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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

4th Incident at NY Nuke Plant Raises Questions

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Monday, April 9, 2007   

Friday’s fire at the Indian Point Energy Center comes as the 40-year-old nuclear plant is seeking a new 20-year operating license. The reactor is located in Congressman John Hall’s district, and he says this fourth unplanned shutdown in a year should prompt Congress to act on his resolution to mandate an independent review of Indian Point. Hall feels a nuclear plant would never be allowed in Westchester County if the process had started today.

"It would never be allowed and, in fact, the utility probably would never even try to ask for a siting there because there's something like 20 million people in a 50-mile radius."

As a result of Friday’s fire, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission downgraded its safety assessment of Indian Point, and that means the reactor will be subject to increased inspections. In the meantime, Congressman Hall hosts a symposium on wind power tonight. He believes, instead of pushing to relicense troubled reactors, that utility companies should be investing in alternative energy sources such as wind.

"All utilities should get involved in this. You know,it’s one of those areas, like the hybrid car, where we don’t want to let other countries get out in front of us so that we have to buy the equipment from them. We want to make sure that we can be the ones selling the equipment, selling the new technologies and creating the jobs here at home."

Hall points out that with wind power, you don’t have to worry about evacuation plans; at Indian Point, he adds that evacuation could be nearly impossible. The NRC's plans call for people to, as they put it, “shelter in place.”

"This is not a serious way of looking at a plant where 8 percent of the population of the entire United States lives in the radius zone. You can just picture. if you know what ordinary rush hour looks like, how bad it would be if there was a serious event at the plant. So I think basically what they are trying to do is bail themselves out of having to have an evacuation plan."


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