Reisman: Gas pipeline. Indian Point. Why tempt fate?

The Indian Point nuclear power complex in Buchanan is the 2,045-megawatt elephant in our backyard.

Because we are human and have a built-in defense mechanism that prevents us from dwelling too heavily on negative things, we tend to ignore the heaving beast.

We tend to resist two hard facts: First that if disaster struck there is no way to safely evacuate hundreds of thousands of people who live within a 10-mile radius of the aging plant. And second, the plant is not likely to close in the foreseeable future because no one has come up with a cheaper, more efficient way to produce the electricity needed to light the skyscrapers of Manhattan, not to mention the modern appliances of everyday life that we take for granted.

Thanks to the taxpayers' largesse, consultants have made small fortunes presenting these twin truths.

Last weekend, Indian Point returned to the forefront of public consciousness when a transformer exploded and caught fire. This has happened before. But this time, a new concern has emerged, namely a controversial plan by a natural gas company, Spectra Energy Corp., to expand and re-route a pipeline only a few hundred feet from the nuclear plant.

One wonders what kind of disaster would have occurred had that fire erupted near the expanded gas line.

Buchanan lies within the town of Cortlandt where Linda Puglisi has been town supervisor for the past 24 years. She has weathered all the Indian Point crises—the leaks, the reactor shutdowns, failed emergency siren tests and a major system blackout.

She has coped with the existential threat of terrorism and the anxiety created by the Ramapo fault that runs underneath the plant. According to the federal odds maker known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance an earthquake along Lower Hudson River Valley could cause core damage to the nuclear plant.

Puglisi has attended hearings, written letters, read reams of documents and fielded phone calls and emails. She has dealt with a gumbo of governmental acronyms—the NRC, the DEC, FERC and so on. One way or another, Indian Point has been on her "to do" list just about every single day of her long tenure. She even has her own consultant, an expert who is paid $10,000 a year.

Through it all, Puglisi believes that it is naïve to think that all the problems will go away simply by closing the plant.

"You can't just turn off a switch," she said.

For starters, it won't solve the conundrum of the radioactive waste kept in dry cask storage units at the site. Until the federal government can clear the many political and environmental hurdles blocking a plan to safely transfer spent fuel rods from the nation's nuclear power plants to a repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the stuff stays put.

"Therein lies the issue," Puglisi said. "Open, closed, licensed or re-licensed we have to deal with the spent fuel rods."

If that's the case, then it seems that for now the best policy regarding Indian Point is to manage and minimize risk. Most of that responsibility rests with Entergy Corp., the Fortune 500 firm that owns Indian Point and whose slogan is "safe, secure, vital."

However, what's to be done about the Spectra project? Driven purely by the profit motive, it poses a risk just as real as the Ramapo fault.

To the horror of many who live in the northern suburbs, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the pipeline expansion anyway. Puglisi has demanded that FERC reverse its decision—saying, "we cannot allow for this large expansion of the natural gas line to go close to Indian Point which could impact the safety of thousands of residents in our community."

Indian Point is our man-made Vesuvius. Why tempt fate?

Email: preisman@lohud.com Twitter: @philreisman