State rejects outdated Oyster Creek environmental info More recent data needed for a determination, DEP says BY PATRICIA A. MILLER Staff Writer The state Department of Environmental Protection has faulted both the owners of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission for relying on environmental studies that were up to 30 years old during the relicensing process. The DEP will not make a "positive consistency determination" for Oyster Creek, as required by the federal Coastal Zone Management Act, said Thomas Micai, the DEP's director of its Division of Land Use Regulation in a May 31 letter to Timothy Rausch, AmerGen's site vice president. The DEP's positive determination is required for all applicants who apply to a federal agency for a license for a new facility or to relicense an existing facility. AmerGen, a subsidiary of Exelon Corp., wants to run the plant on Route 9 south in Lacey Township for another 20 years. Oyster Creek's current license expires in April 2009, the year the plant turns 40. It is the oldest nuclear plant in the country. "Although no development is proposed, the continued operation of OCNGS (Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station) will result in continued taking of endangered or threatened species," the letter said. AmerGen failed to submit data that supported the company's claim that the environmental impacts of the plant on marine life were "small," the letter states. "The applicant was not able to quantify the term 'small' using the data and information to be determined," according to Micai's letter. AmerGen also failed to submit a final public-access waterfront plan and failed to provide documentation to support its claim that the impacts of heat shock on marine life during plant operations were small, the letter states. AmerGen submitted its first application for the DEP's consistency determination on Jan. 21, 2005. The DEP notified AmerGen on March 31, 2005, that more information was needed to back up company claims that the plant's operation had a small impact on fish and wildlife and that the water quality of Barnegat Bay had improved and now supported a healthy fish population. When the DEP deemed the information provided insufficient, AmerGen submitted a new application for a consistency determination on Dec. 1, 2006. Oyster Creek used data from 1965 to 1977 to describe aquatic life found in the project area, Clifford G. Day, supervisor of the federal Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service said in a Nov. 23, 2005, letter. "The age of the data limits its value for assessing current and reasonable foreseeable future impacts," he said in the letter. The FWS recommended that AmerGen expand its current biological sampling to three years. "A three-year study would allow the NRC to more adequately determine what effects, if any, the plant's operation is having on aquatic biota," Day said. The federal Environmental Protection Agency also rated Oyster Creek's draft Environmental Impact Statement as containing "insufficient information." "A serious shortcoming of the document is that it relies on nearly 20- to 30-year-old aquatic resource data to inform the public and decision-makers regarding the facility's impact for the next 20 years," the letter states. The EPA's most serious concern was how the plant would minimize environmental impacts due to entrainment and impingement of fish and shellfish, according to the letter. Impingement occurs when fish and marine life become trapped against intake screens by the force of the water passing through the cooling water intake structure. It can result in starvation, exhaustion or asphyxiation. Marine life such as plankton and early-life stages of fish and shellfish become entrained when they are drawn through the cooling water intake structure into the plant's cooling system. Oyster Creek has been conducting entrainment and impingement studies since October 2005. The DEP said it was "unclear" how the NRC could conclude that there wouldn't be any problems associated with entrainment during the renewal term beyond those already discussed, according to the letter. Oyster Creek is still operating under a N.J. Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NJPDES) permit issued in 1994. But AmerGen will have to comply with new standards spelled out in a draft NJPDES permit for the plant. The permit gives the company two options - either install closed-cycle cooling towers, which would substantially reduce entrainment and impingement, or install technologies and restoration measures that would reduce impingement mortality for all life stages of fish and shellfish by 80 to 90 percent and reduce entrainment by 60 to 90 percent. If AmerGen opts for the second choice, the company would have to design a wetlands restoration and enhancement program of at least 350 acres within the Barnegat Bay estuary to offset any residual impingement and entrainment losses at the plant, according to a fact sheet from the DEP's Division of Water Quality, Bureau of Point Source Permitting for Region 1.