FOOD AND ELECTRICITY

But conversely, food can be a by-product of electricity generation by utilizing some of the heat that is rejected by fossil-fired and nuclear plants. We have already reported on cotton, peanuts and pineapples grown in German soil after it is warmed up by the neighboring nuclear plants with their cooling water circuit buried in it (AtE Dec. 76).

Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama is best known for the fire started by a candle in March 1975, which showed how resilient nuclear plants are even to a freakish accident, though it was made into a near catastrophe by Penthouse and the National Enquirer, not to mention less respectable publications like Business Week and Prof. Kendall's mailings. (For some interesting new information on the fire see Fortune, 3/12/79).

What is less well known is that Browns Ferry's cooling water heats l500 acres of greenhouses. In the unusually cold winter of 1976/77, these greenhouses kept on producing tomatoes while the outside temperature dropped to 0°F; for tomatoes are too dumb to follow Commoner's teachings on thermodynamics.

But the product that is really produced in masses is fish and other marine food, which grows at least twice as fast in the warm water discharged by electric power plants.

Britain, and later Germany, has been researching this field for some years, and the US is now well on the way, too. Cultured Catfish, Inc., of Colorado City, Texas, reports its catfish grow to 1.5 Ibs in 3 to 4 months, instead of the usual 18, when they revel in the warm water provided by a coalfired Texas Electric Service plant; and Long Island Oyster Farms, Inc., report oysters growing at S times the normal rate near a coal-fired plant operated by Long Island Lighting Co. at Northport, N.Y.

But that's just the small fry. The real business is about to begin in the fish hatchery of Puget Sound Power & Light Co., which will increase the Skagit River's migratory fish population in the warm water provided by two nuclear plant reactors. The capacity of this program will be 400,000 steelhead trout and 1,200,000 salmon per year, an 80% increase over the number released into the river by Washington State's Game Department.

The program is a large-scale application of techniques developed at the University of Washington by several scientists under the direction of Dr. L. Donaldson (now retired), who is shown below with a specimen grown to migratory size in about half the time it would have taken Mother Nature without the aid of nuclear plants.

.Meanwhile research continues with other species: Spring chinook fingerlings will, in experimental tanks with warm water, grow four times faster than the control specimen. (Can't they do something about the snail darter?)

But isn't the water discharged from a nuclear power plant radioactive?

Indeed, it is: About as radioactive as the water Mrs. Caldicott drinks with her lunch, or almost 500 times less radioactive (for the same volume) as common salad oil.