by Christina Santiago

This semester, I took a class about science and technology in New York, and our specific topic in this class was energy production in New York.  Energy is a fascinating subject because it’s something that everyone uses in some way or another, and yet no one really thinks about.  We learned a lot about all of this different ways that electricity is produced and distributed, but we focused a lot on nuclear power.

When most people think of nuclear power, they think of radiation, and when most people think of radiation, they think of three things: 1) Cancer, 2) Super heroes, and 3) Weapons. Our media a whole has influenced our general understanding of nuclear power and many similar sciences.  People seem to know that they are dangerous and uncontrollable, but they don’t seem to know what they can do that’s positive.  And with the many science fiction shows and movies out there, people don’t know what to believe in about the uses of nuclear power.  But nuclear power is very useful in the generation of electricity, though that is not widely known.

There are a lot of misunderstandings and general confusion about how nuclear power attributes to the general energy supply.  To most people, nuclear power plants are seen as an unnecessary danger to society, that the plants can explode at any given moment, or that the plants leak radiation and the people living around the plants suffer from that radiation.  I admit that I also had similar fears about nuclear plants, and I generally didn’t like them.  I always thought that nuclear plants were completely unsafe and that they leaked radiation everywhere, especially when they were breaking down.  But there is no real reason to be afraid; all of these fears are simply unwarranted and unfounded.  Nuclear power plants are safe and they are one of the most, if not the most, efficient types of power plants that are used in the country today.  A couple of those power plants can be found in Indian Point Energy Center.

My honors seminar class went on a trip to Indian Point this past November to learn more about nuclear power.  To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to the trip, primarily because I had to wake up at six a.m., but also because I didn’t understand why it was so important to go to the plant?  What is so special about nuclear energy, especially in when compared to renewable energy?  Why do I have to learn about nuclear power?  And why do I have to wake up so early?  I was not in the best of moods that morning, and I was set on being contrary.  I was determined to dislike everything about nuclear power and the plant.  But soon after I got to the plant, I got over it.

The plant is located in Buchanan, New York and sits on the eastern bank of the Hudson River.  The image of it is stunning: the big gray buildings are set against a backdrop of blue skies and New York mountains, which were covered in trees that were changing color because of the fall.  The river is so blue and bright as it flows by the plant.  All of my doubts and annoyances were taken away just because of how pretty everything looked, and so I was much more open to the experience.  The buildings didn’t look ominous or dangerous, and they weren’t breaking down or deteriorating.  It looked like any ordinary workplace that I had visited.  There was nothing really that indicated that the plant was anything other than a normal industrial site.

When my class first arrived, we were put in a small reception area so that our identification can be double-checked.  Security is really tight so that they can keep the plant safe at all times.  There are only ten people in a group allowed to go into the plant at a time so that the tour guide can easily keep track of everyone.  There were a couple of key security measures that we had to go through, but nothing was overly annoying or inconvenient.  It was simple enough to go through—no worse than the best experience with the TSA—and then we were allowed to start seeing the plant.

Our small group was put in a conference room where our tour guide proceeded to give us a presentation about the history of the plant and what the workers actually do in the plant.  We were provided with a pen and a mechanical pencil, complementary of the plant, and a paper copy of the presentation on which we were encouraged to take notes.  This is where the visit became interesting.  In about an hour or so, all of the preconceptions that I had about nuclear plants as a whole were completely proven wrong and dismissed.  As I have said, I thought that nuclear power plants were completely dangerous and they leaked, but as we learned during the presentation, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  We learned many thing about the energy center, the plants, and the how both of them worked tirelessly to provide electricity for New York.

Indian Point Energy Center was created in the 1960’s and was the location of the first running commercial power plant.  This first plant, called Unit 1, was closed soon after its run, but then work on two others began.  Those two plants, Unit 2 and Unit 3, were finished being built in 1974 and 1976 respectively, and then they began to do their work.  The power plants were originally built for ConEdison, but then they were sold to the New York Power Authority when a law passed that made it so that energy companies could either produce power or distribute power, but not both.  Currently, the facility is owned by Entergy, which owns eleven power plants in the country.

