Patrick O’Brien, director for government affairs at Holtec, told the outlet. “It will just take time and money and political will.”
A rep for Hochul’s office told the outlet at the time that the administration had no plans to reopen Indian Point and was instead planning to go through with the plant’s total decommission.
Water from nuclear power plants is known to have a mild amount of radioactivity, in the form of tritium, which poses a small risk of contamination, according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
With Post wires.
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