Nuclear Power Plant Denied Permit Due to Water Concerns

The Indian Point nuclear power plant 35 miles north of New York City has been denied water-quality certification by the State of New York due to its outmoded cooling technology, which is blamed for violating the Clean Water Act and killing billions of fish each year. The ruling, seen as a major victory for environmentalists, will require the power station to upgrade its cooling systems and drastically curtail the 2.5 billion gallons of water it withdraws each day from the Hudson River.

Yup, that’s right. The Indian Point nuclear power plant takes roughly 2.5 billion gallons of water out of the Hudson River each day, killing up to a billion fish and aquatic organism every single year. That’s more than twice the average daily water consumption of New York City, amounting to over 100 million gallons of water per hour or enough water to fill more than two and a half Olympic size swimming pools every minute!

Describing the ruling by New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, the NYT explains:

The strongly worded letter from the Department of Environmental Conservation, issued late Friday, said flatly that Indian Point’s cooling systems, even if modified in a less expensive way proposed by Entergy, “do not and will not comply” with New York’s water quality standards.

It said the power plant’s water-intake system kills nearly a billion aquatic organisms a year, including the shortnose sturgeon, an endangered species. The letter also said that radioactive material had polluted the Hudson after leaking into the groundwater.

The ruling concerned the cooling system at Indian Point Units 2 and 3, which were commissioned in the early 1970s. (Indian Point 1 was shut down in 1974.) Both take in enormous volumes of river water — a combined 2.5 billion gallons a day, or more than twice the average daily water consumption of all of New York City — and use it to create steam for turbines and to cool the reactors. The water is then pumped back into the Hudson, 20 or 30 degrees hotter.

Sucking so much water causes plankton, eggs and larvae to be drawn into the plant’s machinery, or entrained, and the water pressure also causes fish to be trapped, or impinged, against intake screens, the state said.

The plant’s “once-through” cooling system was obsolete by the late 1970s, when the state of the art became “closed-cycle” cooling — more akin to a car’s radiator — which consumes less than 10 percent as much water and kills fewer organisms.

“Conversion from a once-through cooling system to a closed-cycle cooling system, while expensive and involving a potentially lengthy construction process, is nevertheless the only available and technically feasibly technology” for Indian Point to satisfy the “best technology available” requirement of state water-quality regulations, an official of the Department of Environmental Conservation official wrote.

In case you're not familiar, once-through cooling systems are just that: cooling systems that withdraw massive amounts of water, run that water through a power plant once to absorb waste heat and cool the system down, then dump all of the warmer, often contaminated water back into the river or lake from whence it came. On the other hand, recirculating wet or "closed-loop" systems withdraw far less water and continue to recirculate it for cooling, rather than running the water through just once before returning it to the source. Recirculating systems withdraw far less water but ultimately lose more to evaporation, since the recirculated water must be cooled in cooling ponds or towers - which results in evaporation - before it can go back through the system.

See the table below for water use comparisons between once-through and closed-loop cooling systems (from DOE/Office of Fossil Energy):

Interestingly, the article states that if Indian Point adopts the new cooling technology, the power plant will consume 10% less water. But my understanding is (based, in part, on the table above) that while withdrawals will be drastically cut, actual water consumption will likely increase with a closed loop cooling system. Regardless of the details, this ruling could save billions of fish, larvae and wildlife while essentially ending the thermal pollution that results from Indian Point's old, antiquated cooling system.