Posted on 05/02/2003 9:10:44 AM PDT by WaveThatFlag
Entergy Corp., the second-largest U.S. nuclear-power generator, is facing new opposition to its Buchanan, New York, plant: Paul Tudor Jones and other hedge-fund managers are joining environmentalists who want the facility closed. Sept. 11 showed the threat of a terrorist attack on the Indian Point reactors is too great, given their location near 20 million people in the New York City region, Jones said in a speech this week before analysts and investors a block from the World Trade Center site. The plant should be shut within five years, said Jones, who manages $8 billion. Financial support from hedge-fund managers may help environmental groups opposing the plant erase the advantage the energy industry typically enjoys in paying for lobbyists, lawyers and publicity, some academics and environmentalists said. ``The concern is beginning to extend beyond the usual environmentalist constituencies that want to close the plant,'' said Gerald Benjamin, professor of political science at State University of New York in New Paltz. ``That is a sign of danger for the people trying to keep the plant open.'' Indian Point, located on the Hudson River 33 miles north of New York City's Times Square, is about 20 miles west of Greenwich, Connecticut, home to Jones's Tudor Investment Corp. and one of the biggest concentrations of hedge funds. The federal government should immediately assume responsibility for security at Indian Point, and spent fuel at the facility should be moved to ``hardened'' storage bunkers, Jones said. The money manager, whose fund has returned about 27 percent per year after fees since its founding in 1986, said an attack might spread radiation and ``take out the financial capital of the U.S.''
Security Measures
Entergy spokesman Jim Steets said Jones is ``clearly misinformed on how well-protected the plant is and the technologies in place that would prevent the kind of scenarios he's talking about.'' Entergy has stepped up security since Sept. 11, spending about $7 million in the past 18 months on such things as vehicle barriers, explosive detection equipment and improvements to the security force. Entergy hired former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's company to provide emergency planning and security consulting for the four nuclear power plants Entergy runs in the Northeast, Dow Jones Newswires reported. Entergy hired Giuliani Partners LLC, which was formed by Giuliani after he left office in 2001, the wire service said. Any decision to close Indian Point would rest with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates nuclear plants. While the commission has temporarily shut plants for safety problems, it has never permanently closed one. ``Indian Point is no more threatened than any other plant, and we have had no specific threats to nuclear plants anywhere in the country since Sept. 11,'' said Diane Screnci, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman.
Funding
The steps Jones advocates for Indian Point match those of Riverkeeper Inc., a Garrison, New York, environmental group that is campaigning to close Indian Point. In his speech, Jones urged support for Riverkeeper and called for members of the financial community to contact politicians such as New York Governor George Pataki. Jones also is putting his money where his mouth is, said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior counsel for Riverkeeper. Tudor Jones has given a ``very significant'' donation for further publicity about Indian Point . ``We are going to be able to gear up this campaign'' because of his funding, he said. While Jones seldom appears in the press, and declined to answer questions after his speech, he has been willing to support environmental causes publicly before. In the mid-1990s, he backed the Save Our Everglades Committee, a group that was seeking to have sugar growers do more to clean up the Florida Everglades, according to the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. He provided almost $3.7 million to the organization, or 89 percent of its budget, according to a September 1996 Miami Herald article that cited campaign finance records. He also met with reporters to pitch his cause. Jones has three children, a passion for the outdoors, and a second home in the Florida Keys, the newspapers reported.
Capitalists
Support among money managers for shutting down Indian Point goes beyond Jones, said Riverkeeper's executive director, Alex Matthiessen. ``Financial folks are getting increasingly involved,'' Matthiessen said in an interview. He and Kennedy declined to say how much Jones and other Wall Street supporters have donated or promised to the organization. Glenn Dubin, who oversees more than $5 billion at Highbridge Capital Management, says the growing number of hedge-fund managers among Riverkeeper's contributors shows that opposition to Indian Point cuts across the normal split between capitalists and environmentalists. ``What could be a better representation of the capitalist viewpoint than hedge fund managers,'' he said in an interview. ``If something were to happen to Indian Point it would dwarf what happened on Sept. 11,'' he said.
