"Best option"

Joining the Ohio debacle "best option" being to contaminate and kill local wildlife and residents...

The owner of the defunct Indian Point nuclear facility says it’s planning to dump about 1 million gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson River. The move, which the company describes as the “best option” for the waste, could happen as early as August.

[...]

The contaminated water could just naturally — and safely — decay in storage onsite.

Environmental groups and residents are also concerned this could harm their community, as the Hudson River is already a federally designated toxic Superfund site. Rich Burroni, Holtec’s site vice president for Indian Point, agreed to give the community at least a month's notice before any radioactive discharge into the Hudson River begins.

  Gothamist

Wow. How generous. A whole month. Also, does he think the waters of the Hudson stay local?

But Holtec is well within its legal rights and permits to discharge waste at the same rate as it did when operating, and it does not need federal, state or local approval to dump the contaminated water. This practice is standard for nuclear plants.

We don't need no stinkin' regulations.

“Yes, you can do it [discharge radioactive water]. It's normal practice. But should you when you have other options that might avoid this additional release of radioactivity to the environment?” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “It may only cause a low risk to the environment as far as we know, but there are other options here, and why not try to minimize the harm?”

Because it would cost the company more?

Options are limited when it comes to disposing of radioactive waste, and only three methods are typically used for tainted water. The first and most expedient one is to dump small batches of about 18,000 gallons intermittently, which is the method favored by Holtec. The second way is to slowly evaporate the radioactive water and release it into the atmosphere, which Lyman said is “hardly any better than pouring it into the river.” The third procedure entails transporting the contaminated substance to another state, which could pose an environmental justice issue depending on where it lands.

So...no good options. Brilliant. 

Oh, wait.  There is a fourth option.

Lyman said a fourth option would be leaving the radioactive water onsite to decay over time into non-harmful helium. “Keep storing indefinitely and eventually the problem will solve itself," he said.

Ignore it. It'll go away.

For tritium, this process would take just over 24 years. Lyman considers this the best option because it minimizes the effects on the environment. It’s also viable because other radioactive material — spent fuel generated from operating the plant — remains onsite and will take hundreds of thousands of years to decay. This material includes plutonium and uranium.

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“In the long term, it's going to degrade, and the only way to protect the environment from that degradation is to bury it in a deep geological repository,” Lyman said.

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Currently, the U.S. has no permanent sites for this waste, and more than 90,000 metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste, including spent fuel, remains near its site of origin without permanent storage, according to Chemical & Engineering News.

Nice.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.