Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Nuke Plants in Cooling System-Fish Kill Suit

Nuclear power plants operators have won a Supreme Court case, brought by Riverkeeper and the Soundkeeper, about whether they would have to use a technology that limits the number of fish killed by their cooling systems. Millstone and Indian Point are among those affected by the ruling (here and here, with background here). The cost of the cooling systems can be a consideration when federal regulators are deciding whether to require them, the court said.

April 2 -- The Day has a more complete story, here.

Millstone to Make Some Improvements

Connecticut Fund for the Environment and Soundkeeper have gotten the operators of the Millstone nuclear power plant, in Waterford, to move a little faster in its efforts to improve its technology so it doesn't kill as many young fish trapped in the cooling water it takes from Long Island Sound.

David Funkhouser has some details here, in the Courant (glad to see David has survived the Courant's layoffs).

There's been so little news about the Sound lately that there's hasn't been much to blog about, and I've been too busy at work to dig things up, and then on days like yesterday and today, when stories are dropped in my lap, like this Millstone one, I'm still too busy to go into it in any depth. My apologies to the six or seven people still reading this blog.

U.S. Supreme Court Will Hear Riverkeeper Case Concerning Power Plants, Cooling Water, and Fish Kills. Millstone and Other Sound Plants Are Involved.

This blog is going to be a Broadwater-free zone for the next few days, I hope. With that I mind, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important case in the long-term battle to limit the number of fish that are killed in the cooling water intakes of power plants, including the Millstone plant in Waterford and many others.

Soundkeeper Terry Backer tipped me off (he's a plaintiff in Riverkeeper v. EPA, one of the suits that was consolidated by the Supreme Court) and sent me a link to SCOTUSBlog, which explains the case:

The Court also announced it will rule on whether the Environmental Protection Agency may compare costs with benefits when it orders major electricity-generating plants to install new technology when they draw water out of rivers and streams to cool their turbines....

In the electric industry case, the Court actually consolidated three petitions for review, and limited its review to a question as it has been composed by the U.S. Solicitor General’s office in response to the petitions. Here is the question: “Whether 316(b) of the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. 1326(b), authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to compare costs with benefits in determining the ‘best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact’ at cooling water intake structures.” One hour of oral argument will be scheduled in the combined cases of Entergy Corp. v. EPA (07-588), PSEG Fossil v. Riverkeeper (07-589), and Utility Water Act Group v. Riverkeeper (07-597).

The Court agreed to rule in those cases even though the Solicitor General had urged it not to do so. While arguing that the Second Circuit Court had been wrong in concluding that EPA could not make a cost-benefit analysis under the specific provision in the Clean Water Act, the SG also said that the EPA was conducting a new review that may take some months, and that review might change the shape of the legal dispute. The SG conceded, though, that electric-generating plants could well incur significant new costs in the interim, and might even have to shut down their facilities to retrofit their water-intake structures.

Although the electric companies had raised other issues beyond the cost-benefit question –whether EPA could offset environmental harms by restocking the fish supply or improving aquatic habitat in the streams, and whether EPA could impose new technology requirements on existing plants as well as new ones — the Court did not agree to hear those.

The cases granted on Monday will be heard in the new Term starting Oct. 6.

There's an earlier post of mine about the Appellate Division's decision here. If you search "Millstone" in the search blog box above, you'll find a bunch of other posts as well.

Millstone, Nuclear Power, Dead Fish

An e-mail from Terry Backer, Soundkeeper and co-chairman of the General Assembly's peak oil caucus, about the Millstone nuclear power plant:

Some time ago in a post you remarked that you were not sure what my position was on nuclear power. Your statement was prompted by my position that the Millstone Power Station in Waterford should be required to install close cycle cooling.

I have never called for the closure of Millstone and have focused my attention for more than a decade on its impact on marine life.

Any reasonable person should have reservation about the status of spent nuclear fuel and the lack of a national disposal site. Even then the long term storage of spent fuel rods remains challenging on every front from trucking to storing for 10,000 years. Currently, all the high level contaminated spent fuels rods sit on site. Nuclear power will be touted as a way to reduce our oil and gas use along with greenhouse gases. The dirty little secret is there isn't enough uranium in the world to power all the plants it would take to replace a portion of existing fuels. The US isn't the only country that needs oil, gas or uranium. Any one who doesn't have long term reservation about nuclear power and its long range viability must work in the industry or doesn't care to know. The fact is Soundkeeper Inc. does not have a position pro or com on nuclear power. I personally can accept it as needed at this point and into the future.

