Scamming Off the Work of Others

Recognize the Song?
(Let me tell you why you do)

It astounds me how blithely a politician can ignore other peoples' efforts, and successes, and then attach their work to his own resume', as if they had never existed. John Hall, ignoring years of stringent NRC inspections of Indian Point, now regales his followers (and the news media) with what, pray tell? He proposes that NRC must inspect Indian Point, saying it is "crucial". Come again honorable congressperson?

Has not NRC been inspecting the self-same Indian Point for 35 years, telling you & me that it was safe enough? What part of "Safe Enough" is it that you misunderstand? The American national repository of safety expertise in the nuclear field--the NRC , repeatedly gave Indian Point suggestions on how to clean up their act, even shutting them down for 2 years in the 1990's to learn how to run safely. Indian Point complied, and NRC told them "OK , you are once again safe enough".

This is an ongoing work, with the needs of the American public in mind, making nuclear plants safer, chiding them, fining them, learning all their secrets, and John Hall had nothing to do with it. NRC is quite capable of finding out just what is right, or wrong about Indian Point, minus any piggy-back grandstanding by ex rock musicians with an old anti-nuke concert axe to grind.

Tell us, John, just how will your bill for one additional inspection change the ongoing process, 35 years on, that has been made up of several hundred inspections to date? Will your bill give new eyes to the NRC inspectors? New hands? New science, new intelligence? Have they not had their intelligence, their science, and their dedication all along? What an insult your bill is, to all the expert people of good will who have been actually doing the work that you now propose, as if new, as if every single victory they crafted in their careers, is nothing but a PR opportunity, for a newbie congressperson, only because the one time your name is on it, somehow this one last time, its gonna be the big one, the right one, the crucial one, the indispensable one, the one that America demands or else?

Maybe to journalists this is true. NRC just doing the real work, week after week, for decades, is not news. Indian Point, making our lives comfortable and safe, month after month, for decades, seems to be no story at all. But somehow, when 3 Democrats meet at a frozen kayak club, and say "We will force NRC to inspect Indian Point", somehow, this rises to the level of a mall shooting, or a celebrity divorce, and now all of us are told how "crucial" the activity is.

Well, yes. It is crucial. So crucial in fact, that NRC has dedicated itself to it for 30 years, and will continue doing it long after Mr. Hall returns to songwriting.

But this week, all that work is not theirs. Their part in it doesn't count, can't be believed, and is no news. This week all that work is suddenly John Hall's claim to fame. They say that 95% of new songs are somebody else's song, rewritten a little, and offererd up as new work. I say Mr. Hall is just lip-synching NRC's tune, and calling it "Dance With Me". It's not Hall's song, It's not Hall's life's work, it's NRC's work, and he has simply plagiarized it, and added his own sour notes, I might add.

Meanwhile kayaks or no kayaks, over at NRC, the long slow original song plays on.... ensuring that we are all safe, that Entergy toes the line, and that we have the electricity we need , also. That kind of harmony, blending reality, public safety, and public needs, is perhaps too sophisticated a symphony for Hall to comprehend. Perhaps novice music student Hall should book a few lessons with the concertmasters--- NRC.

Or perhaps a dozen anti-nuke Dr Jabberwockies would be best to do the job, misunderstanding 100% of what they see, full of hate and paranoia, deciding just how much electricity you and I , and our children may utilize, for the next 30 years? Perhaps we could all just camp out together, until 2040?

HALL HARRASSES ENTERGY, (provides no electricity, though)

Who said there would be lifeboats?

The 20-odd million people living in the soon-to-be-unaffordable Hudson Valley region need more than empty stunts, cooked up by devious and overanxious "activist advocates'" (paid press agents), in the pay of big charity, big oil, and antinuclear lobbyist foundations, and in turn, foisted on clueless Democratic electees as panaceas, without understanding, without any need, and in the end, without any possible viable result.

It seems that the paid antinuke lobby has settled on the "Independent Safety Assessment" as the next in a line of ostensibly serious proposals that all end up useless exercises in partisan attack futility. It is one thing to oppose policy from the sidelines, but it is quite another to be elected, and have the responsibility of making livable lives for your constituents, outside of any one-sided expectations on the part of the far right, the far left, or the far anti-nuclear fringe.

