By Brooke Byrns

Buchanan, New York, might look like a quiet town on the Hudson, but for decades it was home to the Indian Point nuclear plant. On the surface, Indian Point’s story is familiar: decades of energy production, safety concerns, protests, and finally, shutdown. But if you peel back the layers, the history becomes a lot more complicated.

While combing through records at the town library, I found something strange: a clipped and stamped New York Times draft article from the 1970s. It was buried in a stack of community files, as if someone had tossed it there to be forgotten. The piece describes “unexplained system malfunctions” and “unauthorized federal surveys” at the plant. Parts of it are blacked out — heavy redactions that don’t look like a normal newsroom edit. And as far as I can tell, it was never actually published.

Why does this matter? Because in my earlier research into the Arco incident in Idaho, I noticed the same agencies and names surfacing — tucked into margins, stamped on memos, appearing in places they shouldn’t. Different towns, different years, but the same handwriting behind the curtain.

When I asked a retired Indian Point technician what he remembered about those years, he only smiled and said, “There’s always more than one version of a story.”

This is the version we weren’t meant to see.

—Brooke Byrns