Keep Indian Point Open

(April 30, 2021)—Let’s face it: we all know there is absolutely no good reason to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It’s an obvious scam when you consider that the same people screaming about “carbon free” energy are closing a completely reliable “carbon free” nuclear plant with a perfect safety record to replace it with “natural gas.” How well did that work out in Texas this past February?

Indian Point was built as a project of Eisenhower and JFK’s Atoms for Peace proposal. The first reactor at Indian Point was put on line in 1962, within months of JFK’s Rice University Speech committing the U.S. to going to the Moon in ten years. We accomplished both. Now we are taking U.S. nuclear plants down as other countries are going nuclear. We must reverse this course!

The Human Cost

New Yorkers would do well to consider the recent power blackout during the cold snap in Texas, during which over 200 people either froze to death or died of carbon monoxide poisoning. If you are rightly angered over the needless deaths of elderly citizens in New York nursing homes due to reckless decisions made during the pandemic, what will be the fate of elderly and vulnerable individuals when blackouts and brownouts hit New York City this summer? Remember the tapes of the Enron executives in the early 2000s gloating over “granny’s” suffering in California while they deliberately created artificial shortages and increased utility rates by as much as 100 times?

The derivatives speculators and “too-big-to-jail” bankers are desperate for new income streams to continue to prop up the over-inflated stock market bubble. They think nothing of the suffering of millions of people as a result of their greed, whether it is in impoverished nations where millions may die of starvation, or the people who live within five miles of the New York Stock Exchange.

In this hot election season, every candidate running for office, and in New York City in particular, should be asked how they plan to deal with the consequences of the shutdown of Indian Point, and whether they would fight to get it reopened to avert a life-threatening catastrophe.

The Holtec decommissioning of Indian Point must be prevented

We need to keep the skilled work force of Indian Point in place. The idea that these workers will be re-employed in phony projects with scam promises, such as building blades for offshore windmills, is beyond ludicrous. Why should organized labor be used to sabotage American food production by working to construct foreign-owned but American taxpayer-subsidized off-shore windmills that would jeopardize our fishing industry? What happened to the patriotic American labor movement? There’s no reason to put American farmers, fishermen and food producers out of business for the sake of foreign interests like the Oersted Company of Denmark or for greedy Wall Street speculators.

The shuttered reactors at Indian point must be reopened and put into operation. New York State, New York City or even the Federal Government could purchase the plant and turn it into a public utility, like New York Governor and later President Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). This would be much cheaper than losing 25% of New York City’s energy supply and then putting $3.2 billion into a bonded project that might get hydro-power from Canada. Why allow speculators to reap billions of dollars and jeopardize the American economy and power grid when we can simply buy Indian Point, put it back into operation, and then use the extra acres of the campus to build a new, fourth generation nuclear plant with the skilled labor already in place?

Remember, Entergy is not just shutting down Indian Point in 2021, but has shut, sold, or is shutting five still-licensed nuclear plants over an eight year period. This has all occurred within states which have deregulated energy and are thus claiming “the market” is what is “making them do it.” The loss from closing those plants alone is 2993 highly skilled full time workers dispersed, and 4100 MW of energy lost. Closed plants include: Vermont Yankee, closed in 2014, 643 workers; Massachusetts Plymouth Pilgrim, closed 2019, 650 jobs; New York Indian point 1 and 2, closing April 30, 2021, 1100 workers; and Michigan Palisades, set to close in 2022, 600 workers.

Since Nixon’s termination of the Bretton Woods System in August of 1971, which only Lyndon LaRouche foresaw, the United States has been on a course toward disintegration driven by a cabal of the largest global financial institutions, now pushing for the “great reset.” The hyper-inflation in the 1970s, the repeal of FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, the deregulation of derivatives, and the near-miss on taking down FDR’s PUHCA, (which was only stopped by the crash of Enron), were all steps leading us toward the edge of the abyss. We must reverse course now! Don’t doom New York to be fleeced and then frozen!