BUCHANAN, NY-The threat of a nuclear meltdown in Japan carried repercussions to New York City and its metro area in two ways on Wednesday. In a single day’s trading on Wall Street and elsewhere, American stock indexes gave up nearly all of their 2011 gains, while in Albany, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he was calling for a review of safety procedures at the Indian Point power station, located in this Westchester County village 24 miles north of New York City.

Cuomo has long advocated closing down the facility--as New York State Attorney General, he opposed its relicensing--and based his call on new data from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that put Indian Point at the top of the list for earthquake risk among the 104 reactors currently in service. The NRC ranking gave Indian Point nuclear reactor No. 3, which began operating in 1976, a one-in-10,000 chance of core damage due to its location near two active fault lines.

“The suggestion is that of all the power plants across the country, the Indian Point power plant is the most susceptible to an earthquake because reactor number three is on a fault line,” Cuomo said at a news conference Wednesday. “Frankly, that was surprising to me. One doesn’t normally think of earthquakes and New York in the same breath.”

A debate over whether to shutter Indian Point, raised on and off over the years, has been renewed in view of the meltdown threat in Japan. “It is our position that until Indian Point is proven safe, it should be closed,” environmental group Riverkeeper says in a statement. The group has long called for the nuclear plant to be taken off line.

In his “Cleaner, Greener New York” position paper issued during last year’s gubernatorial campaign, Cuomo wrote, “We must find and implement alternative sources of energy generation and transmission to replace the electricity currently supplied by the Indian Point facility,” which in 2009 ranked as the state’s highest-producing plant at slightly over 2,000 megawatts. However, the “Cleaner, Greener” paper does not provide specifics on ramping up alternative energy production by 2015, when Indian Point would have to close if its license was not renewed.

“The notion that removing 2,000 megawatts of electricity from the New York grid won't harm reliability or lead to higher prices defies any measure of credibility or objective analysis,” a Consolidated Edison spokesman told the Gannett newspaper chain. Con Edison buys output from Indian Point’s reactor no. 2; both of the facility’s operating reactors are owned by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp.

A quake of the magnitude Japan suffered on March 11 is unlikely in the area surrounding Indian Point, as is a resulting tsunami. However, a 2008 study by Columbia University Earth Observatory seismologists found that a quake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale was possible along the active fault lines, with a 1.5% probability of occurring during a 50-year period.

Indian Point’s reactor no. 2 is ranked 25th for quake risk; the no. 1 reactor at Indian Point was built in 1962 and taken off line in 1974. The highest-ranked West Coast nuclear facility, Diablo Canyon near the San Andreas Fault in Avila Beach, CA, is 15th on the NRC’s list with a one in 23,810 risk for each of its two reactors, according to NRC data reported by MSNBC.

Following the March 11 quake and the onset of the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility in Japan, Entergy issued a statement affirming the safety of its facilities. “Entergy’s nuclear plants were designed and built to withstand the effects of natural disasters, including earthquakes and catastrophic flooding,” according to the statement. “The NRC requires that safety-significant structures, systems and components be designed to take into account the most severe natural phenomena historically reported for each site and surrounding area” and also stipulates “an added safety margin,” taking into account the risk of more severe future events.