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Day two of David Pecker testimony wraps in NY Trump trial; Supreme Court hears arguments on Idaho's near-total abortion ban; ND sees a flurry of campaigning among Native candidates; and NH lags behind other states in restricting firearms at polling sites.

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The Senate moves forward with a foreign aid package. A North Carolina judge overturns an aged law penalizing released felons. And child protection groups call a Texas immigration policy traumatic for kids.

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Wyoming needs more educators who can teach kids trade skills, a proposal to open 40-thousand acres of an Ohio forest to fracking has environmental advocates alarmed and rural communities lure bicyclists with state-of-the-art bike trail systems.

Cuomo Letter Opposes Re-licensing Indian Point

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Tuesday, November 17, 2015   

ALBANY, N.Y. – Governor Cuomo's office has sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about the dangers of allowing the reactors at the Indian Point nuclear power facility to continue operating.

Among the concerns raised in the letter are metal fatigue and the safety of non-replaceable metal components that might have grown brittle with age.

Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at the organization Beyond Nuclear, says the governor's concerns deserve careful consideration.

"The industry never really had a grasp on the amount of contaminants in copper, in these forgings, which can accelerate embrittlement," he says. "These are all legitimate concerns."

Entergy, the owner of Indian Point, says the plant is critical to the electric power supply for the region, including New York City, and employs about 1,000 skilled workers.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will hold a hearing this week to collect evidence for Indian Point's license renewal application. Gunter says additional concerns, like the Indian Point facility's proximity to a major population center, were not part of the debate 40 years ago when the reactors went into operation.

"Clearly, these should be issues that are reviewed in the license renewal," he says. "They were never given fair consideration of fact and risk in the original licensing."

Some 20 million people live within 50 miles of the reactors, but the emergency planning zone only extends to a 10-mile radius.

The governor's letter also stressed that the reactors themselves are not the only danger – as Gunter notes, 40 years of radioactive spent fuel rods are being stored at the facility.

"These already over-packed, high-density storage pools are not only technological issues," he says, "they're also a growing security threat."

The letter from Cuomo's office asks the NRC to deny Entergy's application to renew the licenses for Indian Point.


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