Indian Point Energy Center is vitally important to the energy that is used in New York State; on their own, the two power plants generate 10% of the electricity of the whole state, which is presumably used within 30-40 miles of the area around the plant.  The plant produces zero greenhouse gas emissions from the generation of electricity.  Yes these are all merely facts, and they probably don’t mean anything without a tangible personal element to it, but let me put it this way.  Without Indian Point, a lot of New York’s energy couldn’t be made.  It’s close and convenient, and it helps to power New York City, which as you know needs a lot of energy just to function normally.

The most fascinating thing that I learned from the presentation, however, was how the plants actually work.  In general, to generate electricity, the only thing you need is a metal coil and a magnet, and one of those things needs to spin around the other.  The only problem is getting one to spin around the other, and there have been many different methods to getting one to spin.  The magnet or the coil is usually attached to a turbine, which turns as air or water vapor hits it.  In a lot of power plants, something is used to heat up water to turn the turbine, which turns the magnet to generate electricity, and wind turbines use the wind to turn the turbines.  The power plants at Indian Point use models similar to other types of power plants called a pressurized water reactor.  Water is stored in three separate looped pipes: the primary loop, the secondary loop, and the tertiary loop.  The primary loop stores pure and pressurized water (so that it doesn’t turn into water vapor) that is heated up to vaporize the water that is stored in the secondary loop.  The water vapor in the secondary loop is used to turn the turbines to turn the magnet, and is then cooled by the water in the tertiary loop, which is just flowing river water—this is the reason that Indian Point is located on the Hudson.

The best and most interesting part is how the water is heated.  Inside the heater are control rods and inside the control or fuel rods are pieces of uranium.  Neutrons are set to hit and break the atoms of the uranium, which creates a chain reaction of other neutrons hitting and splitting atoms.  When an atom breaks, the part of the broken atom that doesn’t become another atom is turned into energy, which is then used as heat.  This heat is what heats up the high-pressured water that is used to vaporize the water in the other pipe.  It is also what makes the plant so controversial.  When people think about splitting atoms, they think of atomic bombs, because that is what our society has shown them.  Yes, the energy from an atom that is split is highly dangerous, but it is also incredibly useful.  One pellet of uranium that is split is equal to one ton of coal; they heat up the same amount.  Uranium is way more useful than coal is in that respect, and it doesn’t release any harmful gases or pollutants, so why is it so controversial?

Well, that is because of radiation.  I mentioned the neutrons that break up the atoms; that’s the radiation.  When an object is radioactive, it means that it is decaying to a more stable element, and while doing so it is releasing ionizing particles.  This is what causes radiation sickness and all of the illness that people associate with radioactivity.  However, the plants are built to combat all of that radiation.  The place where the uranium is stored is in underground in a vessel that is covered in around 4 feet thick walls of solid concrete.  We were shown a video of an airplane crashing into a similar structure and the airplane disintegrated; it was smashed like a soda can on a sidewalk.  And if anything within the building busted and caused a radiation leak, there are security measures that would douse the whole area in water to dampen the radioactivity.  Nothing is getting in those buildings and nothing is coming out of them.

I was really glad that we got to hear this presentation.  I never knew any of that information and it just made the whole plant real for me.  Instead of Indian Point being some mysterious place where scientist do a bunch of weird science that can kill a lot of people, I saw that the plant is actually just a convenient and efficient way of generating electricity.  I think that is what a lot of people need; they need to be shown that this complicated science isn’t actually all that complicated and it isn’t dangerous.  Physics and chemistry may be foreign topics for a lot of people—myself included—but when the fundamental ideas and concepts are broken down for people to understand, it stops being foreign and hard.  The only thing that nuclear plants do differently from typical power plants is split atoms, and that act of splitting atoms shouldn’t be as maligned as it is.  Like with all things, there is a bad side and a good side, but if you look at it objectively, using nuclear power to generate electricity that many people need, is not a bad thing.  It is actually a very good thing; the amount of energy that it can create with such small amounts of fuel is so large that it’s silly that it hasn’t been used more widely.

