EPA to Reissue Order Vs. Plant

Dec 11 - The Boston Globe

In 2002, a federal permit reducing the environmental impacts of New England's largest fossil fuel plant was celebrated as one of the region's most significant and hard-won victories.

The US Environmental Protection Agency ordered Brayton Point in Massachusetts to stop using vast amounts of water from Mt. Hope Bay because, scientists said, the practice had caused or contributed to a dramatic decline in fish populations.

But the Somerset coal-burning power plant never complied; its owners appealed the permit. Now EPA officials are re issuing the order, but the company could appeal again. If it does, environmentalists and EPA officials say, the issue could take several more years to resolve -- time that the 14-square-mile bay doesn't have.

So lifeless is the waterway straddling Massachusetts and Rhode Island that it has been given the nickname "the dead zone" by some fishermen and environmentalists.

"This bay has been devastated by the impacts of the plant, and every day they are allowed to continue to degrade it it has a cumulative effect," said Carol Lee Rawn, a staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, a Boston-based advocacy group. "At some point it is going to be very difficult for the bay to return."

Dan Genest, a spokesman for Dominion, which bought the plant last year, said company executives are still deciding whether to appeal. They have until the end of the month.

Brayton Point, with its four distinctive smokestacks, supplies enough power to roughly meet one-fifth of Massachusetts' electricity needs. During the plant's cooling process, it draws up to a billion gallons of water a day from the Taunton and Lee rivers and then discharges it into Mt. Hope Bay, at temperatures of up to 95 degrees. As the water is sucked in, it kills billions of fish larvae and eggs each year, federal and state scientists say. The hot discharge can increase the natural temperature of the bay in some places by as much as 5 degrees.

While fish populations had been declining in the bay since 1979, federal and Rhode Island environmental officials say, it nosedived after the plant increased its water usage by 45 percent in 1985. In the last 20 years, total fish abundance has declined between 80 and 85 percent.

Dominion's Genest declined to comment on anything about the plant other than the appeal. But the plant's previous owners, PG&E, vehemently denied that the plant had anything to do with the disappearance of the bay's fish and spent more than $4 million in the late 1990s and early 2000s for scientific studies to prove it was not responsible. PG&E blamed the decline on overfishing, climate change, and the increase of fish larvae predators such as comb jellyfish.

That company's denials became more insistent as the EPA finished four years of intense study on the bay in July 2002 and said that PG&E had to reduce its water usage by about 95 percent to protect fish. The EPA estimated it would cost about $100 million to develop a cooling system that would recycle water. The company said it would cost more than $250 million at the time and appealed to the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board.

That board took until February of this year to issue a 296-page decision, largely supporting the agency's permit but ordering the EPA to further analyze two technical points that helped it arrive at a decision. In the meantime, the company was allowed to operate under its old discharge permit.

EPA finished the technical analysis last month and re issued the same permit, saying its science was sound.

Now Dominion can appeal those two technical issues to the board, which has no timetable to issue a new decision. Even if that appeals board upholds the EPA's decision, Dominion could then appeal to federal court, and the process could take years.

"My hope would be they won't appeal and we'll see improvements in the bay," said Mark Stein, senior assistant regional counsel for the New England EPA. "The fish stocks have collapsed, and EPA's judgment is that Brayton Point has significantly contributed to that problem."

Environmentalists say they are disheartened by the delay. They expect the power plant to appeal because it is less expensive for them to do so than to abide by the permit.

"Chronic damage is taking its toll," said John Torgan, spokesman for Save the Bay, a Rhode Island group dedicated to Narragansett Bay and waterways associated with it. "This has gone on too long."

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