Soundkeeper Achieves Progress towards Closed-Cycle Cooling at Millstone

Soundkeeper Terry Backer announced that a settlement has been reached with respect to Soundkeeper's challenge to the permit renewal proposed by the Department of Environmental Protection for the Millstone nuclear power station at Waterford, CT.  "Through this settlement, Soundkeeper and our friends at Connecticut Fund for the Environment have advanced the protection of the Sound and helped put us on a track that we expect will lead to the installation of closed-cycle cooling at Millstone" said Mr. Backer.

The settlement significantly improves the draft permit by accelerating and improving the technology study and interim measures:

  • The new permit imposes an unambiguous final deadline of January 2012 for Dominion Nuclear Connecticut's (DNC's) comprehensive evaluation of closed-cycle cooling and other technologies to minimize impingement & entrainment with measure to ensure that deadline is actually met. 
  • The new permit adds three new interim milestones and expanded status reports so that DEP, Soundkeeper, CFE and other citizens can better track DNC's progress and comprehensiveness in evaluating closed-cycle cooling. 
  • DNC has agreed to immediately begin work on a study which will include two full years of entrainment and impingement sampling in Niantic Bay.  The new permit expands and improves the requirements for that study, such as specifying that macrocrustaceans, molluscs and horseshoe crabs must be studied (as well as fish species) and that the raw sampling data must be made public, amoung other things.

 We firmly believe that the comprehensive evaluation will produce technical information data supporting that conclusion that closed-cycle cooling is technologically feasible and affordable at Millstone and constitutes the Best Technology Available (BTA) to minimize the adverse environmental impacts of the plant's intakes which to date have entrained over a hundred billion fish, eggs, and larvae.  Soundkeeper will remain an active party to these permit proceedings, providing technical expertise and closely monitoring and providing input to DNC's submittals at every appropriate opportunity over the next few years.

9/30/2008