After the presentation, we were given lunch, which was really considerate of the workers at the plant.  Our tour guide answered any of the questions that we had and then my class was taken to see the inner workings of the facility.  We were given hard hats and earplugs for safety and then we had to go through another round of security.  The workers didn’t seem to mind us being there, and our tour guide took us all through the open areas (some areas had too high level of security for visitors, which is understandable, because the switches in the plant are too delicate to risk taking a group of college students to see them).

Our tour guide took us all around the plant to look at the many different rooms and places that make the plant work as well as it does.  The whole of Indian Point is huge, with too many buildings for me to count, and even more workers in the buildings and security posts.  Each of those workers make sure that nothing goes wrong with the plant, because they know how much of an impact it can have.  If any little thing goes wrong, the entire plant shuts down, taking the 10% of electricity with it.  There are lists and lists of precautions and steps that each of the workers must take to make sure that everything is as safe as it possibly can be.

We were allowed to see one of the generator rooms, but we were required to wear ear protection, and as soon as we entered the room, it was obvious why; there was an incredibly loud and pervasive humming.  The room looked like an auditorium and in the middle was a large apparatus in the middle.  The humming came from the apparatus, which housed the turbine that was spinning the magnet at incredibly high speeds.  Our tour guide mimed to different parts of the apparatus and room, and motioned for us to follow him.  We walked the length of the generator and turbine and around it in a line, and then we followed our guide down some steps into the lower levels.  These led to rooms of switches, levers, pipes, and all sort of other devices, all which looked like they would fit right in on the set of a science fiction television show.  We passed through many of these rooms and halls until we resurfaced on a different side of that particular plant.

For me, it was really cool to see the inner workings of generator room.  I’m not scientifically savvy so it was really cool to see the creation of people who are.  I don’t know what the knobs or levers do and I probably would never know what they do, but it was comforting for me to know that there is such an extensive series of checks and balances within the facility and within each part of the plants.

From there, we went outside the building to see the river and where the river meets the tertiary loops.  It was such a beautiful view from the facility; the back of it faced the river and the mountains across.  It added to the ambiance of Indian Point, and it just made everything feel safe.  All of my fear and annoyance from earlier in the day had gone and I had begun to accept that Indian Point is not scary or dangerous.  To be honest, I think it’s a lot safer to be inside the plant than outside it; it’s monitored twenty-four hours a day, every day, all year, so if anything were to happen, someone would know immediately, and it would be fixed probably before anyone would know there was something wrong in the first place.  I cannot stress how safe this place is because there are a lot of people out there who say that it isn’t and try to give Indian Point a bad name.

There are many people who want to shut down Indian Point, and for no good reason.  Aside from the people who realize that nuclear power could easily get rid of the coal and oil way of making electricity, most of the people are scared of the dangers of nuclear power. Those dangers, which I have stressed multiple times, are unwarranted.  There has been no rise in illnesses around the area of Indian Point because the area is so secure.  The workers make sure that radiation cannot leak from the from the plants so there is no way that it can reach the surrounding neighborhoods and towns.

People also say that Indian Point shouldn’t be so close to New York City because of the same ideas.  Well, it has to be near the city, by the very nature of electricity; the longer the distance electricity has to travel, the less electricity there is going to be.  The plants need to be near the city in order to maximize the amount of electrical output.

