COOLING IT WITH APEEPA

In bygone days, when ecology was still a meaningful word (denoting a scientific discipline), the most common method was "once-through" cooling, in which water was taken out of a river, stream, cooling reservoir or the sea, and the warm water returned to it. The warm water did not harm marine life as such: It may have driven out some species, but gave shelter to others, and on balance, marine life was enhanced. In fact, it was power plants that showed fish hatcheries how to grow bigger fish faster in warm water.

But the NRDC or the Friends of the Earth have little interest in marine life; they are not in the business of engineering the lives of fish, but the lives of people. Thermal "pollution," as they termed it, was made into a whip with which to punish utilities, and it was happily wielded by the Muskies, Udalls and other sanctimonious politicians. The result was the environmental legislation of the early 1970's, which enabled anybody to obstruct and nobody to build.

We all know what this did to costs, and sometimes to availability regardless of cost; but what did it do to the environment? From millions of acres chewed up by the gypsy moth (with DDT needlessly banned) to rain so acid it etches holes into car paint, the environment was usually degraded rather than improved.

"Closed-cycle" cooling, it now turns out, was no exception. In this type of cooling, the water circulates through cooling towers, dripping down from trough to trough against a draft of cool air before it returns to the heat exchanger in the condenser. Much of it evaporates, of course, and has to be replaced by "make-up water."

In 1974, the EPA identified closed-cycle cooling as "best available technology," which by a 1972 law would have become the mandatory cooling method (if the courts had not left the issue unclear after the law was challenged). Even if the EPA's guess had been right, it would have been a double outrage: Once because it was a guess based on flimsy or no evidence, and once again because the decision of what is the "best available technology" (there is only one that's best for everybody everwhere?) is made by politically appointed bureaucrats. What agency decided that railroads were a better technology than stage coaches?

In any case, the guess was wrong. Six years and literally hundreds of millions of dollars later, it turns out that cooling towers are environmentally more harmful than once-through cooling. This emerges from a fundamental paper, "Power Plant Cooling Systems: Policy Alternatives," (Science, 25 Jan 1980, pp.367-372) by J.Z. Reynolds, project manager of EPRI's Ecological Effects Program. Cooling towers, reports Reynolds, waste far more water (by evaporation), and the energy losses amount to 3,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day for each unit constructed with closed-cycle cooling. Water pollution is worse than for once-through cooling, because the cooling towers, not surprisingly, act as concentrators of contaminants by distilling away the pure water; in addition, they contaminate the water with biocides (chlorine) necessary to prevent biofouling in the towers.

And then there are indirect effects: The many other uses of cooling reservoirs (recreation, flood control, municipal water supplies, and several others) generate pressures for facilities elsewhere; and large power plant complexes become necessary when the economy of dispersing smaller plants along natural water bodies is denied.

And so once again we call for a new government agency called APEEPA:

Agency to Protect the Environment from the Environmental Protection Agency.