“We’re trying to manage a changing climate, its impact on
water supplies and our ability to generate power, all at once,”
said
Michael L. Connor, commissioner of the Bureau of
Reclamation, the Interior Department’s water-management agency.
Producing electricity accounts for at least 40 percent of water
use in the United States.
Warmer and drier summers mean less water is available to cool
nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants. The Millstone nuclear
plant in Waterford, Conn.,
had to shut down one of its reactors in mid-August because
the water it drew from the Long Island Sound was too warm to
cool critical equipment outside the core. A twin-unit nuclear
plant in Braidwood, Ill., needed to get special permission to
continue operating this summer because the temperature in its
cooling-water pond rose to 102 degrees, four degrees above its
normal limit; another Midwestern plant stopped operating
temporarily because its water-intake pipes ended up on dry
ground from the prolonged drought.
Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, said the safety of America’s nuclear plants “is not
in jeopardy,” because the sources of water cooling the core are
self-contained and might have to shut down in some instances if
water is either too warm or unavailable.
“If water levels dropped to the point where you can’t
draw water into the condenser, you’d have to shut down the
plant,” he said.The commission’s new chairman,
Allison Macfarlane, has asked her staff to look at “a broad
array of natural events that could affect nuclear plant
operations” in the future, such as climate change, Burnell
added.
For more than three-quarters of a century, the
Hoover Dam has represented an engineering triumph,
harnessing the power of the mighty Colorado River to generate
electricity for customers in not just nearby
Las Vegas but as far away as Southern California and Mexico.
But the bleached volcanic rock ringing Black Canyon above
Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the dam, speaks to the
limits of human engineering. Higher temperatures and less
snowpack have reduced the river’s flow and left the reservoir
103 feet below elevation for its full targeted storage
capacity, which it last came close to reaching in 1999.
In the Colorado River’s 100-year recorded history, 1999
through 2010 ranks as the second-driest 12-year period, yielding
an average of 16 percent less energy.
Scientists have just begun to study some key questions, such
as the rate of evaporation off dams’ storage facilities.
Predicting river flows — which can flood one year and dry up the
next — is even harder.