People also say that Indian Point should be shut down because their leases have expired.  The leases were set to expire forty years after the plants started running.  Technically only one has expired already, and the other has another two years to go.  When the plants were built in the 70’s, the technology was still very new and no one knew how long the power plants were going to last, so they just said forty to be safe.  Because the technology is still quite new, no one really knows how long the plants can go on anyway, so forty is just an arbitrary number.  And it doesn’t really matter, because everything in the facility has been replaces already.  It is like any building or house; when something gets old, you fix it or replace it.  With that in mind, technically Indian Point has different parts than when it was first built, rendering the original forty-year limit moot anyway.

There are also a lot of concerns about security.  One of the biggest worries is that a terrorist group can come to the facility and break the buildings and leak radiation.  Well, it is physically impossible to have a big enough and easily maneuverable plane to hit the buildings at the right angle, and even if they managed that, it would still be a relatively flimsy metal bird hitting large solid concrete at high speeds, which would not be good for the plane in any way.  Plus, the ground security is really strict; there are several fences surrounding Indian Point and each fence is guarded by trained and armed security personnel so that there is no area of the center that is unguarded or unprotected.  The fences also have motion detectors, so the security knows everything that is going on in and around Indian Point.  The security is so intense that Indian Point has never failed a government safety regulation test.

Lastly, people worry about the state of the fish because part of the river water goes through the tertiary loop.  They feel that the plant is disrupting the natural ecosystem of the river, which is understandable.  However, the plant has checks in place.  There are series of nets that prevent fish that are too large from getting caught in the system, and even in some are caught, they can be released safely back into the river by a drainage system.  We saw the system in person; it looks like a water slide that just lets fish go back into their habitat.  And there weren’t even fish in there; apparently there are only one or two that get caught per hour.

If there is anything that I have learned about Indian Point Energy Center, it is that it is safe.  But if it is safe, why are people so afraid of it and of other nuclear power plants in general?  I think that it’s because of the lack of education about the center.  I didn’t know anything about Indian Point and it helps power the city that I’m living in.  It impacts my life so much and yet no one talks about it so I just stayed ignorant, which was why I was initially wary about going there.  There are so many misunderstandings about the place that would all be dispelled if people actually went there and learned about what actually goes on.  Opinions perpetuated by fear instead of the truth never do anyone any good, and so it would just be better if people would just educate themselves and people they know about issues that affect them. Nuclear energy is such a fascinating topic and I feel that a lot of people should learn about it, because it has such a great potential to change lives.  Every single person is affected by the use of electricity every day so they have the prerogative of being able to know everything that has to do with electricity.  It does not benefit anyone to keep the grand majority of people in the dark about a subject that is integral to life in the 21^st century.

I also think that politics have a lot to do with it.  Energy companies have such a strong stake in the government that if any other energy group tried to gain a stake, it would affect a lot of policy.  And if a politician wants to get their agenda across, they will malign anything that they perceive to be the enemy of what they want to accomplish, which only works to perpetuate the fear.  And unfortunately, the fear works really well to get people to do anything quickly.   Ideally, actual scientists should be in charge of informing people on whether something is dangerous or scary, or not.  People should not be in charge of talking about things that they know nothing about, politicians included, politicians especially.  False knowledge should never be able to circulate, lest we have situations such as those related to the opinions of Indian Point.

Personally, I think that we should use nuclear energy more than we are using it now.  I don’t know how much we can or should use of it, but I think that it would be very efficient to generate electricity with this method.  Once again, I think that if people were educated about the benefits of using nuclear power, then I don’t see why it would be a problem to make them more common.  Not only would it benefit us as a species for being able to access more energy than we have now, but it would also benefit the planet.

In conclusion, I am happy that I was able to visit Indian Point.  I had such a great experience with the whole trip and I am grateful that I was able to become educated on a subject that not many people are educated on.  I learned about a topic that I probably would have never gotten to learn about, and even if I had, there is nothing like gaining knowledge on a first hand basis.  I am aware how powerful this knowledge is, and I want to work to make sure that I can spread the knowledge so that other people can know about nuclear energy and make their own educated opinions, because very good things can come out of knowledge.

