Cooling towers as tall as 500 feet may dot the landscape near Connecticut’s power plants and large manufacturers, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency weighs regulations to protect wildlife.
If the EPA follows through with a new rule in July, the final decision still rests with the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection to determine if cooling towers are best to protect the state’s fish, lobsters, crabs and other sea life.
“If we have to build cooling towers, they are going to be big,” said Kenneth Holt, spokesman for the Waterford nuclear Millstone Power Station, which is New England’s largest power generator.
The rule potentially coming down from EPA seeks to protect fish and other aquatic life from being killed by industries that take in large amounts of water, such as power plants and manufacturers producing food, aluminum, iron, steel and chemicals. Effected industries would have to install technology that minimizes the number of fish killed when they are trapped against intake screens or drawn into the facility.
The proposed rule impacts only those facilities taking in more than 2 million gallons per day of cooling water, although that number could change before the final decision is handed out. The agency is reviewing the proposals and public comments now, and the final rule must be issued by July 27.
For large users of cooling water such as Millstone — which takes in 1.5 million gallons per minute from Long Island Sound — the proposal has serious ramifications. The plant’s owner, Dominion, estimates the facility will need three 500-foot-tall cooling towers to meet its cooling water needs.
Cooling towers, despite their size and the negative environmental perception that comes from constantly releasing large amounts of steam into the air, are considered the best way to cool large amounts of water while having minimal impact on the environment. Cooling towers, also known as closed-cycle cooling, run the same water through the facility over and over again, as opposed to once-through cooling, where facilities withdraw water from a body of water and discharge it back after using it once, a system Millstone now uses.
Cooling towers use 2-5 percent of the water a once-through cooling system needs.
Dominion doesn’t have a cost estimate on retrofitting Millstone with cooling towers, but when the company installed two 500-foot-tall towers at its coal and natural gas Brayton Point Power Plant in Massachusetts, the cost was $500 million.
“Cooling towers have never been retrofitted on a nuclear power plant,” Holt said. “It will be a technical engineering issue to build towers in a place that wasn’t designed for them.”
But cooling towers are only one possible result of the EPA rule, as the agency wants its state-level counterparts to make the final ruling on what technology best fits each situation.
DEEP asked all the potentially impacted power and manufacturing facilities to perform a data analysis on how the rule could apply to them and what technologies best fit their situation, DEEP spokesman Dennis Schain said.
While the rule has the largest impact on Millstone, the nuclear plant is not the only Connecticut facility affected. However, DEEP doesn’t know the exact number of impacted power plants and manufacturing facilities because the EPA rule isn’t final yet.
“We are sort of looking at the universe to see who it impacts,” Schain said.
Millstone’s report to DEEP is due Aug. 15, and the station must evaluate various technology options for alternative cooling systems for the plants two reactors. As DEEP then makes a ruling on what technology is best, the proposals will be subject to a public process including hearings before the final decision is made.
“It could hit industry, if you are a large manufacturer that uses water to cool machines,” said Kevin Hennessy, Dominion director of state and local affairs in New England.
