POLITICS ON THE HUDSON

Fuhgeddaboudit: 'The Simpsons' takes on Indian Point

Jon Campbell
jcampbell1@gannett.com

ALBANY - The Indian Point nuclear power plant will close by 2021. On Sunday, "The Simpsons" got in some parting licks.

The venerable Fox television show made the Westchester County plant the butt of its jokes during its opening scene Sunday, which featured an intramural softball game between Springfield Nuclear and Indian Point.

The Indian Point squad — filled with New Yorkers with cartoonish outer-borough accents (and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie) — chortled and shouted things like "Pizza!" and "Verrazano Bridge!" as they waited to bat.

Lenny Leonard, a "Simpsons" mainstay, lamented "those Indian Point nuclear jerks" that "think they’re so great because their fallout radius includes Manhattan."

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"How many Mets games can you postpone?" an Indian Point batter fired back. "Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Later, Montgomery Burns — Springfield Nuclear's aging, wealthy owner — sits in a lavish, glass-encased, escalator-serviced box with Indian Point's "owner," a cigar-wielding caricature who laments the future of the nuclear business.

"Me, I'm thinking of getting into, uh, solar," he said. “I won’t use it myself. I’ll just sell it to poor people and the musicians.”

Through a spokesman, Entergy Corp. — Indian Point's actual owner — declined comment.

Indian Point, located about 30 miles north of Manhattan, is a massive nuclear plant that can provide about a quarter of the power used by New York City and Westchester County.

In January, Entergy Corp. entered into an agreement with the state of New York to gradually shut the plant down, with one reactor set to come offline in April 2020 and the other to follow a year later.