Just as bungled electric service negotiations are turning into major permanent rate hikes and tax hikes for the unfortunates living in Rockland county, are we to stand by mesmerized, while the same electoral stupidity begins to destroy infrastructure on the east shore, in attacking Indian Point power plant for no demonstrable reason, except that certain fringe political groups voted a "no nukes" line?

The no-nukes cadre was but a small minority in a fairly close majority voting Sue Kelly into retirement in favor of John Hall, and Hall made much of declaring he was "everyone's congressman"---- so now we demand to hear exactly what cause there is to begin to harrass Indian Point, and its mentor, Entergy, aside from promises perhaps rashly made at fuzzy-logic no-nukes concerts over twenty years, by a man who does not understand the area's big cities, the inner suburbs, the local job markets, the local near-suburban housing crunch, the need for blue collar work, and the urgency of the viable absorption of unknown tens of thousands of new arrivals, who are here for the long haul, and who cannot survive integration into American life as penniless marginalized peons, prevented from participation by ill-thought-out infrastructure-burning rampages, hatched in the name of 1980's rock'n'roll concert talk.

In the only other "Independent Safety Assessment" ever held, (Maine Yankee 1996) there seemed to be a glaring proximate cause---a smoking gun--- in an employee allegation of criminal wrongdoing. Without that allegation, which also implicated the NRC, no ISA ever would have happened a decade ago. Where is today's smoking gun? Where is the specific wrongdoing. It is much more than claiming Indian Point could be "Guilty until proven innocent", ..... it is a case in which our freshman congressrocker cannot even say WHAT Indian Point might be guilty of!

In the Maine case, in 1996, even the smoking gun claims were later found to be not true--- it just so happened that Maine Yankee was decrepit, understaffed, lax in almost every way, ignored by its corporate owners, and so it was put to a just and deserving death. And in the irony of ironies, the savior corporation called upon to send knowledgeable experts to Maine to complete the burial arrangements, was you guessed it--ENTERGY!! Entergy uncovered a host of FURTHER bad stuff at Maine Yankee, and correctly advised them to stay closed, and give up their license (which they eventually did).

At least in part from the glaring lessons learned in doing away with Maine Yankee, Entergy entered New York in 2000 with a healthy skepticism toward Indian Point, and began a long 7 year improvement plan, one still being followed today. Almost every area concentrated on by Entergy at Indian Point harks back at least in part to some laxity found at Maine Yankee, and therefore has been specifically targeted now for at least 7 years of ISA remediation at the New York plants, whether they needed it or not.

All this info is available to Hall, and tells him not only could nothing bad be found by an Indian Point ISA, but that it is at root a deception of the public, to act as if an ISA could do the public any good . It cannot. But it can help Hall, and a few other complicit cross-burners, because professionally organized antinuke fakery contributed at least some votes to all of them.

Bread & Circuses is, I'm afraid not enough here. What we need, all us 20 million forgotten souls (all of us who didn't meet at the concerts)-- what we need, is a concrete plan to build energy centers. Not study centers, actual viable electricity-producing power plants, to replace Indian Point's 2000+ megawatts, get them built, set up, and pumping on the grid--so that we can live here---- and I will be the first one to say , at that point, to Indian Point :....."Goodnight old gal, thanks for a fine half-century"

If nobody builds those plants, every single swipe at Indian Point , is a hatchet swipe on at least 15 million of us being able to afford to live here. Mark my words. Its smoke and mirrors. Its bread & circuses. It's screw-your brother for a soundbite, but it is NOT responsible leadership.

It's like blowing up the Titanic first, so it won't hit an iceberg, and,
once in the icy water saying: "Lifeboats?"
"Who said there would be lifeboats?"

"HALL GATE" SCANDAL BEGINS

John Hall disgraces his new office

The so-called "return of ethics" principle, upon which the new Democratic majority was elected, will be seriously challenged by the attempt of long-time antinuclear celebrity turned congress member John Hall to launch a private legislative vendetta, calling for an obviously unneeded independent safety assessment of Indian Point power plant, to satisfy the wishes of old adherents.