That said, I believe that for better or for worse nuclear power generation is here for years to come. It's never been my or Soundkeeper's position to force Millstone to closure. In fact, like it or not Millstone will be needed as natural gas supplies drop over the next several years. This is especially important since the Energy Board Canada in October has said Canadian exports of natural gas will be cut up to 30% between now and 2015.

What I want from Millstone is for them to stop killing winter flounder and other marine organisms, period. I want then to install the best technology available for this purpose, closed cycle cooling. The heat from the closed cycle cooling could be captured and used in cooling or heating a combined cycle per se. Whether they have enough land or not I can't address but I can say that everything seems to be impossible until it is required.

Winter flounder populations are down across their range for a number of reasons. One of the reasons and one that can best be controlled are power station intakes. Consider this: If a fisherman takes a sub-legal fish he can be fined up to $50 per fish even if they have a permit to take fish. Yet, Millstone can take millions upon millions of fish at all stages of life with its operating permit. No fines, no penalties.

I understand that power plants need to run and they need water to do that. I don't understand given the technology available why they would need to use once through water continually sucking the life from the sea.

Soundkeeper's action at DEP is not just about Millstone, our efforts would apply to all the plants that take water from the Sound in the coming years. DEP should require closed cycle cooling at all Long Island Sound power plants now and allow the companies a period of time to demonstrate that closed cycle cooling isn't feasible. A license to operate a power plant shouldn't be a license to kill.

Terry

DEP Taking a New Look at Millstone's Permit

The Connecticut DEP is changing course on a new permit for the cooling system at the Millstone nuclear power plant, in Waterford. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that nuclear power plants need to do a better job protecting fish, which get destroyed when they are sucked into cooling systems (some background here). The DEP had already been in the process of rewriting Millstone’s permit but decided recently that it needed to revise the revision.

Here’s what The Day reported:

This spring, before the DEP could hold a public hearing on its proposed permit, a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators need to take into account the “best technology available” when issuing permits. Such equipment could include costly cooling towers that would re-circulate water and kill fewer fish and fish larvae.

In the federal court case, Riverkeeper II v. EPA, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals also determined that using a cost/benefit analysis to determine what constitutes the best technology available is not in keeping with the tenets of the Clean Water Act. A number of environmental groups and states, including Connecticut, were parties to the Riverkeeper case.

Schain said it's likely the revised permit will require Millstone owner Dominion to look at all available technologies in addressing the nuclear reactor operations' impact on aquatic life. The old Millstone permit is still in effect while the new process moves forward, he said.

Eating Fish Safely, Killing Fish at Millstone

I reported 10 or so days ago that New York and Connecticut were trying to come up with consistent advisories about the safety of eating striped bass and bluefish from Long Island Sound. The Journal News has a follow-up, here.

A Waterford resident named Mike Hessling, who works at a natural gas-fired power plant, takes Terry Backer to task in the New London Day for wanting the operators of the Millstone nuclear power plant to build a cooling tower that kills fewer fish than the cooling system they have now.

He argues that nuclear power is not as cheap to produce as Terry thinks. He also makes a valid point that I'd like to hear more about: He asks why the Soundkeepr is focusing on Millstone and not the other many non-nuke plants on the Sound.

He seems to jump to the conclusion though that this must mean that Backer is somehow a front for the same old anti-nuke groups. I've never asked Terry specifically if he's for or against nuclear power, but from what I know of him I'd be surprised if he's unequivocally against it. The issue of fish being killed by nuke plants is one of the issues that got the Waterkeeper Alliance (which Soundkeeper is a charter member of) its start, back at Indian Point in the 1960s (Waterkeeper Alliance is a descendant of the Hudson River Fisherman's Association, which documented massive fish kills at Indian Point). So I tend totake Terry's opposition to cooling towers that kill a lot of fish at face value.

