Top court to consider nuke plant's impact on river life
Cooling system is focus of suit
BY GREG CLARY
The Indian Point nuclear plant's impact on the Hudson River will be central to a case heading for the country's highest court today - and a final decision could affect operations at 550 power plants across the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court's nine justices are set to hear Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper Inc., a battle over whether the Clean Water Act allows federal regulators to weigh costs, as well as benefits, when protecting the environment.
New Orleans-based Entergy, which is the plant's owner, and the energy industry think costs should be considered.
Environmentalists do not.
At issue for Indian Point is a technology the plant uses to take in Hudson River water, use it to cool its operations and return warmer water to the ecosystem.
It requires billions of gallons of water every day and dooms fish eggs and smaller species of fish that get caught in the plant's intake, according to environmentalists.
Entergy officials said 25 years and $50 million of government-supervised studies show otherwise.
"The once-through cooling intakes of Hudson River power plants, which withdraw five billion gallons of water each day, have had a devastating effect on the river's ecosystem," said Alex Matthiessen, Hudson Riverkeeper and president of the nonprofit. "The Clean Water Act clearly mandates the use of 'best technology available' without regard to cost-benefit comparisons and was intended to address precisely these types of impacts."
Matthiessen said the Su-preme Court has the opportunity to weigh in on an important environmental issue.
Across the country, 550 power plants use such cooling technology, and if the court decides costs must be left out of the equation, billions of dollars must be spent to retrofit existing facilities to meet federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
Four power plants on the Hudson River - Indian Point, Danskammer, Roseton and Bowline - use the "once-through" cooling, as it is called.
Indian Point officials have estimated replacing that technology with towers that use much less river water and circulating the water through a closed internal cooling system would cost the company more than $1 billion and require shutting down electricity generation for months, as well blasting bedrock to prepare the Buchanan site.
The renovation might also include moving buried natural gas lines, which company officials said would be another potential problem for the environment.
"The Clean Water Act isn't specific to cooling towers. It doesn't prescribe or proscribe," Entergy spokesman Jim Steets said at Indian Point. "What we believe the court and the federal agency carrying out the act should do is take a common-sense ap-proach that includes weighing the costs and the benefits."
Riverkeeper and its supporters have won their case in the lower courts.
Cost-Benefit Issue Is Focus
Entergy appealed to the Supreme Court after losing in the district courts, but the court - which hears only about one appeal from every 100 made - opted to examine only the cost-benefit question.
Even after the presentations each side will make today, justices are not likely to issue a ruling until spring, lawyers said. The Supreme Court session ends in June.
The Supreme Court decision will have significant implications for power plants across the country, but the stakes are particularly high for Indian Point.
Entergy, the plant's owner, is already fighting with New York state over permits to release warmer water into the Hudson; the state is concerned about the system's effect on the river's fish population.
The environmental impact on the Hudson River could end up as a key element in Indian Point's efforts to extend its license to create electricity at the site for another 20 years, to 2035.
Should the court side with Riverkeeper and its supporters, the company would have to put in closed-cycle cooling and, at the very least, amend its application before its first license expires in 2013. It could also choose not to continue its operations at the site.
The U.S. Supreme Court's nine justices are set to hear Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper Inc., a battle over whether the Clean Water Act allows federal regulators to weigh costs, as well as benefits, when protecting the environment.
New Orleans-based Entergy, which is the plant's owner, and the energy industry think costs should be considered.
Environmentalists do not.
At issue for Indian Point is a technology the plant uses to take in Hudson River water, use it to cool its operations and return warmer water to the ecosystem.
It requires billions of gallons of water every day and dooms fish eggs and smaller species of fish that get caught in the plant's intake, according to environmentalists.
Entergy officials said 25 years and $50 million of government-supervised studies show otherwise.
"The once-through cooling intakes of Hudson River power plants, which withdraw five billion gallons of water each day, have had a devastating effect on the river's ecosystem," said Alex Matthiessen, Hudson Riverkeeper and president of the nonprofit. "The Clean Water Act clearly mandates the use of 'best technology available' without regard to cost-benefit comparisons and was intended to address precisely these types of impacts."
Matthiessen said the Su-preme Court has the opportunity to weigh in on an important environmental issue.
Across the country, 550 power plants use such cooling technology, and if the court decides costs must be left out of the equation, billions of dollars must be spent to retrofit existing facilities to meet federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
Four power plants on the Hudson River - Indian Point, Danskammer, Roseton and Bowline - use the "once-through" cooling, as it is called.
Indian Point officials have estimated replacing that technology with towers that use much less river water and circulating the water through a closed internal cooling system would cost the company more than $1 billion and require shutting down electricity generation for months, as well blasting bedrock to prepare the Buchanan site.
The renovation might also include moving buried natural gas lines, which company officials said would be another potential problem for the environment.
"The Clean Water Act isn't specific to cooling towers. It doesn't prescribe or proscribe," Entergy spokesman Jim Steets said at Indian Point. "What we believe the court and the federal agency carrying out the act should do is take a common-sense ap-proach that includes weighing the costs and the benefits."