Modeling itself on the only other such inspection ever held, one at Maine Yankee in 1996, this bill would propose a pointless search for some unknown and unspecified "wrong" ---which is at root, an undoable task. (Maine Yankee's inspection grew from a specific whistle blower complaint in a declining and below average plant.)

Hall's bill would target no specific wrongdoing (no whistleblower has complained), in a vastly improved, previously inspected smoothly functioning above average plant, run by a corporation that offers to manage poorly run plants for other utilities, and bring them up to par.

Hall must know this, and so the motive for this inspection cannot be valid, as was the reason for Maine Yankee's inspection. The motive must be sought in Hall's antinuclear past, and antinuclear following, and washes out as pure legislative harrassment of a well run, and widely accepted business, simply because it is "nuclear".

A Bisconti research poll recently showed that 80% of people living within ten miles of nuclear plants favored the plants, and Hall has access to this poll. So that pushes the status of his antinuclear harrassment bill down another notch, to that of a vanity bill, one concocted with no hope of success, to make him look good to old supporters.

And this is supposedly "a new ethics"?
This might more accurately be termed a corrupt misuse of a newly won office, to punish an old enemy, via legislative harrassment, against the will of the people, to gain press notice.

We might even term it "Hallgate".

Why So Quiet?

In 1995 a whistle blower wrote to the Union of Concerned Scientists, alleging that he had participated in the falsification of computer code at Maine Yankee atomic power plant, in order to gain an undeserved power uprate at that plant. The utmost seriousness of the crime he alleged, and the lack of its detection by the NRC (who had granted the uprate), called into question the honesty and/or criminality of Maine Yankee's management, and the competency and/or complicity of the NRC as an organization, and did it all very credibly, from inside the fence.

A public allegation of a specific criminal act so serious had to be addressed, quickly, and in the most high-level fashion.That is why NRC immediately revoked Maine Yankee's uprate, and did an Independent Safety Assessment there.

The inspection done was a duplicate of NRC's usual inspections, and was "independent" only in the fact that inspectors from other NRC regions made up the team of 25 inspectors (not the previous Maine Yankee residents), and a small group of state inspectors sat in with the NRC team.

Unfortunately for Maine Yankee, and its ultra-thrifty parent company, a host of unacceptable conditions, and license deviations was found by the team, which would have challenged the plant's parent company to spend a lot of cash to fix things up. Two months after the report was issued Maine Yankee ceased operation.

After reading the report, and a host of other documents about the ISA, I have concluded that Maine Yankee, as a situation, and as a plant, bears no resemblance whatsoever to Entergy's Indian Point plant in Buchanan New York.

Maine Atomic corporation was cheap, ignored the plant, held back needed funds, never fixed anything, was short of staff, allowed fakery and evasion in its codes, as long as profits were made. Long-term bad conditions were tolerated so long they were forgotten, and when NRC came in, they were glaringly easily found. The Maine Yankee ISA was needed, and did a decent job. Maine Yankee should have been radically fixed, or shut down. In keeping with its cheapness and lack of faith in itself, Maine Atomic chose to fold.

On the other hand......
Entergy corporation, an organization suffused with belief in America's nuclear future, has undergone a steady series of improvements at Indian Point since 2001, improving not only items that Maine Yankee forgot about, but many others, also.Most importantly, no whistleblower allegation similar to the Maine Yankee false-computer-code allegation, has ever been made at Indian Point, and so...... no immediate prima facia reason, or rationale exists for an independent safety assessment in New York. Entergy's Buchanan plant is not understaffed, as was Maine Yankee, Entergy is not intent only on bleeding profits, as was Maine Atomic, Indian Point's design basis has just undergone a five year $40 million dollar revamp, its testing program is fully certified, its material condition is excellent, there are a minimum of operator burdens and workarounds, backlogs are way down, and the plant has a full complement of system engineers (Maine atomic did not believe in system engineers, never hired any, and so no individual champions ever existed for out of whack plant systems). Entergy has a full complement of system engineers. Every single thing that was bad at Maine Yankee, is exceptionally good at Indian Point. Indian Point's Cable separation and Reactor Protection systems have just undergone exhaustive five year detailed inspections, leading to major upgrades.-- these areas were ignored and completely deficient in Maine. Inspectors in Maine found a wire to start its safety pumps was glaringly not even attached. All these systems are newly inspected at Buchanan.

