Leak in pipeline being built by energy giant Spectra could lead to shutdown – or worse – at the New York state power station, experts say

Across a narrow swath cut by bulldozers and chainsaws through the woods of Westchester County, New York, triangular yellow flags are clotheslined between pairs of trees. The flags trace the eventual path of the gas pipeline that the energy giant Spectra is building through the area, escorted at times by police and harried by local residents worried by its proximity to a decaying nuclear power plant.

If that pipeline leaks or breaks, say experts, its contents could detonate and destroy the switchyard that sits 400ft from the gas line. Entergy, which runs the Indian Point power station, said the plant could be quickly shut down in such an event. Nuclear engineer Paul Blanch is not so sure. Blanch, who has previously consulted for Entergy and now assists an organization calling for the pipeline to be stopped, said that assertion is a best-case scenario. In the worst case, he said, the reactors could melt down. And he believes Entergy and Spectra have not fully considered that worst-case scenario.

“I’m not anti-nuke or anything like that. I’ve been in the business for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything as egregious as this,” he said.



Indian Point nuclear plant reeks of troubled history Read more

He’s not the only one who is worried. The area’s residents are unhappy with the project, which began construction in late 2015, and they have tried to keep it from continuing – objecting in court, in meetings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc) and in the trees themselves as the protests grow more aggressive and construction continues unimpeded.

The gas company has used eminent domain laws to acquire adjoining chunks of property in the countryside just north of New York City to place its pipes and compressor stations. Spectra has paid Entergy to build the pipeline on its property. Entergy said its “compensation from Spectra is nominal and in line with industry practice” but declined to give a dollar figure.

The payment creates a potential conflict of interest. Entergy’s primary regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), required Entergy to assess the safety of Spectra’s pipeline on its property. The NRC said the amount of the compensation paid for the easement was “out of our jurisdiction”.

The town of Yorktown was paid $1.5m by Spectra for the easement on its lands; Westchester County received $2m; the town of Buchanan, where Indian Point is located, received $700,000.

Entergy’s assessment itself also has some experts worried. The safety of the pipeline is addressed in an eight-page document that includes a hand-drawn diagram of the property. Its brevity has some worried that risks have been overlooked.

Regulators are nonplussed. “We verified the accuracy of their computations,” said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Indian Point nuclear power plant’s containment silos rise along the Hudson River in Buchanan, N.Y., 35 miles north of New York City Photograph: Julie Jacobson/AP

Indeed, few concerns outside those of the industry have attracted attention from regulators. New York governor Andrew Cuomo asked Ferc to review the assessment more thoroughly, but Ferc refused, saying it had already dealt with objections.

What frustrates Blanch, who has worked around nuclear technology since he was a 21-year-old in the navy, is what he sees as the regulator’s refusal to do a more thorough risk assessment. He scoffs at the document Entergy produced – the environmental impact survey concerned with nearby wildlife is enormous, especially by comparison. “We have a risk assessment for the turtles in the area and the one-eyed bats but we don’t have a risk assessment for the humans,” Blanch said. “There are guidelines about how to do a high-hazard risk assessment; they’re totally ignored.” Ferc’s environmental impact report cites “consultations with the NRC”.

The 42in-diameter natural gas pipeline is an integral part of Spectra’s plan to transmit gas from controversial fracking sites throughout Appalachia’s Marcellus shale deposits all the way up the eastern seaboard to an export terminal in Nova Scotia, where they will be shipped overseas and sold. The route is planned to pass within 105ft of the fuel oil supply tank for the Indian Point switchyard’s emergency generators.



The plant is in poor condition, and two Spectra gas pipelines predating its original construction already run underneath. Last week, the Guardian published an assessment of the ageing reactors’ worsening safety record. Since then, Entergy admitted that some of the bolts holding together the interior of one reactor suffered “degradations” and were, in some cases, missing. “That’s a big fucking deal,” Blanch said.

The NRC’s office of the inspector general, its internal watchdog, confirmed to the Guardian an open investigation into the NRC’s conduct at Indian Point. A spokesman was not allowed to discuss its details but said it was safe to assume the investigation pertained to the pipeline. A Spectra spokesman said the company believes the pipeline is safe. Construction in Westchester continues.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pipe being laid near by energy company Spectra near the Indian Point nuclear plant in Westchester County, New York Photograph: Sam Thielman

‘The gas company sends out its stuff about accidents saying they’re like unicorn farts’

Nancy Vann, who lives in Buchanan, near Indian Point, says she won’t put up with the situation. The 68-year-old former attorney is president of the cooperative colony Reynolds Hills, a community founded in 1929 as a campground for Jewish communists, where residents consider the group’s support of the Rojos faction in the Spanish civil war a badge of honor. In her spare time, she works with a local group called Sape – Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion – which has galvanized local people against Spectra.

Vann has been to court over the proposed payment for use of her co-op’s land – too small, she said – and has made it a point to stand so close to Spectra’s giant tree-harvesters that the company couldn’t operate them safely. Spectra had to shut down the site for the day and return the following morning with chainsaws.



Last week, because Ferc does not have a public comment process, Vann stood up in the middle of a Ferc meeting and addressed the commissioners. “I got out the words, ‘Chairman Norman Bay, we would like to ... ’ and then the security guard came over,” Vann recalls. “I walk with a cane. The security guard grabbed me – I was sitting the third seat in; there were two guys between me and the aisle – grabbed me, pulled me over the laps of these two guys, and I said, ‘I need my cane,’ and she said, ‘Somebody will bring it to you.’”

