Heard Around Town: Cuomo wants to shut down Indian Point

From City & State's Heard Around Town, May 1, 2012: Andrew Cuomo wants to shutter Entergy's Indian Point nuclear power plant, but company executives aren't worried about it closing any time soon. One potential threat is Cuomo's New York Energy Highway initiative, an effort to update transmission lines, install new ones and repower old power plants ? all of which could help replace the plant's two reactors. "First of all, this initiative is very preliminary," Entergy CEO J. Wayne Leonard told analysts last week, according to a [Seeking Alpha](http://seekingalpha.com/article/533641-entergy-s-ceo-discusses-q1-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript) [transcript](http://seekingalpha.com/article/533641-entergy-s-ceo-discusses-q1-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript). "In the preliminary meetings to date, the state of New York has not expressed the goal of closing Indian Point." Another question mark is the state's denial of a water quality permit, which could stall federal relicensing of the reactors, and that fight with the state "will definitely go into 2013," said Chuck Barlow, Entergy's vice president of environmental policy. Leonard also touted the plant's reliability and proximity to New York City. "No plan that you are going to come up with is going to produce an expected reliability level as good as one that includes Indian Point," he insisted. "It's just that simple." To read more from City & State [click here](http://www.cityandstateny.com).