Damage To Long Island Sound, No Secret

October 10, 2007

The Millstone power station propaganda battle concerning closed cycle cooling has begun. The campaign to frighten people with higher electric prices and monstrous 500-foot cooling towers is under way, orchestrated by Dominion, owners of Millstone. Local politicians and business leaders are being rounded up and trotted out to the media and to the townspeople with the Dominion company line.

I won’t say that these are not reasonable concerns for local leaders to have and given that these impressions persist, Soundkeeper, as a party to this administrative proceeding, needs to do a better job presenting the facts on the issue.

Power plant cooling water intakes kill trillions of fish, fish eggs and larva on an ongoing basis. This fact is certainly no secret. It’s clear that species of fish in Long Island Sound are heavily affected by power plants. The fish are killed, in all their life stages, along with other marine life when they are sucked into the facility along with a flood of water to cool the plant, in Millstone’s case it can be up to two billion gallons per day. The marinelife that can’t escape are then either scraped off the protective screens into a trash pit or discharged back to the Sound as a lifeless soup.