Sierra Club Headquarters: 85 Second Street, Second Floor • San Francisco, CA 94105 • (415) 977-5500 2011 Explore, enjoy, and protect the planetphoto: LakeErie Waterkeeper

Bayshore power plant in Ohio has been known to kill 60 million fish and more than 2.5 billion fish eggs and larvae in just one year
because of outdated water intake structures. 

# POWER PLANTS

ARE DESTROYING

OUR WATERS 

# EPA–Stop the Fish Massacre 

# I t is no coincidence that power plants are located along some of our nation’s mightiest rivers and most treasured waterways. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, power plants use more water than any other industry sector in the United States, withdrawing more than 200 billion gallons daily.

Nearly all of this water is used for “once-through cooling,” an antiquated cooling system that sucks millions of gallons of water into the plant’s cooling system and then spits it back out at a much hotter temperature.Power plants that rely on outdated cooling systems use more than four times the amount of water per day than the public, as seen in this graph.

Sierra Club Headquarters: 85 Second Street, Second Floor • San Francisco, CA 94105 • (415) 977-5500 2011 

### THREATS FROM POWER PLANT WATER USE Power plant cooling water intake systems kill billions of aquatic creatures annually. 1 This fish massacre threatens the full spectrum of aquatic species and wildlife that rely on a complex food web, from phytoplankton to fish, birds, and marine mammals, including species that are already threatened or endangered.

Some communities face devastating economic consequences as power plants threaten commercial fisheries and recreational fishing. For example:

Ohio’s Bay Shore coal-fired power plant on Lake Erie kills 46 million fish and sucks in another two billion larvae per year. 2 Itfails to protect the fisheries in the Great Lakes and other highlyvalued, beloved waterways. Fish kills from the Bay Shore plant

1 Cronin, 90 F. Supp. at 366, citing James R. May & Maya K. van Rossum, The Quick and the Dead: Fish Entrainment, Entrapment, and the Implementation and Application of Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act, 20 Vt. L. Rev. 373, 382 (1995).

2 Kinetrics, Bay Shore Power Plant Cooling Water Intake Structure Information and I&E Sampling Data (January 2008), available at http://www.westernlakeerie.org/bayshore_ entrainimpinge_kinetric_38_sum.pdf. drain about $29.7 million out of the local fishing economy in Western Lake Erie each year. 3

New Jersey’s Salem Nuclear Power Plant uses more than three billion gallons of water every day from the Delaware Bay and kills an estimated three billion fish a year. 4



### THE EPA SHOULD ENACT STRONG COOLING WATER
STANDARDS Under the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to require the use of the best technologies available to protect waterways from power plants.

The best technology available for cooling water is called “closedcycle cooling.” Closed-cycle cooling reduces water intake by approximately 95 percent, drastically reducing the threats to fish and other species. This technology is already in use at hundreds of power plants around the country.

Instead of proposing a rule that would bring all power plants and other large industrial water users up to par with plants already using closed-cycle cooling, EPA caved to intense pressure from powerful industry interests. The EPA’s recently issued proposed standard offers little to no improvement in the technologies required to protect our waterways and our wildlife.

Worse yet, EPA left to the states the decisions about whether to implement improved technologies at the power plants that lag behind. These are largely the same state permitting agencies that have done almost nothing over the past 30 years to reduce the threats that power plants pose to wildlife, despite their authority

to do so.



### PROTECTING OUR TREASURED WATERWAYS Our communities deserve clear, consistent national safeguards that protect our waterways and help move the nation towards a future with energy production that phases out once-through cooling.

Almost 40 years after the Clean Water Act identified cooling water intake as a threat to our waterways and the life sustained by them, EPA has failed to require power plants to reduce their damage.

EPA should require closed-cycle cooling systems to protect people and the environment from cooling water intakes. By phasing out older, destructive technology, the United States would better protect its aquatic ecosystems and modernize its energy fleet.

3 “Economic Damages of Impingement and Entrainment of Fish, Fish Eggs, and Fish Larvae at the Bay Shore Power Plant,” Genter Consulting Group, 2009.

4 Maya van Rossum, Delaware Riverkeeper (January 20, 2011), citing Correspondence from US Fish & Wildlife Service to New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (June 30, 2000).



### F or more information v isit www

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