Riverkeeper has joined calls for an independent study to assess the risk to the Indian Point nuclear power plant from the Algonquin pipeline expansion.
In a Jan. 16 letter the Ossining-based environmental group said a safety evaluation prepared by Entergy, the company that operates Indian Point, didn’t adequately account for the effects of a natural gas pipeline rupture. The Algonquin pipeline runs through the power plant’s Buchanan property and it would lie more than 1,600 feet from the power plant structures.
Riverkeeper’s letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission echoed an assessment made by Accufacts, a public records research company that called Entergy’s analysis “seriously incomplete, even dismissive.”
On Tuesday Entergy defended its safety study.
“Entergy places plant and community safety first and foremost and is required by federal regulation to analyze new potential safety impacts, such as potential impacts of the proposed AIM pipeline project,” Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi wrote in an email. “Entergy engineers spent hundreds of hours analyzing data provided by Spectra Energy and concluded the project, if built, would pose no increased risks to safety at the plant. Experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted their own independent analysis and reached the same conclusion. Entergy takes no position on the pipeline project itself.”
Spectra Energy needs New York and federal permits to expand a pipeline that runs through Putnam, Rockland and Westchester counties. More than 15 miles of the pipeline would be dug up in New York.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation will hold public hearings this week on the pipeline expansion.
The Jan. 21 meeting at 6 p.m. will be held in the auditorium of the Henry H. Wells Middle School, 570 Route 312, Brewster. The 6 p.m. hearing on Jan. 22 at the Stony Point Community Center, 5 Clubhouse Lane, Stony Point.
Twitter: @ErnieJourno
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