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. Longannet had an unusually wide intake mouth, without which the system would have been permanently clogged.
Utility companies have two responses.
The other is that the screens act as useful showcases for researchers interested in the inshore -which is akin to the doctor killing the patient to find out about the disease. When the scale of slaughter is understood, the excuses look pitiful. For example, at Britain s newest conventional power station Sizewell B, hunched on the beleaguered North Sea, the numbers are boggling. With intake meshes of about 1cm. Internal casualties include small fish such as gobies which can slip through even as adults.