Wall Street
Louis Bacon, chairman of Moore Capital Management Inc. in New York City is a longtime supporter of Riverkeeper. Roy Winnick, a spokesman for Bacon, said there is no ``organized effort by the hedge-fund community per se'' to oppose Indian Point. ``There is just a number of people who have individually concluded that Indian Point is a concern,'' said Winnick, who is with the Kekst & Co. public relations firm. Tudor Capital and Moore Capital, which also has about $8 billion under management, are among the biggest hedge fund firms based on total assets. David Kowitz, one of two managing partners at Indus Capital Management, a $600 million hedge fund firm, said he has given money to Riverkeeper and tried to recruit people based on their concern about the safety of Indian Point following the Sept. 11 attacks. Kowitz was a partner with George Soros's firm until June 2000, at which time he left with the rest of the Asia equities team to start Indus. He said he's meeting with three former Goldman, Sachs & Co. partners, who he declined to name, to try to enlist their support. ``The Wall Street community, because of their growing interest and ability to fund this campaign, are in a position to single-handedly bring about the closure of Indian Point,'' said Matthiessen, whose group's budget is about $2.5 million this year.
--Robert Dieterich in the New York newsroom (212) 893-4485, or at rdieterich@bloomberg.net, with reporting by Maite Junco and Richard Schwartz in New York. Editor: Wiegold, Siler.
Story illustration: For more information about U.S. nuclear power plants, enter {NRCR }. For a recent Federal Emergency Management Agency report on Indian Point, see http://www.fema.gov/regions/ii/2003/indianpt022103.shtm
Every time I see a Discovery Channel special on nuclear waste and Yucca Mountain they always fail to bring up the accepted fact that recycling the waste is likely to be economical within the next 25 to 50 years. Instead, they always fixate on the 10,000 year half-life, and how Indian Medicin Men, and Bushman Witch Doctors were consulted to consult on the proper marker, because english may have vanished by then and we need to be able to convey a universal "keep out" message. Makes for good TV, but it is typical useless liberal nonsense.
There's a better way than burying it- other countries have, for decades, recycled the stuff:
US Nuclear Power Debate
... The Bush administration also wants to explore new technology to recycle nuclear
fuel, increasing its efficiency and possibly reducing its danger. ...
Other info:
Numatec - the Tri-Cities' 'French connection'
... Numatec other parent is Cogema, the owner and operator of facilities used to produce
and recycle nuclear fuel, including many designed and built by SGN. ...
Nuclear Electricity
... gas equivalent). • Uranium offers a long-term source of energy. Unlike
fossil fuels, we can recycle nuclear fuel. We can recover ...
[MMA Alumni] Helping out MMA Nuclear Employed Alumni
... Many MMA Grads are employed in the Nuclear Power industry, ever since President Carter
killed the national plans to recycle nuclear fuel as was always intended ...
[PDF] U. S. Nuclear Waste Policy: Reaching Critical Mass
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... An Aside: Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Overseas In addition to the United States,
only two other countries don't recycle nuclear fuel as a matter of national ...
Salon.com Technology | Nukes now!
... Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford ...
Why do I have a feeling this guy is buying natrural gas futures?
It's an East Coast thing, apparently. If you don't like power-consuming industry, send it to Phoenix, home of America's largest nuclear plant. We could use the jobs.
Like CaptRon, I'm within 30 miles of the plant and have been voicing my opinion to legislators to ignore these voices of gloom and doom, whoever they are: it's a mystery still.
My advice to those who would fold like a cheap camera on the issue: Buy some KI and then jump up onto the hamster wheels to generate enough electricity for New York City.
The idiots who advocate the IP shutdown ignore the reality of the situation. And that is that the Northeast is the next California waiting to happen. They haven't built a new plant in a long time and have thrown away perfectly good ones (Maine Yankee, Shoreham) for no rational reason. The last thing they need to do is throw away a perfectly reliable and safe power generator for no good reason. The Northeast uses a fair amount of oil-fired generation, which in itself is kind of unusual, and leaves them vulnerable because the region also uses a fair amount of oil for home heating use. A significant amount of electricity is brought in from north of the border. If the canucks tell us to stuff it, we're taking care of our own first (which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do if they get into a similar pinch, which they seem to be doing), then where are the wackos in the Northeast going to go for electricity? I guess Hildebeast and Chuckie will just get a law passed making electricity shortages illegal. Yeah, there ya go...
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