He also says, essentially, that Soundkeeper should be concentrating on other issues, like controlling contaminated stormwater runoff. This is not only a red herring but it happens to be an issue that Soundkeeper has worked hard on, sponsoring the Smart Sponge program in Norwalk.

Killing Fish at Millstone; Shays Should Be Proud of Opposing Broadwater for the Right Reasons

Terry Backer argues forcefully and convincingly that the Millstone nuke plant, in Waterford, is killing fish by the millions and that the only question for its owner, Dominion, is whether it wants to stop killing fish. It could easily do this by building a closed-cycle cooling system but if it does so, its profits will be lower. In other words, there's an environmental cost to running a nuke plant, but Dominion doesn't want to pay it. Here’s what Terry says:

Power plant cooling water intakes kill trillions of fish, fish eggs and larva on an ongoing basis. This fact is certainly no secret. It's clear that species of fish in Long Island Sound are heavily affected by power plants. The fish are killed, in all their life stages, along with other marine life when they are sucked into the facility along with a flood of water to cool the plant, in Millstone's case it can be up to two billion gallons per day. The marinelife that can't escape are then either scraped off the protective screens into a trash pit or discharged back to the Sound as a lifeless soup….

Studies of large power plants demonstrate that cooling water intakes have caused the near collapse of fisheries. Millstone is already known to have created great pressure on the flounder population in Long Island Sound. The carnage caused by cooling water intakes at Millstone has been known for some time, now we know how to stop it. Closed cycle cooling is the best available technology to protect our dwindling fish populations and preserve the environmental integrity of the Sound.

I will leave you with this. Power plants are not built to make electricity, they are built to make profits for investors and shareholders. Dominion will fight tooth and nail for that profit. After years and years of no progress it is time for us to stop giving away our irreplaceable and threatened resources of Long Island Sound for power-generator profits.

There’s more about the issue on the Soundkeeper’s website.

Meanwhile, Newsday quoted Congressman Chris Shays as saying he was “becoming ashamed” of his opposition to the Broadwater liquefied natural gas plant.

"I'm formally against Broadwater, but I'm becoming ashamed that I am."

But look deeper and you’ll see that, in a way, Shays is right. What he’s ashamed of are the silly, irrelevant reasons people cite for opposing Broadwater. Anyone following the issue has noticed the same thing, from the beginning, and I wrote about it at least once, here (these kinds of the-sky-is-falling scenarios are common whenever a project causes opposition on environmental grounds – some people raise legitimate issues and some don’t; that’s life, and while I don’t like it, in this case it’s Broadwater’s problem, not mine).

Oppose Broadwater because it’s an unneeded natural gas factory being imposed on the publicly-owned waters of Long Island Sound and would usurp all kinds of beneficial, non-industrial uses of the Sound, as well as damage marine life.

So now that he’s said he’s ashamed, Chris Shays ought to also say he’s proud to oppose Broadwater for the right reason.

Still Trying to Figure Out How to Kill Fewer Fish at the Millstone Nuke Plant

The Connecticut DEP is still trying to figure out what to do about the water that the Millstone nuke plant, in Waterford, draws in from Long Island Sound for cooling. In January, a federal court ruled that power plants had to figure out a better system, because too many fish were being killed (background info here). Here's what the New London Day reports today:

The step, depending on how it is implemented, could require an expensive technological overhaul at many plants, including Millstone. It could include reducing the flow of water used from Long Island Sound or deploying costly, large cooling towers that use significantly less water by recycling what they do use, thereby putting much less strain on the aquatic environment.

The story also includes these two paragraphs, which seem to contradict each other:

According to the DEP, 30 years of ecological monitoring by Northeast Utilities, the previous owner of Millstone, and Dominion show that the discharge of water from Millstone has not adversely affected the Sound.

When Millstone takes in water from the Sound, that water flows into the plant through a large grate, which traps fish and other sea life and returns it to the Sound by way of a vertical conveyor belt. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission study has found that winter flounder larvae were too small to be trapped by the system and died from heat inside the plant.

The nuke plants have not adversely affected the Sound but they're killing winter flounder. Dead winter flounder seems like an adverse affect, but maybe that's just my interpretation.

The cooling water, by the way, flows through the part of the plant that is not radioactive.