For weeks, the firm said the reactors had sustained less serious "core damage".
Japanese media said officials had detected iodine and caesium, elements released when overheating causes core damage.
The fear was that more core damage would bring bigger releases.
Instead of expecting core damage once every 20,000 or 30,000 years, each reactor at Indian Point could expect a core-damage incident, which increases the risk of radioactive materials' escaping, once every 400 years.
So that confusing patriotism with unconditional support for a government policy, it seems to me, does damage, and core damage, to the meaning of citizenship in our democracy.
But projecting forward, the nuclear statisticians estimate the frequency of core damage accidents at one-tenth to one-hundredth of that level.
Special inspections are typically done when a problem increases the possibility of nuclear core damage by a factor of at least 10.
Given the core damage in the reactors, the plant operators may have decided that the reactors were a higher priority than the pools.
By contrast, the expected frequency of a core damage accident at the Quad Cities facility in Illinois is once every 833,000 years.
The panel limited itself to suggesting that a quicker response might have mitigated the core damage and lessened the release of radiation into the environment.
The agency ordered changes because it said that under the plan in place at the time, a major flood could cause core damage.