Researching all this has only reinforced how little our politicians know about today's nuclear power industry, especially the Entergy fleet, which in almost every way is the exact opposite of Maine Yankee, and an exemplar of every good quality Maine Atomic Corporation never bothered to achieve. Almost every single shortfall in the Maine Yankee Independent Safety Inspection is in some area that Entergy has addressed previously and vigorously at its Indian Point plant, and thus pre-improved to far beyond what Maine Yankee could have attained, even if its corporation had stayed the course.

It's more than apples and oranges.
It's worm-eaten rotten Maine apples versus fresh golden Indian Point Oranges.

Anti-nuclear press agentry shops have hung their hat on the supposition that something must be wrong at Indian Point, because they want something to be wrong. Unfortunately for that supposition, Entergy got there the firstest, with the mostest, and more or less started their own, internally motivated Independent Safety Assessment in concert with their purchase, beginning over 7 long years ago. The sum total of the very exhaustive, near-complete round of multimillion dollar improvements adds up to a firm, valuable local infrastructure resource, a gem in New York State's energy crown, and a wanted, valued business linchpin, upholding the local area's wellbeing, in ways that talking head activism cannot ever replace, and does not intend to.

Those calling for an independent assessment might more productively assess the source of their negatively-spun misinformation, and the self-inflating claims of those who stand to gain from the notoriety attached to false accusation. That way at least, they will have something to find, and our lights can stay on.

Why so quiet?
Nothing's wrong.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF NUCLEAR

The Moral Imperative of Nuclear

I always knew the earth's core was hot, but It was unclear to me exactly why. On some astronomical bodies, such as Jupiter's moon Io , it's flexing due to Jupiter's gravity that causes purely mechanical rubbing heat. In some white stars, it's nuclear fusion. Guess what the earth's internal heat comes from? Good old U235 decay. In the earth's core, the exact, self-same process that runs every nuclear reactor in the world, is the ancient historical process causing earth's volcanoes, and thus all the geothermal power anywhere on the planet. Thus, ...U235 CAUSES our environment. The scope of this news is staggering, in its philosophical implications for environmentalists. It makes environmentalist opposition to human use of U235 fission into a backward cult of avoidance, a kind of meaningless earth-hating tabu, pure superstition, not tied to science, or love of the planet.

It's implication for those who love the planet, and are truly willing to act on that love outside narrow energy politics, is that just as Watson & Crick outed the double helix of DNA as the essence of biological life, Earth-Philosophers must now accept that U235 fission is in point of fact, the white-hot beating heart of Gaia.

Where does that place the American Nuclear Industry, and all it's spokespeople? It places them firmly in the right. Overwhelmingly on the side of the planet. Undeniably historical. Absolutely ethical. Backed up in all their assertions by both of Stephen J. Gould's "Two Magisteria"-- Science, and Religion (both capitalized).

The powerful arguments deriving from nuclear power being what the planet itself does, easily smash all pseudoscience attacks on nuclear as sophistry,... at their widest scope,... nothing but quibbling over means and methods.
Any argument over merest means and methods can be countered by engineering. Engineering can always find new means, new methods. All that is required is optimism, expertise, and funding.

The knowledge that we are right to use U235 is founded on the broadest philosophical stepping stone, a tacit license to proceed, given by the planet itself. Any person then arguing otherwise, is placed in the unenviable debating stance, of claiming that mankind as a race does not deserve to occupy the earth. That assertion is tantamount to a Lemming's call for mass suicide, and is evil nonsense, closely approaching Hitlerian angst in its self-hate, and its Faustian deathwish.

People at large emotionally recognize this Dr. Strangelove inversion displayed by anti-nukes, but cannot easily pin it down. I hereby share it with the U235 outreach community, exposed in all its magnificent simplicity.

