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

Explore, enjoy, and protect the planet

photo: Lake Erie 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because of outdated water intake structures.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Power plants that rely on outdated cooling systems use more 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

 It 

fails 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).

For more information visit www.sierraclub.org/coal/fishchopper

PHOTO: PISCES CONSERVATION, LTD