Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

The Bush administration asked the high court to overturn a lower court ruling that would force the owners of Indian Point to build a costly new cooling system that, according to environmentalists, would greatly reduce damage to the river's marine life. Indian Point's owners, New Orleans-based Entergy, dispute the extent to which their plant harms fish populations in the surrounding waters. The case focuses on efforts by the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency to make it easier to weigh the cost of a regulation against its benefits.

Tricia O'Hare Jedele, on hand at the hearing to represent Rhode Island as a special assistant attorney general, said the collapse of the flounder population in Mount Hope Bay is a vivid example of the damage that a power plant cooling system can do to the surrounding marine habitat. Environmentalists and commercial fishing interests blamed the cooling system in the generating plant at Brayton Point in Somerset, which kills some fish and their eggs by sucking huge amounts of water into the plant and sending it back into the bay at higher temperatures. About a year ago, Dominion Resources, the owners of Brayton Point, agreed to replace its old cooling system with two large cooling towers, settling a longstanding dispute with the EPA.

The old mechanism, known as an open-cycle cooling system, cools the coal-fired electricity plant with as much as a billion gallons of water a day. Besides destroying and small fish in the action of the system, the plant may also drive away marine life by cycling the water back into the bay 30 degrees hotter. The new, ``closed cycle'' system will cut the water intake by 96 percent, using a pair of hourglass-shaped towers - similar in appearance to the signature towers at nuclear plants, and comparable in size to the 450-foot tall smokestacks that have long made Brayton Point a landmark on the region's horizon.

Dominion's spokesman, Jim Norville, said the new system will cost the company about $500 million. Norville said the company's decision to build the new cooling towers was largely based on its desire conclude a dispute that it inherited when Dominion bought Brayton Point in 2005. Experts disagreed about the damage to the fish, he said, but ```we needed to get this behind us.''

The origins of the Brayton Point case predate by many years the Bush administration rule-making at issue in the Indian Point case, but both cases involve the issue of power plant cooling systems and the expense involved in limiting the damage they can do to fish.