Why nuclear? Because Gaia tells us so.
Enjoy

John Sweeney
Buchanan New York

Gaia is Nuclear

Nuclear power is the gift of Gaia’s long past
The heat given in ancient times
By Gaia to her progeny
at Oklo then
At Peekskill now
One and the same
heart of matter
heart of gaia
warmth without fire
spontaneous living metals
warmed by history
to give us life

This planet, called Earth, or Terra, which has awakened as the living being known as Gaia has assembled itself over eons , eons in which examples were layed down for the wise to ponder and learn from. What better way to solve some modern day problem, than to observe what the planet or its life forms has done in the past, under similar circumstances.This outlook might be termed biomimetics, or Gaiamimetics, and its lessons ought to help avoid plans or agendae too uninformed, too unconnected to Gaian reality to succeed.

One incident that happened spontaneously 2 billion years ago, was the formation of the mats of Oklo. Bacterial beings, the earliest known life forms, have formed
mats or nodules around the globe, similar to coral reefs, as both their living homes, and as the historical record of their having existed. In Australia, the nodules of their habitations still exist,in coastal waters, and are known as stromatolites. At Oklo, in Gabon, Africa, similar creatures have left not only mats, but a mineralized historical record of the most surprising kind, a record only decipherable recently, using physical knowlege not available until late in the twentieth century. At Oklo, a deposit of heavy minerals existed in a wet environment, perhaps a stream. For 12 billion years or so, nothing notable occurred, until micro-organisms occupied the inner spaces between grains of this mineral deposit, using it as their home, but also inadvertently acting as a living moderator for certain chemical reactions now enabled to occur within the mineral itself.
On a steady basis, interludes of wetting, drying, growing, and changing occurred, completely altering the raw minerals, to suit the needs of the stromatolite population living within the grains, and leaving (as in Australia) , a permanent record of their having lived. Microbiotic symbiosis between bacteria and an inorganic chemical reaction had created the special conditions required to permanently alter the mineral, and thus write the record of the Oklo mats, in stone, or rather, in metal.The stone, a uraninite oxide, now contains an imbalance of its U238 and U235 metals which is easily recognizable to scientists, as the result of a biological nuclear reactor. The depletion in its 235 species of metal can’t be attributed to any other cause, and could not have happened any other way. The Oklo bacteria created their own living Indian Point. Without the bacteria –unmoderated– the reaction could not have occurred (and did not for 12 billion years before they arrived). Without the warmth of the reactor surrounding them, the bacteria could not have flourished as they did, for an estimated billion years, living high on the hog in their self-heating apartment house, their own self-warming coral reef in a river in Africa, a successful nuclearbiotic symbiosis of the first magnitude, teaching us how to use what Gaia provides– the spontaneous warmth of her own body, contained in her own mineral gift, used locally, in full biomimetic respectfulness,
and Gaiamimetic gratitude, only at the Indian Point Energy Center, our own biomimetic triumph on the Hudson. Far from being an interloper, invading a pristine shore, IPEC is seen in this light to be an environmental savior, using its biomimetics to gather Gaia’s gift, her self warming mineral deposits, cleanly, silently, and naturally, to warm & sustain us like the bacteria at Oklo, rather than burning up the dwindling atmosphere as other power plants, on coal, oil, or gas, will surely do.




You enjoy life.
We all, each & every one of us, sleep,
with a chunk of uranium beneath us.
That chunk is known as “Terra” or “Earth” Without the radiating core, Earth would be cold. Therefore we may look on Earth's uranium core as its heart, its "Life", or personalizing a bit, as Gaia herself. The heat of uranium makes the hot volcanic lava beneath us. Would you plunge your hand into the lava?…. Of course not.



HOWEVER …
All these powerful Gaian outpourings are GIFTS!!
Gaia gives, and we are allowed to accept, and use, or die out
and become mere food for whatever creature accepts the gifts.
(Gaia’s first Law).
Neither volcanoes nor uranium are evil,
they are both natural, even supernatural, gifts.
The greenest gifts ever given our humble monkeyrace.
We ought to use them.
Hope to meet you all someday,
and hoist a brandy (organic of course)
to our momma,
Goddess Gaia!




