Magnet on the Hudson
Sited as it is 100 yards south of the Buchanan town sewage outlet, half a mile south of the Annsville sewage treatment plant, and two miles south of Anthony's nose, site of a partially exposed uraninite vein, & 1950's-era uranium mine tailings, directly across the river from the coal burning Lovett plant (coal contains 1% uranium, 3% thorium) Indian Point has sat for all its history in a raging stream of pollution not of its own making.
It came to the river in an era when Anaconda was turning the river green with copper sulfate, and the upstream dye factories turned it any color that commerce demanded, some weeks orange, others purple, and in the face of common industrial culture at the time, Indian Point funded Riverkeeper with its founding $12 million grant, and independently began the fish farm that repopulated the Hudson bass to its current bumper crop levels.
Strontium from U.S. Navy experimental reactors near Troy, fallout from Chernobyl, a downed Russian satellite, and above ground bomb tests had historically salted Hudson fish with a miniscule strontium dose common in the northern hemisphere, not unique to the Hudson, and certainly not stemming from Indian Point. General Electric's PCB's had always made Hudson fish unpalatable, and still lie there in wait today on the Hudson's floor for remediation. The PCB's resulted in a legal prohibition on eating Hudson fish in the 1970's, even the new hatchlings spawned for us by the Indian Point fish farm in the 1980's & 1990's. Entergy's new re-test finds the same old strontium levels 30 miles upstream, in a place any effluent from Peekskill would never reach, more or less confirming that the Hudson is still dirty, but proving nothing at all about Indian Point, except that Indian Point independently tests, and publicizes its results.
However, after being stripped of everything, in readiness for its new role as Ginsburg Development's gated 300-mile-long Luxury Condo Corridor, The Hudson River no longer has any viable whipping boy, target, or supposed evildoer on its shores to act as modern-day lightning rod for an entire 200 years of Hudson use & misuse, (and a geriatric generation of aging activists). None, that is, except Indian Point, probably the cleanest installation ever to be built along the old industrial corridor. Far from being the target of foreign terrorists, Indian Point now serves as media magnet for dozens of local wannabe issue makers (and issue mongers), and all the while keeps pumping nearly a billion dollars a year into local coffers, and billions of kilowatt hours of life, safety, enjoyment and security into all of its neighboring (and very lucky) communities.
Fish will come, and fish will go. The African American anglers at China Bay will keep on eating the Indian-Point-hatched river bass descendants, and media opponents will keep sensationalizing every last crumb of info about routine tests. Meanwhile life goes on, unchanged.
