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scuttle Butt
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
“The governor wants the support of all people in Louisiana.” — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s spokesman Kyle Plotkin, explaining why his boss found it kosher to have a fundraiser for himself organized by Mike Worley, whose company worked for BP processing claims and currently works for compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg. Tickets to the after-work party, which was held not in a restaurant or hotel but in the offices of Worley Catastrophe Response, ran between $1,000 and $5,000 apiece. Louisiana House Democratic Caucus chairman John Bel Edwards asked Jindal to return the money, but Jindal refused, telling the Baton Rouge Advocate, “People who support us are supporting our agenda and not the other way around.”
Powerful Reaction THE NUCLEAR MELTDOWN IN JAPAN RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT POWER PLANTS IN THE U.S. HOW SAFE IS LOUISIANA? BY JULIEN GORBACH
T
“To our surprise, the persistent three-fold increase in heart attack risk has occurred in the absence of any change in traditional risk factors — for example, age, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes.” — Dr. Anand Irimpen, associate professor at Tulane University School of Medicine’s Heart and Vascular Institute, on the results of a new study showing heart disease in New Orleans, which tripled after Hurricane Katrina, has not gone down again. The study was presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific session in New Orleans.
DRAWING THE SHORT STRAW An NRC report says among all nuclear power plants in the country, River Bend runs the highest risk of experiencing a meltdown due to power loss. PHOTO COUR TE S Y RI V ER BEND S TATION
When push comes to shove in a redistricting session, one of the first casualties is the inter-parish harmony many lawmakers and local elected officials genuinely work hard to achieve. So it was with both the state House and Senate redistricting plans, which two weeks ago strained relations between PAGE 12
has acquired a backup diesel generator for its battery at the River Bend plant, adding yet another layer of protection. An Entergy spokesperson says the chance of a meltdown now stands at one event per every 1 million years. Nevertheless, representatives at the NRC and Entergy could not say why the comparative threat of a blackout at River Bend ranked so high in the first place. In 2003, when the NRC originally reported on relative blackout risks, the commission based its 87.5 percent figure for River Bend on an assessment the plant conducted in 1993, says Katie Damratoski, a communication specialist with Entergy. She couldn’t say why the NRC’s figure jumped up half a percentage point in its 2005 update, but Damratoski notes that River Bend’s own assessment that year dropped the figure dramatically: down to 37.64 percent.
c'est what? DO YOU SEE THE CITY MAKING PROGRESS IN REFORMING THE NEW ORLEANS POLICE DEPARTMENT SINCE RONAL SERPAS BECAME SUPERINTENDENT?
20% lots
Mark Davis
some
29% none
Vote on “c’est what?” on bestofneworleans.com THIS WEEK’S QUESTION
PAGE 11
BoUQuets
51%
Will Democrats be able to mount a strong challenger to face Gov. Bobby Jindal in the fall elections?
THIS WEEK’S HEROES AND ZEROES
will be honored with the Green Project’s 2011 Green Giant Award at a ceremony on April 16. Davis, the founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, will be honored for his work as the executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. In that capacity, he has testified before Congress as to the importance of wetlands restoration along the Gulf Coast.
The Better Than Ezra Foundation
dedicated a state-of-the-art educational playground for kindergarten and pre-K students at Bethune Elementary. The playground features a music station, climbing wall, slides and a tricycle path. The foundation is a nonprofit founded by the rock band and works toward renewal of the structural and cultural heritage of New Orleans and southeast Louisiana.
Transocean Ltd.,
the company that operated the Deepwater Horizon rig which killed 11 men when it exploded last April, gave five of its top executives a total of $19.5 million in bonuses — calling 2010 the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history.” That was the most sickeningly insensitive comment about the disaster since BP CEO Tony Hayward whined about “wanting my life back.” Transocean’s announcement of the safety bonuses came on April 1, but it was no April Fool’s joke.
Transocean Ltd.
compounded its safety bonus embarrassment by issuing an insulting apology (“We acknowledge that some of the wording in our 2010 proxy statement may have been insensitive”), then said the safety bonuses would be donated to families of the men who were killed. Here’s the rub: Forbes reported the “donations” would total only around $250,000 — a fraction of the cash and stock options the oil execs would still pocket.
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > aPril 12 > 2011
he nuclear disaster that continues to unfold at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant raises questions about safety in south Louisiana, a hurricane-prone region powered by three nuclear reactors in the state and neighboring Mississippi. Even skeptics would be hard-pressed to point out glaring vulnerabilities in the multiple layers of safeguards at Entergy’s River Bend plant in St. Francisville, La., Waterford 3 in Killona, La., and Grand Gulf plant in Port Gibson, Miss. But as the Japanese are finding, safeguards that work on paper don’t necessarily work during a real meltdown, and the Fukushima crisis highlights what seems to be the major concern for the Entergy plants: the danger of power failure. Compared to all other factors that could lead to a meltdown, a “station blackout” at River Bend posed a greater proportion of risk — 88.2 percent — than at any other plant in the country, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s most recent report, published in 2005. “It dwarfed everything else combined,” says David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “All of the other things were only 13 percent of the risk (according to an earlier report the NRC released in 2003). Station blackout is a threat to all plants. River Bend just had the highest percentage of its risk being represented by that.” Grand Gulf’s total blackout risk was 32.16 percent and Waterford’s was 52.14 percent, within the top 15 of the 104 reactors nationwide. The national average was 17.5 percent. The same report points out that the actual chance of a partial meltdown at River Bend is eight in 1 million — almost unimaginably slim. And since 2005, Entergy
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