This semester, I took a class about science and technology in New York, and our specific topic in this class was energy production in New York.  Energy is a fascinating subject because it’s something that everyone uses in some way or another, and yet no one really thinks about.  We learned a lot about all of this different ways that electricity is produced and distributed, but we focused a lot on nuclear power.

When most people think of nuclear power, they think of radiation, and when most people think of radiation, they think of three things: 1) Cancer, 2) Super heroes, and 3) Weapons. Our media a whole has influenced our general understanding of nuclear power and many similar sciences.  People seem to know that they are dangerous and uncontrollable, but they don’t seem to know what they can do that’s positive.  And with the many science fiction shows and movies out there, people don’t know what to believe in about the uses of nuclear power.  But nuclear power is very useful in the generation of electricity, though that is not widely known.

There are a lot of misunderstandings and general confusion about how nuclear power attributes to the general energy supply.  To most people, nuclear power plants are seen as an unnecessary danger to society, that the plants can explode at any given moment, or that the plants leak radiation and the people living around the plants suffer from that radiation.  I admit that I also had similar fears about nuclear plants, and I generally didn’t like them.  I always thought that nuclear plants were completely unsafe and that they leaked radiation everywhere, especially when they were breaking down.  But there is no real reason to be afraid; all of these fears are simply unwarranted and unfounded.  Nuclear power plants are safe and they are one of the most, if not the most, efficient types of power plants that are used in the country today.  A couple of those power plants can be found in Indian Point Energy Center.

My honors seminar class went on a trip to Indian Point this past November to learn more about nuclear power.  To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to the trip, primarily because I had to wake up at six a.m., but also because I didn’t understand why it was so important to go to the plant?  What is so special about nuclear energy, especially in when compared to renewable energy?  Why do I have to learn about nuclear power?  And why do I have to wake up so early?  I was not in the best of moods that morning, and I was set on being contrary.  I was determined to dislike everything about nuclear power and the plant.  But soon after I got to the plant, I got over it.

The plant is located in Buchanan, New York and sits on the eastern bank of the Hudson River.  The image of it is stunning: the big gray buildings are set against a backdrop of blue skies and New York mountains, which were covered in trees that were changing color because of the fall.  The river is so blue and bright as it flows by the plant.  All of my doubts and annoyances were taken away just because of how pretty everything looked, and so I was much more open to the experience.  The buildings didn’t look ominous or dangerous, and they weren’t breaking down or deteriorating.  It looked like any ordinary workplace that I had visited.  There was nothing really that indicated that the plant was anything other than a normal industrial site.

When my class first arrived, we were put in a small reception area so that our identification can be double-checked.  Security is really tight so that they can keep the plant safe at all times.  There are only ten people in a group allowed to go into the plant at a time so that the tour guide can easily keep track of everyone.  There were a couple of key security measures that we had to go through, but nothing was overly annoying or inconvenient.  It was simple enough to go through—no worse than the best experience with the TSA—and then we were allowed to start seeing the plant.

            Our small group was put in a conference room where our tour guide proceeded to give us a presentation about the history of the plant and what the workers actually do in the plant.  We were provided with a pen and a mechanical pencil, complementary of the plant, and a paper copy of the presentation on which we were encouraged to take notes.  This is where the visit became interesting.  In about an hour or so, all of the preconceptions that I had about nuclear plants as a whole were completely proven wrong and dismissed.  As I have said, I thought that nuclear power plants were completely dangerous and they leaked, but as we learned during the presentation, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  We learned many thing about the energy center, the plants, and the how both of them worked tirelessly to provide electricity for New York.

            Indian Point Energy Center was created in the 1960’s and was the location of the first running commercial power plant.  This first plant, called Unit 1, was closed soon after its run, but then work on two others began.  Those two plants, Unit 2 and Unit 3, were finished being built in 1974 and 1976 respectively, and then they began to do their work.  The power plants were originally built for ConEdison, but then they were sold to the New York Power Authority when a law passed that made it so that energy companies could either produce power or distribute power, but not both.  Currently, the facility is owned by Entergy, which owns eleven power plants in the country.

