New York Stories

David Usborne on why 20 million people worry about the nuclear timebomb on their doorstep; and why children of the rich want to be teachers for the poor

It's Mother's Day in the US, and Senator Hillary Clinton will have more than a card from Chelsea on the breakfast table. Less affectionate will be the hundreds of missives sent to her by residents in and around New York City who are concerned about dying in a nuclear catastrophe.

Blitzing the former first lady with Mother's Day mail was the idea of a group called the New York City Campaign to Close Indian Point. Its mission is simple: to persuade the state that it's time to close the Indian Point nuclear power station which sits on the Hudson river about 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan.

The waterside complex has had its detractors ever since going on-line 25 years ago. But since 11 September, what was once a fringe brigade of anti-nuke agitators has burgeoned.

Here is the startling thing about Indian Point. The USA is a big place with plenty of open space, yet this facility was built in one of the most densely populated regions. Any kind of accident would threaten up to 20 million people, who live within 50 miles of the site. Eight per cent of the US population is in its shadow.

A hearing before New York's city council last week spoke directly to the new fears about Indian Point. Various experts stepped forward to testify on just how large an aircraft terrorists would need if they planned a direct smash into one of its reinforced domes. We thought we had seen about the worst that could ever happen to this city last year, but imagine the mayhem if an attack on Indian Point succeeded.

Federal officials concede that they already have plans to trigger an immediate evacuation of all humans from the city. That is eight million of us all fleeing the nuclear cloud at once.

"A terrorist attack on the facility could have devastating consequences, rendering much of the Hudson River Valley, including New York City, uninhabitable," warned Riverkeeper, a prominent environmental group, in a new report. The spectre of "Chernobyl-on-Hudson", as one paper here recently called it, is not being taken lightly. Serious discussion has now started on retiring Indian Point early. There is a problem, of course: the place supplies one-fifth of the electricity consumed by New York City.

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A dinner of poussin chicken and ice-cream in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Wednesday netted $1m (£680,000) for the cause of the evening: Teachers for America. This noble charity recruits graduates from the US's most respected university campuses to spend two years teaching schoolchildren in some of the country's most impoverished areas, urban and rural. At Yale, 7 per cent of all graduating students have applied to join this year.

It seemed not to occur to many in the room that their government might normally be depended upon to provide its schools with good teachers without help from private volunteers. But then, few things in the US that we Europeans might expect the state to supply, up to and including a public broadcasting service, can survive without private philanthropy playing a role.

Those that give – that can give – feel better for it, of course. Three generous attenders were singled out for our attention on Wednesday. The author and historian David Halberstam, his wife, Jean, and Andy Lack, NBC's president. They beamed when it was revealed that they had offspring serving, or about to serve, in the Teachers for America corps.