Power Plants Are Boiling Salmon, Trout, and Sturgeon Alive

Cooking fish is a fine and subtle art: a hard pan-sear yields crispy skin but might dry out the delicate flesh, while a white wine-poach produces a tender result but can be kind of a snoozer when it comes to flavor. Whichever way you cook your fish, at the end of the day, you can at least sit down and enjoy it, paying homage to the creature that gave its life for your meal. But all across the country, millions of salmon, trout, and sturgeon—as well as endangered species such as sea turtles and orcas—are being sucked up by power plants and either boiled whole or ground to a pulp. Worst of all, these fine fish go completely to waste, spat back out into oceans or rivers dead, and of no use to the commercial or recreational fishermen who'd like to hook them.

Across America, hundreds of waterside power plants and industrial facilities draw billions of gallons of water each day into water intake structures; the buildings then heat that water to convert it to steam, which is used to rotate plants' turbines and generate electricity. But these structures use so much pressure when drawing water that all kinds of fish and animals get sucked up, too, only to be crushed to death against coarse filters or, as in the case of the smaller fish that slip through, boiled alive as the plant heats the water.

"This is happening on every major river, on all the Great Lakes, and along both coasts," said Brett Hartl, a policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's a very pervasive problem."

Last month, the Center, along with a coalition of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, filed a lawsuit that challenges the opinion of the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), groups which have supported the EPA's ruling to allow power plants to continue to rely on such intake systems, which the coalition alleges are outdated and wasteful.

"The cooling water intake structures allowed for by the EPA rule draw billion gallons of water each day from rivers across the country and collectively destroy tens of billions of fish per year and trillions of organisms per year overall, including individuals from at least 266 federally 'threatened' and 'endangered' species,'" the coalition's press release reads. "Among the species impacted are iconic sea turtles, orcas, Hudson River sturgeon, and Pacific Northwest salmon and trout."

Hartl noted that while it's nearly impossible to quantify the power plants' effect on these fish species, the news is bad for both professional and amateur fishermen.

"There's no way that it's a good thing for commercial or recreational fishing," Hartl said. He noted that in addition to sucking up adult fish, the plants' water intake structures also vacuum in an uncountable number of potential lives, in the form of fish eggs and larvae that will never hatch.

"By the EPA's own estimate, this affects billions if not tens of billions of eggs and larvae," he said. "That's a lot of lost productivity that's really hard to pin down."

Beyond killing fish and other marine species, these power plant systems further disrupt marine environments—potentially killing more fish—by discharging excess heated water back into the waterways they took it from. The resulting change in water temperature can cause animals to suffer from sometimes-fatal heat shock, and produces algal blooms that rob fish of the oxygen they need to survive, Hartl said. And as if Pacific Northwest salmon didn't already have enough to be worried about—what with being endangered as well as killed off by illegal pot-growing operations—the fish are particularly affected by these warm-water discharges.

"They're highly temperature sensitive, and these changes really affect their productivity," Hartl said.

Currently, power plants are responsible for 25 percent of US water consumption, "and that's water you can even drink," Hartl said. Many of the country's plants are decades-old, and continue to rely on the same wasteful, open systems they used when they were built. Newer power plants, Hartl said, tend to use a closed-system method that still draws in water, but then cools it and recycles it to be heated again. Although those plants have some environmental impact, it's far preferable to how the older plants operate.

"There's still a water input, but it's far, far less, and it's constantly reused," Hartl said.

Although 1972's Clean Water Act established guidelines for improving power plant operations over time, Hartl said that the EPA has consistently evaded the issue. Although the agency is required to consult with businesses whose operations might affect endangered species, Hartl said, it didn't do so for 40 years, having just met with the FWS and the NMFS earlier this year.

"The task was so large, and so difficult, that they just put it off," he said. "Now, the EPA is saying it will examine individual facilities on a case-by-case basis over the next 20 years. But that approach is problematic, because the problem is cumulative and bigger than just one plant. They made a deliberate decision not to address this issue." (The EPA did not respond at press time; a press officer at the FWS declined to comment on ongoing litigation.)

You probably wouldn't dump your uneaten dinner down the garbage disposal. But it appears that's exactly what out power plants are doing.