            Indian Point Energy Center is vitally important to the energy that is used in New York State; on their own, the two power plants generate 10% of the electricity of the whole state, which is presumably used within 30-40 miles of the area around the plant.  The plant produces zero greenhouse gas emissions from the generation of electricity.  Yes these are all merely facts, and they probably don’t mean anything without a tangible personal element to it, but let me put it this way.  Without Indian Point, a lot of New York’s energy couldn’t be made.  It’s close and convenient, and it helps to power New York City, which as you know needs a lot of energy just to function normally.

            The most fascinating thing that I learned from the presentation, however, was how the plants actually work.  In general, to generate electricity, the only thing you need is a metal coil and a magnet, and one of those things needs to spin around the other.  The only problem is getting one to spin around the other, and there have been many different methods to getting one to spin.  The magnet or the coil is usually attached to a turbine, which turns as air or water vapor hits it.  In a lot of power plants, something is used to heat up water to turn the turbine, which turns the magnet to generate electricity, and wind turbines use the wind to turn the turbines.  The power plants at Indian Point use models similar to other types of power plants called a pressurized water reactor.  Water is stored in three separate looped pipes: the primary loop, the secondary loop, and the tertiary loop.  The primary loop stores pure and pressurized water (so that it doesn’t turn into water vapor) that is heated up to vaporize the water that is stored in the secondary loop.  The water vapor in the secondary loop is used to turn the turbines to turn the magnet, and is then cooled by the water in the tertiary loop, which is just flowing river water—this is the reason that Indian Point is located on the Hudson.

            The best and most interesting part is how the water is heated.  Inside the heater are control rods and inside the control or fuel rods are pieces of uranium.  Neutrons are set to hit and break the atoms of the uranium, which creates a chain reaction of other neutrons hitting and splitting atoms.  When an atom breaks, the part of the broken atom that doesn’t become another atom is turned into energy, which is then used as heat.  This heat is what heats up the high-pressured water that is used to vaporize the water in the other pipe.  It is also what makes the plant so controversial.  When people think about splitting atoms, they think of atomic bombs, because that is what our society has shown them.  Yes, the energy from an atom that is split is highly dangerous, but it is also incredibly useful.  One pellet of uranium that is split is equal to one ton of coal; they heat up the same amount.  Uranium is way more useful than coal is in that respect, and it doesn’t release any harmful gases or pollutants, so why is it so controversial?

            Well, that is because of radiation.  I mentioned the neutrons that break up the atoms; that’s the radiation.  When an object is radioactive, it means that it is decaying to a more stable element, and while doing so it is releasing ionizing particles.  This is what causes radiation sickness and all of the illness that people associate with radioactivity.  However, the plants are built to combat all of that radiation.  The place where the uranium is stored is in underground in a vessel that is covered in around 4 feet thick walls of solid concrete.  We were shown a video of an airplane crashing into a similar structure and the airplane disintegrated; it was smashed like a soda can on a sidewalk.  And if anything within the building busted and caused a radiation leak, there are security measures that would douse the whole area in water to dampen the radioactivity.  Nothing is getting in those buildings and nothing is coming out of them.

            I was really glad that we got to hear this presentation.  I never knew any of that information and it just made the whole plant real for me.  Instead of Indian Point being some mysterious place where scientist do a bunch of weird science that can kill a lot of people, I saw that the plant is actually just a convenient and efficient way of generating electricity.  I think that is what a lot of people need; they need to be shown that this complicated science isn’t actually all that complicated and it isn’t dangerous.  Physics and chemistry may be foreign topics for a lot of people—myself included—but when the fundamental ideas and concepts are broken down for people to understand, it stops being foreign and hard.  The only thing that nuclear plants do differently from typical power plants is split atoms, and that act of splitting atoms shouldn’t be as maligned as it is.  Like with all things, there is a bad side and a good side, but if you look at it objectively, using nuclear power to generate electricity that many people need, is not a bad thing.  It is actually a very good thing; the amount of energy that it can create with such small amounts of fuel is so large that it’s silly that it hasn’t been used more widely.

