A regional environmental group set the stage Friday for a new round in the decades long battle over Salem nuclear plant cooling-water demands, submitting the most-detailed critique yet of the site’s 3-billion-gallon-per-day draw from the Delaware River.
Jeff Montgomery reports for the The News Journal:
Delaware Riverkeeper, a multi-state environmental and conservation group, said New Jersey’s renewal of a federally required permit for the twin reactors’ intakes would be “irresponsible,” based on newly submitted and past economic and ecological studies.
The comments came at the end of a public response period that New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection recently extended after opponents accused the agency of providing inadequate time to assess the massive permit.
Salem’s regular authority to draw from or discharge into the Delaware River expired in 2006, but the plant has been operating under the previous approval, pending a decision on the “best available technology” to reduce fish losses, heating of the river and other environmental burdens.
Billions of fish, fry, eggs and other aquatic organisms are caught and killed, or impinged, on the plant’s intake guards while even larger numbers die when sucked into plant systems. Estimates of economic losses in the Riverkeeper group’s latest filings were more than 70 times higher than company supported estimates from the past.
“Salem is surpassed in its impingement and entrainment impacts on fish by only one other facility in the nation,” a power plant in Florida, Maya van Rossum, the Riverkeeper’s director, said on Friday. “Salem is the largest predator in the Delaware Estuary and Bay, and has been for over 40 years.”
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