Now, to the Protection of Mother Earth’s Daughters!
6000 Chinese coal miners die on average each year, mining the coal used to create the permanent east Asian atmospheric disturbance which has been visible from outer space for the last decade, the brown death-smog which now grows increasingly worse each year. Not only do the massive mining operations mar the breast of mother earth, causing acid runoffs into streams, killing fish, deforesting entire provinces with irreparable open scars, but the impoverishment & lung disease following stunt the lives of millions, to place the sleeping giant, China, at the forefront of the fossil burning nations. The single technology most protective of mother earth, of the miners, of the atmosphere, of the steams, their fish, their trees, and all the poor people dependent on them, is the gift of the Earth itself, giving heat without burning anything, vastly reducing mining operations by a thousand, or ten thousand orders of magnitude for the same power (thus saving 6000 lives directly),
the minerals used by bacteria ages ago, and used today in the biomimetic triumph on the Hudson, Indian Point.




Closing Indian Point would necessitate the burning of oil, or coal in the USA, on the same scale as in China, shooting us backwards 200 years in one fell swoop, back to the age of “Black Birmingham”, when 100,000 people per year would die of lung disease in England, from the soot clouds of Birmingham’s factories. Mother Earth has given us a way out. Are we to deny its existence out of malicious self pride? Gaia’s self warming minerals are here whether we use them or not. You don’t burn them. You need not even mine any more of them (simply use what we already possess). Simply acknowlege the purity, the pristine invisibility of the Indian Point process, which makes no smoke, buries its own waste in its own casks, emits no greenhouse gas, and asks only to be allowed to continue to protect our mother earth with her own gift.



This is the moral fact of it.
This is the one ethical solution to it.
This is the scientific reality of it.
Any denial of this, is malicious self promotion,
based on malicious misinformation,
and is, in fact,
the knowing promotion of intentional death.

PAPIER MACHE' PANDERING ?

There's a papier-mache' mockup of Indian Point, faithful in many details to the real original Indian Point, and it lives in journalist's communal psyche as a dependable knock. Write a few words about aging, ailing, leaking, distressed, woeful, etc., and you've got yourself a story. It's not even required to leave one's chair to investigate,.... all the needed parameters spring right to hand, out of communal memory of a nice hot purple flashing story angle, and blink on the page, obligingly, for our journalist, drawing attention, readership, and the satisfaction of having served up a palatable piece of work.

The only drawback, is that the leaking 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.

Do away with Indian Point? I can't wait! I am sick to death of the lurid claims, the carefully posed mock concern, the politician's sanctimonious puppet acts, mouthing less-than-credible complaints hatched for them by deluded and pushy place-grabbers, the kind of people who sneak to the front of democracy's feeding-line, and eat up all the deliberative attention for their own bogus complaints, leaving the rest of us screwed, annoyed, and without effective politicians, since ours are all tied up mired chin-deep in papier-mache'.

Yes, let us do away with Indian Point immediately--- the papier mache' version, that is.
While the Axis-Of-Anxiety (journalists, politicoes, and activists) fritters away weeks and months in their cute glue-spattered artist's smocks, carefully placing little Al Qaeda action figures on their toy domes, and making "brrrrrr---brrrrr" lip noises, while holding little model airplanes aloft above their papier mache masterpiece, the rest of us have to live here, and not get screwed.

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 this new administration can only deal with papier mache', and so Cuomo jr. is hell-bent on ignoring both NAS, and us. So...... sadly, indeed, .....that makes new AG Cuomo's latest press-blast against Indian Point into a pandering exercise. Pandering to papier-mache', and a mailing list, 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 WERN'T POSING IN THEIR CUTE LITTLE BERETS AND ARTIST SMOCKS, in front of the big purple papier mache horror castle, for a vid byte to be shown to Riverkeeper's 5000 name mailing list, because Cuomo junior's political ambitions don't end with the state attorney general position!

Therefore, Let us all consider this question:

IS CUOMO JUNIOR'S POLITICAL FUTURE IMPORTANT ENOUGH , TO LET HIM SACRIFICE YOUR FUTURE FOR HIS?