Power Plants Don't Have to Suck (Literally)
For decades, electric power plants have quietly preyed on America's waterways and devoured our fisheries, but their actions have largely escaped government accountability. Now - after years of successful litigation brought by environmental groups - the federal Environmental Protection Agency and many states like California have the opportunity to do something meaningful to prevent this senseless slaughter.
Experts have long known that cooling water intake structures operated by the electric utility industry are "the single largest predators of our Nation's waters." Collectively, the power industry sucks in approximately 80 trillion gallons of water annually to cool their equipment - a number so staggering it is equivalent to four times the amount of water in all of the Chesapeake Bay.
In the process of using this water for cooling, power plants kill on a massive scale fish, larvae and other aquatic organisms - and often do so in sensitive or important spawning areas. These organisms are mangled on grates or superheated inside the power plants. And while a fisher might pay $40 or more a year for a local fishing license that limits with exacting specificity what kind and how much of a species he or she can catch, the power industry has an unbridled license-to-kill unlike anything seen in a summer action movie.
In New Jersey, the Salem Nuclear Plant - the nation's largest user of cooling water - withdraws more than 3 billion gallons of water per day from Delaware Bay, killing an estimated 845 million fish a year.
Combined, the 19 California plants using antiquated, once-through cooling technology are allowed to suck in 16 billion gallons of sea water every day and kill an estimated 79 billion fish, larvae and other marine life - including two dozen sea lions and a dozen seals - annually.
The Bay Shore power plant in Ohio kills 46 million Lake Erie fish and sucks in another 2 billion larvae a year.
This killing surpasses many types of commercial and recreational fishing in some areas, and is completely unnecessary. Widely available and affordable technologies reuse and recycle cooling water, preventing fish kills almost entirely.
Most new power plants use closed-cycle cooling, which recirculates water and can reduce fish mortality by 95% or more. Even better, dry cooling technology is currently used at dozens of power plants in the U.S. and hundreds worldwide. According to the environmental group Riverkeeper, which for years has led the environmental effort to modernize the nation's power plants, for every 10,000 fish killed by a once-through cooling plant, about 9,996 can be saved by dry cooling.
The costs can also be reasonably borne by industry. In Massachusetts, for example, the Brayton Point power plant, which provides approximately 6% of New England's electricity and fought improvements for years, is currently upgrading its plant at the modest expense to ratepayers of 6 to 18 cents a month. This revelation prompted one EPA official to note that the cost of compliance when added to other upgrades at the plant was less than the price of the postage stamp needed to mail the monthly electric bill.
But nearly 40 years after Congress first sought to solve this problem, the power industry continues its massive ecological destruction. Nationally, hundreds of outdated once-through cooling power plants remain on both fresh waterways and along our coasts.
It is time for EPA and the states to act and to do so definitively.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year set the stage for new rules from EPA on the issue, and those rules should be forthcoming during President Obama's tenure. Ahead of these new rules, California stands poised to be a leader on this issue like it has on so many other environmental initiatives. A recent proposal by the California State Water Resources Control Board to phase out once-through cooling has a chance to end this pointless destruction along the state's entire coast. But while the intentions of the proposal are laudable and should be supported, the current draft still suffers from loopholes big enough to swallow a whale.
California should seize this opportunity and set a strong example by making clear the need to upgrade all power plants to the best technology available. No more excuses. No more delay. The federal government then should follow that lead and require modern technologies such as closed-cycle and dry cooling that drastically reduce the impact on our waterways.
If our current national situation has taught us anything it is that we can no longer take the seemingly endless wealth of this great country for granted. Our national assets include the bounty of our fisheries, and EPA and the states need to put a stop to this appalling and illegal waste.
New York City-based attorney Reed Super and Los Angeles-based marine biologist Tom Ford contributed to this post.
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Replace all coal and oil plants with rooftop solar and Waste Biogchar, see my profile., Cheaper, safe, forever.
there are air cooled condensors on some plants we've built, and waste heat is being used in an adjacent 10 acre greenhouse (McAdoo, PA)
The best solution is cogeneration, also called CHP (combined heat and power) as one poster noted. Supply side!
Conventional power plants waste more energy as heat, than they make as electricity. That's to condense the steam after it goes through the turbine. That heat could be used to bake bread, dry paint, heat water, etc.