Riverkeeper and its supporters have won their case in the lower courts.
Cost-Benefit Issue Is Focus
Entergy appealed to the Supreme Court after losing in the district courts, but the court - which hears only about one appeal from every 100 made - opted to examine only the cost-benefit question.
Even after the presentations each side will make today, justices are not likely to issue a ruling until spring, lawyers said. The Supreme Court session ends in June.
The Supreme Court decision will have significant implications for power plants across the country, but the stakes are particularly high for Indian Point.
Entergy, the plant's owner, is already fighting with New York state over permits to release warmer water into the Hudson; the state is concerned about the system's effect on the river's fish population.
The environmental impact on the Hudson River could end up as a key element in Indian Point's efforts to extend its license to create electricity at the site for another 20 years, to 2035.
Should the court side with Riverkeeper and its supporters, the company would have to put in closed-cycle cooling and, at the very least, amend its application before its first license expires in 2013. It could also choose not to continue its operations at the site.
There's more on this story, including links to Riverkeeper's April congressional testimony at NyackNewsAndViews.com http://www.nyacknewsandviews.com/2008/12/rvrkprsupremes.
Posted by: dz | December 02, 2008 at 07:43 AM
Let us clear up some facts intentionally clouded, by those wishing to maximize the impact of a basically flawed argument.
First off, let us take a hydroelectric dam, blocking its river from shore-to-shore, leaving as the only possible route downstream, the path directly through its turbines. If that river has fish in it, they will be impacted, and any attempts to divert them can never be 100% effective. Fish will be injured.
Let us now consider an open, un-dammed river, with a power plant on one shore, taking cooling water in through an intake grate of perhaps 8 feet high, and 15 feet wide, in a small man-made bay on one shore.It is readily seen that the vast preponderance of river water passes by unaffected, and does not enter the grate. In fact, a mere 30 to 50 feet out in the stream, no suction can be felt towards the grate, and its effect is strictly local, being limited to perhaps a 100 foot half-circle centered on the grate. Beyond the half-circle, river water flows past the intake too strongly to be diverted, and misses the intake entirely.
Examining the habits of fish, one would have to find a species which aggressively seeks out the shoreline, in order for that species to come near enough to the shorebound intake grate to be impacted. Moreover only a small percentage of even the most shore-seeking species will seek out that particular expanse of shore , as opposed to the remaining 315+ miles of West shore, and 315+ miles of East shore. Assuming every fish crossing into the the 100 foot half circle gets sucked in, still, that means only one thousandth of one percent of all fish on the river are affected.
But.... many fish do not seek the shoreline. Many fish, including the anadromous shad, keep to the midriver deeps when both swimming upsteam to spawn, foraging as fry, and migrating back to sea. This means that one thousandth of one percent is a wildly inflated upper boundary, for what percent of these species ever encounter the intake ports of a shore-bound power plant. Uninvolved civilian residents in the immediate vicinity of Indian Point report that they never see dead fish corpses floating in the Hudson, or washed up on the shore. Workers at the plant claim that fish are harmlessly diverted by an intentionally installed fish-diversion weir.
As far as fish eggs, Hudson river fish drop their eggs in historic pebble beds far north of Indian Point, so that they hatch long before coming south enough to be near Indian Point. It takes 126 days, according to the Lamont Doherty Laboratory, for Hudson river water to clear the estuary. If shad drop eggs near Troy, and they hatch within 10 days,...this means they hatch a mere 10 divided by 126, or 7.9% of the way downriver, in the vicinity of Castleton N.Y..Once hatched, the lively fry seek out the midriver deeps, to feed on plankton, and thus never come anywhere near Indian Point.
The fresh water/salt water division line lies north of West Point, so that ALL of the species spawning in fresh water do so far from Indian Point. The brackish (slightly salty) water peculiar to the Peekskill region does not support the spawning of saltwater species either, who prefer salt marshes such as exist far downriver. In fact, the brackish middle reaches of the Hudson near Indian Point are naturally scrubbed of aquatic life, by the constant changes in salinity, thus relieving Indian Point of the problem.
These particularities tend to untrack the vague Riverkeeper accusation that "billions of fish" are "slaughtered" by Indian Point.
Had Riverkeeper, or their new friends at the NYS DEC displayed some actual data to back up the accusation, then DEC's blanket statement could be viewed as a statement of need. Without any onsite investigation, DEC's statement must be viewed as a mere statement of their own intent. They intend to manage Indian Point, so, without any research, they simply declare that "billions of fish" are killed.
Why do this??.....DEC can be viewed in public arenas as proactive, and Riverkeeper can be viewed by its public as worthy of cash contributions, neither of which has any protective value for any Hudson river fish, or the river, or the local inhabitants.
This specious argument is being fielded because of agency needs of both Riverkeeper and NYS DEC. Riverkeeper needs a campaign issue, to continue to seem relevant. Simultaneously, personnel at NYS DEC wish to pass through the whitewater shoals of Albany's gubernatorial changes with their jobs intact, and so have crafted a pseudo-document, declaring dead fish to exist.
Posted by: H. Springer | January 08, 2009 at 01:12 PM