            After the presentation, we were given lunch, which was really considerate of the workers at the plant.  Our tour guide answered any of the questions that we had and then my class was taken to see the inner workings of the facility.  We were given hard hats and earplugs for safety and then we had to go through another round of security.  The workers didn’t seem to mind us being there, and our tour guide took us all through the open areas (some areas had too high level of security for visitors, which is understandable, because the switches in the plant are too delicate to risk taking a group of college students to see them).

            Our tour guide took us all around the plant to look at the many different rooms and places that make the plant work as well as it does.  The whole of Indian Point is huge, with too many buildings for me to count, and even more workers in the buildings and security posts.  Each of those workers make sure that nothing goes wrong with the plant, because they know how much of an impact it can have.  If any little thing goes wrong, the entire plant shuts down, taking the 10% of electricity with it.  There are lists and lists of precautions and steps that each of the workers must take to make sure that everything is as safe as it possibly can be.

            We were allowed to see one of the generator rooms, but we were required to wear ear protection, and as soon as we entered the room, it was obvious why; there was an incredibly loud and pervasive humming.  The room looked like an auditorium and in the middle was a large apparatus in the middle.  The humming came from the apparatus, which housed the turbine that was spinning the magnet at incredibly high speeds.  Our tour guide mimed to different parts of the apparatus and room, and motioned for us to follow him.  We walked the length of the generator and turbine and around it in a line, and then we followed our guide down some steps into the lower levels.  These led to rooms of switches, levers, pipes, and all sort of other devices, all which looked like they would fit right in on the set of a science fiction television show.  We passed through many of these rooms and halls until we resurfaced on a different side of that particular plant.

            For me, it was really cool to see the inner workings of generator room.  I’m not scientifically savvy so it was really cool to see the creation of people who are.  I don’t know what the knobs or levers do and I probably would never know what they do, but it was comforting for me to know that there is such an extensive series of checks and balances within the facility and within each part of the plants.

            From there, we went outside the building to see the river and where the river meets the tertiary loops.  It was such a beautiful view from the facility; the back of it faced the river and the mountains across.  It added to the ambiance of Indian Point, and it just made everything feel safe.  All of my fear and annoyance from earlier in the day had gone and I had begun to accept that Indian Point is not scary or dangerous.  To be honest, I think it’s a lot safer to be inside the plant than outside it; it’s monitored twenty-four hours a day, every day, all year, so if anything were to happen, someone would know immediately, and it would be fixed probably before anyone would know there was something wrong in the first place.  I cannot stress how safe this place is because there are a lot of people out there who say that it isn’t and try to give Indian Point a bad name.

            There are many people who want to shut down Indian Point, and for no good reason.  Aside from the people who realize that nuclear power could easily get rid of the coal and oil way of making electricity, most of the people are scared of the dangers of nuclear power. Those dangers, which I have stressed multiple times, are unwarranted.  There has been no rise in illnesses around the area of Indian Point because the area is so secure.  The workers make sure that radiation cannot leak from the from the plants so there is no way that it can reach the surrounding neighborhoods and towns.

            People also say that Indian Point shouldn’t be so close to New York City because of the same ideas.  Well, it has to be near the city, by the very nature of electricity; the longer the distance electricity has to travel, the less electricity there is going to be.  The plants need to be near the city in order to maximize the amount of electrical output.

