BUCHANAN – Indian Point is taking its case on cooling towers to court.
The nuclear plant’s owners are battling the state Department of Environmental Conservation to determine whether they must construct special towers to cool Hudson River water used to produce electricity.
The cost to build the concrete towers has been estimated as high as $1.5 billion.
Company officials say studies on fish in the river that they’ve done for more than two decades – under the supervision of the state agency – don’t make the environmental case for such a large-scale change.
“We don’t even know if it’s feasible to build these,” said Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, the company that owns and operates Indian Point. “This is a project that would involve dynamiting next to the plant.”
Steets said the recent appeal to state Supreme Court disputed the DEC’s Aug. 14 ruling that there is no need to argue the question of adverse effect on fish species as environmental regulators look at renewing the nuclear plant’s permit to draw billions of gallons of Hudson River water to cool its operation.
Specifically, the state is concerned that intake structures for the cooling water destroy too many fish eggs and larvae as they are sucked in and hurt larger fish that are pulled against the screens or exterior of the intake system.
The state says those actions destabilize the habitat, but Entergy’s experts say most of the eggs and larvae would not survive regardless of whether they were caught in those flows because the odds of a single one surviving to maturity are so slim.
“The (DEC ruling) says adverse impact on the fish can’t be argued because it’s a given,” Steets said. “We don’t believe that. Anything you do on the river is going to have impact, but we’ve spent 50 million dollars to assess those impacts for nearly 30 years and done everything we’ve been asked.”
Yancey Roy, a DEC spokesman, declined to comment on the matter.
What may prove a bigger issue for the courts and the parties to decide is how much environmental impact building the towers would have.
Anti-nuclear activists in the early years of Indian Point argued successfully against the cooling towers, and by the time the large cement towers are presented to the public this time around, they likely will be evaluated on issues such as whether building them would too severely limit Indian Point’s ability to produce necessary electricity as well as require the relocation of a natural gas line on site.
Environmentalists and the state want the closed cooling towers to recycle water and lessen the need for the river to be part of the plant’s operation.
Additionally, putting water that has been warmed by use back into the Hudson results in what is called thermal pollution.
According to the state’s permit requirements, the system that is required “shall reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.”
The DEC recently issued a permit to Entergy’s FitzPatrick station, a nuclear plant on the southeastern Lake Ontario shore where no closed-cycle cooling has been required, company officials said.
Some of this will have to wait until at least March, when the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to take up a case examining whether the Clean Water Act can effectively force a change to the best technology available without regard to environmental effects.
Until then, the 1987 release permit the DEC granted Indian Point remains in effect.
Reach Greg Clary at gclary@lohud.com or 914-696-8566.
http://lohud.com/article/20081030/NEWS01/810300459/-1/newsfront
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