Evidently none of them had been looking into the cooling systems of power stations. Their seawater intake pipes may not be salubrious places. However, they hold the sorry secret of where many fish end up and show that it is not just fishermen who are to blame for emptying the sea. All power stations have to be cooled. The easiest way to cool plants that generate vast heat is to use water.
Seawater is free.
That is why, hunkered around the British coastline, squat the familiar colossi of power plants, mostly built long ago. Cooling water needs to be screened. You cannot have salmon fricassee hurtling around power plants as a coolant. The screens, usually drums or bands, which sieve off the solids in sea-water s minestrone, are electronically lifted, cleaned and replaced. In the days when they were allowed inside, local fishery officers in Scotland s Firth of Forth remember seeing adult salmon lying in the waste-bins at the Longannet power plant.