BUCHANAN, N.Y. — For a newly hatched striped bass in the Hudson River, a clutch of trout eggs in Lake Michigan or a baby salmon in San Francisco Bay, drifting a little too close to a power plant can mean a quick and turbulent death.
Sucked in with enormous volumes of water, battered against the sides of pipes and heated by steam, the small fry of the aquatic world are being sacrificed in huge numbers each year to the cooling systems of power plants across the country.
Conservationists say the nation’s power plants are needlessly killing fish and fish eggs, but energy-industry officials say opponents of nuclear power are exaggerating the losses.
The issue is affecting the debate over the future of a nuclear plant in the suburbs north of New York City, and the facilities and conservationists are watching the outcome to see how to proceed in other cities. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this term in a lawsuit related to the matter.
The issue’s scope is tremendous. More than 1,000 power plants and factories across the country use water from rivers, lakes, oceans and creeks as a coolant. At Indian Point plant in New York, the two reactors can pull in 1.7 million gallons of water per minute. Nineteen plants on or near the California coast use 16.3 billion gallons of seawater every day.
Most of the casualties are fish eggs, and for many species, it takes thousands of eggs to result in one adult fish. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which counts only species that are valuable for commerce or recreation, says the number of eggs and larvae killed each year at the nation’s large power plants would have grown into 1.5 billion year-old fish.
Conservationists note that even fish that die before maturity contribute to the ecosystem as food for larger fish and birds, and as predators themselves on smaller organisms.
But once they’ve gone through the power plant, they become decomposing detritus on the river bottom and have moved from the top to the bottom of the food chain, said Reed Super, an environmental lawyer specializing in the federal Clean Water Act.
Technology has long existed that might reduce the fish kill by 90 percent or more. Cooling towers allow a power plant to recycle the water rather than continuously pump it in. New power plants are required to use cooling towers, but most existing plants resist any push to convert, citing the cost and claiming that most fish eggs and larvae are doomed anyway.
“We’re not killing grown fish,” said Jerry Nappi, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, owner of Indian Point. “If we were killing billions of grown fish, you’d be able to walk across the Hudson on their backs.”