A video of the confrontation shows Vann then falling over the men next to her on to the floor as the security guard continues to pull her. After a moment, more guards come to help and she is dragged from the room, still talking.

“I cause trouble wherever I go,” she said proudly. Vann, whose ankle has been reconstructed and whose knee has a metal plate and screws in it, said she had to use a wheelchair to leave the building. Ferc declined to comment on the incident, but a spokeswoman said the regulator accepts only written comments, which are handled by an external contractor.

Courtney Williams also wants the pipeline shut down – she lives in Peekskill and the pipeline runs next to her children’s school. A cancer researcher for a pharmaceutical company, she was initially skeptical, but said Vann’s group’s research checked out. “[They] kept saying the sky was falling and we were going to be the next Fukushima, and the gas company sends out its stuff about accidents saying they’re like unicorn farts and are nothing to worry about, and that everything’s fine.”

Further research horrified her: people who live near compressor or “pigging” stations experience nosebleeds and headaches, one survey of a few south-western Pennsylvania residents found. A team from the State University of New York Albany found that carcinogenic airborne formaldehyde was in abundance around the stations in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health. Williams said she receives emergency procedure pamphlets from both the power plant and the gas company now; last year they arrived on the same day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Westchester resident Nancy Vann is dragged from a public Federal Energy Regulatory Commission meeting

‘With high heat flux, it would actually melt the power lines’

The safety assessment of the pipeline’s proximity to the plant was performed by Entergy on behalf of the NRC, in turn on behalf of Ferc. It is a scant eight pages long. Those pages include a few figures from an analysis assuming a single kind of pipeline rupture; some of the figures are written out by hand. On one page, a freehand map of the power plant is jotted in thick ink.

The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Blanch, who now works with Sape, Vann’s organization. Blanch sent 39 questions to the NRC and Sape enlisted congresswoman Nita Lowey to try to elict a response.

Stephen Burns, chairman of the NRC, wrote to Lowey in January that the regulator had done its own “confirmatory analysis” of the project. “I remain confident that the NRC staff has conducted thorough, independent analysis of the impacts of this project on the Indian Point facility,” Burns wrote to Lowey.

In its response to Blanch, the NRC said it had no authority to stop the pipeline from being built. The Department of Transportation’s pipeline and hazardous materials safety administration (PHMSA) deferred to the NRC in correspondence to Blanch passed to the Guardian.

The NRC confirmed that its internal analysis does not represent a separate document but the commission’s efforts to double-check the eight-page Entergy analysis.

Experts in the pipeline field including Richard Kuprewicz, who conducts risk analyses through his company Accufacts, say that the assessment on which Ferc relies does not even begin to do the necessary job: “The fundamental question still remains,” Kuprewicz said. In the event of break in the line, “can the Indian Point facilities be safely cooled down?” If they can, he said, the current assessment does not show how.

Kuprewicz performs assessments of that kind regularly and his own assessment of a rupture next to the switchyard where the pipeline will run is blunt. Were a pipeline to rupture, “the heat radiation and the impact zones are so great that with high heat flux they would actually melt the power lines”, he said.

If power lines melt, that will be the end of Indian Point, Kuprewicz said. “If they were to have a rupture of that 42in gas pipeline, yes, the Indian Point facilities are coming down. When the electricity can’t go out [of the plant], the plant’s got to come down, and it’s going to do that fairly quickly.”

Entergy's full assessment of the 42-inch gas pipeline that is being built on the Indian Point nuclear facility property Entergy’s full assessment of the 42-inch Spectra gas pipeline that is being built on the Indian Point nuclear facility property

‘Probably not the smartest way to do it’

Kuprewicz is not a tree-hugger. The oil industry veteran – Kuprewicz worked for Arco and Anvil Alaska for more than 20 years – sits on PHMSA’s own hazardous liquid pipeline safety standards committee, which advises the regulator but cannot force it to take action. It isn’t that gas pipelines should never be built, he said – it’s that the buildings around them must be hardened in the event of a rupture.

Kuprewicz said the Entergy report was inadequate. “You need a list of the equipment required to cool down the reactors as the rupture will force the emergency shutdown of both facilities via power blackout,” he said.

Entergy spokeswoman Patricia Kakridas said the company’s assessor assumed Spectra could immediately shut down a worst-case-scenario “guillotine” rupture because its systems could pick up that significant drop in pressure immediately, and that Indian Point could shut down safely in the event of an explosion.



“Indian Point has a federally approved comprehensive emergency plan that addresses all potential emergencies, including an event that damages plant equipment and makes it unavailable,” she said. “Both Indian Point units are designed to safely shut down when posed with any challenge to safe operations.”



But when the most recent major gas explosion in New York, in the heart of the East Village, was investigated, researchers found evidence of natural gas in the soil, indicating that the problem stemmed from a slow leak over a long time. The gas line planned next to the Indian Point power plant would be reinforced, with “enhanced protective measures like increasing the thickness of the pipe” and additional corrosion protection, Kakridas said.

The assessment focuses on prevention, rather than response, which Kuprewicz characterizes as a flaw: “Assuming low probability is no probability when it means you might have to evacuate New York City is probably not the smartest way to do it.”