PROVIDENCE – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 1 office, in Boston, Friday issued the final pieces of a permit requiring the Brayton Point power plant to reduce its use of water by roughly 95 percent.
The EPA ruling came in response to a 2003 appeal by the plant’s owner, Dominion Power of Virginia. Further appeals are likely.
“Brayton Point has been ruining Mount Hope Bay for decades and this permit is long overdue,” said Curt Spalding, Save the Bay’s executive director, in a statement that followed the EPA announcement.
“EPA has done great work, but as long as this permit is under appeal, the damage continues,” Spalding said. “We urge Dominion to accept the new permit conditions and begin an aggressive construction schedule to come back into compliance with the Clean Water Act.”
Brayton Point Station, in Somerset, Mass., is New England’s largest and dirtiest power plant, Save the Bay noted. Each day, the station withdraws nearly one billion gallons of water from the Bay to cool its generators, and then discharges that water at temperatures of up to 95 degrees. This not only warms the shallow waters of Mount Hope Bay, Narragansett Bay’s northeastern arm, it also sucks in and destroys trillions of fish eggs and larvae each year.
In 1985, Brayton Point added a new cooling water intake and increased its discharge, and generating capacity by about 45 percent. Immediately, fishermen began to report troubling declines in the local fish stocks, and soon they were calling the once productive Mount Hope Bay “a dead zone.”
A decade later, a study by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management documented an 87-percent decline in the fish populations of Mount Hope Bay, a trend not reflected in other parts of the Bay or New England.
Save The Bay has strongly advocated for the once-through cooling system to be banned. In 2002, EPA issued a draft discharge permit calling for Brayton Point’s flow to be reduced from nearly one billion to forty five million gallons per day.
The plant’s owners appealed that permit to EPA’s Administrative Appeals Board (EAB) in Washington, D.C. In February, the board handed down a ruling supporting Region 1’s permit in part, but remanding certain key parts back to the regional office. Today, the EPA essentially upheld its original work.
After several 60-day administrative review windows, the permit is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. During appeals, the existing operating regime of the plant will continue.
