Indian Point does not stand in isolation. It is the northernmost facility in the old Con Ed superstructure, and it gives its power to the world even to this day, through Con Ed's Buchanan transmission yard. So what?
The Con Ed system, including Indian Point was vastly overbuilt, doubled and redoubled, back-fed a hundred different ways, because Con Ed, as the world's first electricity provider, understood that people could make mistakes, so they built their entire system to be marvelously people-proof. Thomas Edison never trusted anyone. Rather than trust his engineers to be good engineers, he just instructed them to build double or triple the machinery actually needed, so that he would never require their skills. The Con Ed system is/was therefore a very reliable system.
True, Con Ed has downsized lately, and failed some of its repair commitments through lack of staff, but just over the line, in Putnam, where Con Ed never was the provider, the system gets a lot more rickety.
A relative of mine, from Putnam, tells me of the recurrent outages up there, which especially impact them because they use well water--which goes unavailable in an electrical outage.(as does their heat). So up in Putnam, where the normal unreliability of rural electricity holds sway, they live a lot more tenuous an existence than us down here in urbanized Westchester, with our urban electric system, including Con Ed and Indian Point.
Close Indian Point, and you will move the area in its entirety-- including NYC, Poughkeepsie, White Plains, and all the urban enclaves, directly into a rural electric situation, only without any of the private backups that farmers learned to provide themselves.
I truly believe the public has no idea what it means to spend two weeks, or a month in a blackout after almost every storm, and to routinely keep backup generators, kerosene heaters, and a squirrel rifle & ammunition around, as well as canned goods , to tide you through the inevitable repeat outages that make life insecure out in the hustings.
And.... were it to happen repeatedly in an urban locale.... its likely that criminal elements would learn just how to use it to full advantage, much as in the urban riots of the 1960's, only this time repeating after each storm, permanently, forever.
