During times of peak use, Indian Point, Bowline, Roseton, Danskammer and Lovett withdraw five billion gallons per day from the biologically rich tidal Hudson River north of New York City. The intakes “entrain” smaller fish, including eggs and larvae, into their cooling water systems, where physical impacts, pressure changes, thermal shock, and antifouling chemicals such as chlorine kill or seriously injure them. The force of the water withdrawal can also trap or “impinge” larger fish on the screens which prevent debris from entering the facility's cooling system. Impingement can starve, exhaust, asphyxiate (when trapping prevents proper gill movement or when screen rotation removes fish from the water for prolonged periods), descale, and otherwise kill or injure fish. Abatement of these kills would help restore the estuary’s productivity.

Entrainment is directly related to the size of a facility’s withdrawal, since egg and larvae are unable to avoid the intake water flow. Mature fish can swim away unless overwhelmed by the current, so impingement levels result from both the size and velocity of the withdrawals.

Available cooling technologies require vastly different quantities of water, so the type of system a facility uses is the critical determinant of the damage it causes. The Hudson River power plants use “once through” cooling, by far the most wasteful and destructive system. Indian Point withdraws as much as 2.5 billion gallons of water per day; the large fossil fuel plants, Bowline in Haverstraw and Roseton north of Newburgh each use about 1 billion gallons per day at peak. And the older, smaller coal plants also contribute: Danskammer, on the River adjacent to Roseton, withdraws from 200-450 million gallons per day, and Lovett in Tompkins Cove uses a peak of 390 million gallons per day

By any measure, these cooling withdrawals are enormous. Indian Point’s alone is nearly twice the combined water consumption of New York City and Westchester. In a summer month, Indian Point withdraws enough water, and discharges it heated, to fill the Hudson from Peekskill to Croton; during the five month season when the bulk of the River’s fish species hatch and mature, the plant’s consumption could fill the River from Yonkers to Poughkeepsie. Barring substantial outages or breakdowns in peak periods, the Indian Point annual withdrawal is larger than the entire volume of the estuary from the Battery to the Federal Dam at Troy. The other power plants together match this dubious feat.

The impacts of once through cooling on the Hudson vary widely from year to year but typically amount to billions of fish annually. For example, entrainment consumes eggs, larvae and juveniles comprising on average more than 35 percent of the young population of striped bass, 25 percent of Atlantic tomcod, 50 percent of spottail shiner, and large proportions of the year classes of many other species. In contrast, the common closed cycle “hybrid” technology would reduce water withdrawals and fish mortality by 97 percent. Dry cooling, which the new Athens Generating plant will employ, would reduce water use by more than 99 percent.

Legal Background

The federal Clean Water Act, which the DEC administers under the SPDES program, requires such facilities to employ the “best technology available to minimize adverse environmental impact.” Given its vastly superior efficiency, it is impossible to minimize adverse environmental impact without recirculating the water by some type of closed cycle cooling.

In 1975, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered Indian Point to construct closed cycle cooling, but its owners forced years of inconclusive hearings. The parties ultimately allowed the generators to continue once through cooling for ten years, until 1991, with only monitoring of fish kills and modest abatement of impact, in return for contributions to Hudson River scientific research. The Hudson River Fishermen’s Association (Riverkeeper’s predecessor), Scenic Hudson and NRDC were the public interest participants in the Settlement Agreement, which set the conditions for the 1981 and 1987 SPDES permits.

The Clean Water Act mandates a five-year duration for these permits, which accordingly expired in 1992. Since then, DEC has unsuccessfully sought to negotiate new conditions with the generators and environmental parties. In autumn 2002, after futilely petitioning DEC, environmental groups and citizens brought separate lawsuits against the state over the permitting delays on Indian Point and Danskammer. The resulting judicial orders force DEC to commence the formal state permitting process, instead of continuing the endless negotiations. After DEC publishes draft SPDES permits (by July 1 for Danskammer and November 14 for Indian Point), Riverkeeper and other members of the public will be able to submit comments and demand an evidentiary hearing on the appropriate protective technology. Under the Indian Point order, DEC must also complete an environmental impact statement for the withdrawals by July 1.

The power plant fish mortality is the River’s oldest ongoing environmental battle. The 1960s controversy over the scenic and fishery impacts of the proposed Storm King Mountain pumped storage facility laid the basis for modern environmental law when a federal appeals court ruled that citizens had standing to sue to protect such resources. Given the Clean Water Act requirement for best technology to minimize environmental damage, the new court-ordered permitting should abate the last unaddressed industrial impact on the Hudson River.