Dancing Donkeys
A combination of a low tide and river ice, lowered Indian Point's intake water past a preset alarm point at about 7 A.M. yesterday. Abiding by pre-agreed technical specifications, Entergy alerted the NRC, as agreed. No emergency occurred, nothing broke, everything worked as designed. By 10 A.M. the tide rose, and the alert was lifted. It was an operational triviality. At worst, it might have resulted in Entergy shutting down the plant for an hour.
However, by a recent agreement, alerting the NRC is now done simultaneously with alerting all local and regional officialdom. To local officialdom the rationale is that a shifty and duplicit NRC, in cahoots with their lax and evasive bedmates, the operators, may conspire to drag their feet, hide the facts, and keep concerned officials in the dark. So everybody gets the same call, all at once. This is called "Transparency".
Net result? Ten major news feeds, and over 1270 "piggy-back" internet news items poured out of Buchanan within hours, including repetitious and off-the-mark boilerplate statements by Hillary Clinton, Nita Lowey, John Hall, and Andrew Spano, all urging Entergy to "do more maintenance" and pointing out how this proves whatever hackneyed last press blurb they had issued, was supposedly now prophetic in hindsight.
Transparency?
Did 1270 piggy-back articles raise the river? Did Spano et al. lift the Hudson tide, as a kind of collective left-leaning god Zeus? What WAS lifted, was the press visibility of dozens of issue-riders, issue-manipulators, self-aggrandizers, and wannabe kingpins, a veritable Chicken Little Brigade in full stampede towards the nearest microphone---all accomplishing what, specifically?
Entergy did not lower the tide. God lowered the tide. The chicken little brigade did not raise the tide. The Almighty, once again, did that unaided. As far as admonitions to improve maintenance, or shut the plant, or revamp evac plans, or deny a license, they're all red herrings. A preset technical set point functioned as planned, and a trivial operating notification went out to the legal overseer, NRC.
The effort to achieve transparency, was an obvious utter failure, bringing on a blinding and obscuring blizzard of irrelevancies, struttings, muggings, everything but a dancing donkey act, wearing "Impeach Bush" buttons. Had the alert lasted longer than 3 hours, I'm sure Susin Tolchin could have at least drummed up the dancing tooth fairy lady to perform, even if the donkeys were unavailable. But the tide came in, and the transparency went out. Out the window, that is.
Certain functions, from mundane water & electric service, to declarations of war, and national security, ought never be politicized. The trouble with transparency is that the recipients of it seldom have a clue of what to do with it, once they get it. Yesterday's dancing donkeys amply prove my point, I think.