All new power plants should be CHP with a minimum overall efficiency of 70% (our current mix is 32% efficient). There are states right now with incentives for plants that meet those criteria.
combined cycle gas turbines still have steam turbines and water cooled condensors. the waste heat from the gas turbine flows through water or steam filled boiler tubes (depending on which stage ) generating steam for the steam turbine. the spent steam passes over condensor tubes reconstitutes as water and is then returned as boiler feed water
Important article! It tells why the activist community and regulatory bodies are so important. Otherwise, power plants will keep taking shortcuts, as opposed to replacing older technologies with new, affordable, environmentally friendly ones.
Another way to provide power at the point of use is described in the article: 4 Steps to Revive the Auto Industry and the Economy. It will be found on the Aesop Institute website: www.aesopinstitute.org
The brief two pages article outines little known breakthrough technology that opens paths to cars that need no fossil fuel or recharge.
Later, more advanced versions can turn cars into power plants, wirelessly able to sell power to the local utility when parked.
Imagine the impact of cars and trucks that can pay for themselves, and end the need to build coal or nuclear power plants!
tell us again when it's proven.
I hope you will speak out very loudly against the greenwashing of massive so-called "renewable energy" power plants like CSP and geothermal, and support point of use solutions within the built environment! Even "air cooled" solar thermal in our hot deserts uses tens of millions of gallons of water a year for DAILY mirror rinsing, and is much, much less able to produce peak power, when demand is highest, because efficiency drops 25 - 35%. Dead desert, no benefits.
The only reason to slaughter our ecosystems for industrial, remote, centralized power plants nowadays is to enrich the Robber Barons who will own them. Our so-called "Green Revolution" will be owned and controlled almost entirely by Chevron, BP, Goldman Sachs, Pickens and other mercenaries, so this is about preventing democratic, stable ownership and control of clean power generation right where it is needed.
We need to stop these CSP and geothermal plants from destroying our wilderness habitats, and support feed in tariffs and loans so that every structure can get as close to Net Zero (or often even export energy) asap.
Can this excessive heat not be used as thermal energy in the plant?
Why isn't this warm water output considered thermal pollution?
See Steve Fleischli's Profile
Good point. The warm water output certainly is thermal pollution. Regulators are required under the Clean Water Act (section 316a) to ensure these discharges meet state and federal standards; however, this often leads to endless debate with some power companies as to the impacts from the increase in temperature in the water being discharged. Can fish just swim through the heat plume in a river or lake? Does it really affect the waterway’s ecology? Those debates happen pretty regularly. I also believe most companies don’t view it as cost effective for them to try to get the remaining heat from the water before they discharge it. They are using it for cooling, not additional energy generation. It is far easier for them to burn coal, natural gas or other material to get energy.
From my perspective, the law as written requiring reduction of water intake actually is stronger in many ways than the law prohibiting the heated discharge – if only the law would be applied and enforced.
Power plants and most other industrial facilities produce more heat than they can consume. Modern combined heat and power (CHP) plants distribute their waste heat to nearby communities for space heating and domestic hot water.
In America, CHP is mostly used on university and business campuses, although in Europe it is fairly common for residential communities to be designed around central CHP.
Good work Steve. Thanks!
There's a trade-off between water efficiency and energy efficiency. If you ignore the cost of water, then once-through cooling is the most energy-efficient method of rejecting heat.
I recently worked as an energy analyst for a leading-edge sustainable design firm. They're designing a unique HVAC system for a science museum on a pier in San Francisco that will probably get a LEED Platinum certification. The system pumps bay water up from underneath the pier into a water-to-water heat exchanger in the machine room and back into the bay. Once-through cooling.
This system was chosen because it has low pump energy and no fan energy, whereas cooling towers require significant fan energy and dry coolers require much more fan energy. The once-through bay water heat exchanger is the ideal solution if we're only concerned with carbon footprint and municipal water.
This isn't to say that water consumption from natural bodies shouldn't be considered. I'm saying that there are benefits to once-through cooling, and today's sustainable development orthodoxy provides incentives to pursue those benefits. The case against once-through cooling is not watertight...
Worth considering, but HVAC cooling is not very close to cooling for a Nuke plant's reactors. Also you did not mention any design consideration of the effect of heating the bay water on the sea life in the bay.
You have a good point, and I would say that cooling towers are unquestionably the best solution for heat rejection systems with high condenser water temperatures. However, I would never recommend dry coolers for industrial applications.
The HVAC system I described has no compressor-based refrigeration, just passive water loops through radiant floors and ceiling panels. So the temperature increase across the bay water side of the heat exchanger is too small to create any significant localized heating.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