            People also say that Indian Point should be shut down because their leases have expired.  The leases were set to expire forty years after the plants started running.  Technically only one has expired already, and the other has another two years to go.  When the plants were built in the 70’s, the technology was still very new and no one knew how long the power plants were going to last, so they just said forty to be safe.  Because the technology is still quite new, no one really knows how long the plants can go on anyway, so forty is just an arbitrary number.  And it doesn’t really matter, because everything in the facility has been replaces already.  It is like any building or house; when something gets old, you fix it or replace it.  With that in mind, technically Indian Point has different parts than when it was first built, rendering the original forty-year limit moot anyway.

            There are also a lot of concerns about security.  One of the biggest worries is that a terrorist group can come to the facility and break the buildings and leak radiation.  Well, it is physically impossible to have a big enough and easily maneuverable plane to hit the buildings at the right angle, and even if they managed that, it would still be a relatively flimsy metal bird hitting large solid concrete at high speeds, which would not be good for the plane in any way.  Plus, the ground security is really strict; there are several fences surrounding Indian Point and each fence is guarded by trained and armed security personnel so that there is no area of the center that is unguarded or unprotected.  The fences also have motion detectors, so the security knows everything that is going on in and around Indian Point.  The security is so intense that Indian Point has never failed a government safety regulation test.

            Lastly, people worry about the state of the fish because part of the river water goes through the tertiary loop.  They feel that the plant is disrupting the natural ecosystem of the river, which is understandable.  However, the plant has checks in place.  There are series of nets that prevent fish that are too large from getting caught in the system, and even in some are caught, they can be released safely back into the river by a drainage system.  We saw the system in person; it looks like a water slide that just lets fish go back into their habitat.  And there weren’t even fish in there; apparently there are only one or two that get caught per hour.

            If there is anything that I have learned about Indian Point Energy Center, it is that it is safe.  But if it is safe, why are people so afraid of it and of other nuclear power plants in general?  I think that it’s because of the lack of education about the center.  I didn’t know anything about Indian Point and it helps power the city that I’m living in.  It impacts my life so much and yet no one talks about it so I just stayed ignorant, which was why I was initially wary about going there.  There are so many misunderstandings about the place that would all be dispelled if people actually went there and learned about what actually goes on.  Opinions perpetuated by fear instead of the truth never do anyone any good, and so it would just be better if people would just educate themselves and people they know about issues that affect them. Nuclear energy is such a fascinating topic and I feel that a lot of people should learn about it, because it has such a great potential to change lives.  Every single person is affected by the use of electricity every day so they have the prerogative of being able to know everything that has to do with electricity.  It does not benefit anyone to keep the grand majority of people in the dark about a subject that is integral to life in the 21^st century.

            I also think that politics have a lot to do with it.  Energy companies have such a strong stake in the government that if any other energy group tried to gain a stake, it would affect a lot of policy.  And if a politician wants to get their agenda across, they will malign anything that they perceive to be the enemy of what they want to accomplish, which only works to perpetuate the fear.  And unfortunately, the fear works really well to get people to do anything quickly.   Ideally, actual scientists should be in charge of informing people on whether something is dangerous or scary, or not.  People should not be in charge of talking about things that they know nothing about, politicians included, politicians especially.  False knowledge should never be able to circulate, lest we have situations such as those related to the opinions of Indian Point.

            Personally, I think that we should use nuclear energy more than we are using it now.  I don’t know how much we can or should use of it, but I think that it would be very efficient to generate electricity with this method.  Once again, I think that if people were educated about the benefits of using nuclear power, then I don’t see why it would be a problem to make them more common.  Not only would it benefit us as a species for being able to access more energy than we have now, but it would also benefit the planet.

            In conclusion, I am happy that I was able to visit Indian Point.  I had such a great experience with the whole trip and I am grateful that I was able to become educated on a subject that not many people are educated on.  I learned about a topic that I probably would have never gotten to learn about, and even if I had, there is nothing like gaining knowledge on a first hand basis.  I am aware how powerful this knowledge is, and I want to work to make sure that I can spread the knowledge so that other people can know about nuclear energy and make their own educated opinions, because very good things can come out of knowledge.