Power plant discharges on rivers and lakes are hot spots for anglers, but their cool water intakes kill untold numbers of fish. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued the first national standards for reducing fish kills at existing plants, though environmentalists say it lets energy companies off the hook.

Six states -- Pennsylvania not among them -- are suing the EPA, claiming it failed to fulfill the Clean Water Act of 30 years ago with regulations issued July 9 and effective Sept. 7.

"EPA's issuance of technology standards for existing intakes, albeit 30 years late, should have ended the needless destruction of aquatic life in our nation's waterways," said Alex Matthiessen, Hudson Riverkeeper and executive director of Riverkeeper, Inc., the New York group leading a coalition of states seeking judicial review. "Unfortunately, the agency has illegally rewritten the Clean Water Act to allow industry to avoid upgrading power plants that function as aquatic slaughterhouses."

It is hard to know just what the impact on fisheries is, because cool water intakes have been under the radar screen compared to some types of pollution, said Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission aquatics resources chief Leroy Young.

"A single fish can spawn tens of thousands of eggs at a time, and a lot of factors influence species survival, from predator-prey relationships to flow events. But any time you have a man-induced impact on top of what nature is doing, you're affecting the ecosystem," Young said.

One of the largest power plants on the East Coast, PSEG's Salem nuclear facility in New Jersey -- which takes in 250,000 million gallons of water a day -- acknowledges killing three billion fish a year, but company spokesman Neil Brown said that has "absolutely no impact on the fishery." He said more than 99 percent of the 3 billion were eggs and juvenile fish.

Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum, an attorney whose group, Delaware Riverkeepers Network, has battled PSEG for more than a decade, calls the company "the largest predator on the Delaware River," and points to specific species, including shad and stripers, which have perished.

PSEG's data is more current than other companies, who haven't had issues with environmentalists or government permitting agencies. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection hasn't required the state's 35 power plants to perform studies in about 25 years, unless specific plants were problematic, said DEP water pollution biologist Tom Barron.

But surveys done after implementation of the Clean Water Act of 1972 indicate that intakes can be deadly. The Beaver Valley power plant, when owned by a consortium of companies including Duquesne Light in the 1970s, trapped 39 species of fish, said Young. About 33,000 juvenile and adult fish a year were impinged -- or trapped -- on screens at Philadelphia Electric's Eddystone plant on the estuarial lower Delaware until finer mesh coverings were installed about 10 years ago, he said. The same plant entrained -- or sucked in -- 150 million larval fish in 1977.

Allegheny Power's Armstrong plant on the Allegheny River entrained 49 million larval fish in 1978, Young said. The company's environmental specialist, Joe Lapcevic, said he believes the figure was closer to 20,000, and while "there are problems at certain facilities where there's a lot of spawning, at facilities like where we're located you're not going to see the same issues." He points to the river as a thriving fishery.

"The argument that rivers are healthier now and have bigger numbers of fish probably means that there are just more fish getting killed," Young said.

Power plants on rivers and lakes use water to cool their machinery, taking it in and spitting it out, sometimes at hotter than 110 degrees and dosed with chlorine to minimize bacterial contamination of turbines. Big plants, Young said, can draw in "huge" amounts of water, "as much as half the flow of a river in a day."

Unless plants employ closed cycle cooling, which recycles water -- and is the only acceptable technology, said van Rossum -- they are constantly drawing in water. In the process, fish get sucked in, too.

"Fish get taken in and cooked, basically," said Young. They also can get pinned and then crushed or suffocated on grates and screens used to strain out logs, beer cans and other debris, although traveling screens with backwash devices can lessen impingement, said Barran.

"Pennsylvania has been pretty good," Barran said, given that the EPA has been seen as ambiguous in its guidance for minimizing environmental impact. It took a lawsuit by environmentalists, including van Rossum's group, to force the EPA to set standards around technology and impact in a three-phase ruling, the latest of which deals with large (at least 50 million gallons a day) plants.

"This is a new frontier in permitting. It looks at live things in the water, which is more difficult than measuring the chemical concentration of something coming out of a pipe," said EPA environmental biologist Mark Smith. "There's a long way we can go here."

The EPA is telling big plants to reduce entrainment by 60 to 90 percent and impingement by 80 to 90 percent, depending on the water they're on. Since fish are attracted by flow, that means reducing the velocity of the water that comes into their pipes to one-half foot per second, or "a sixteenth the speed of a slow walk," said Smith. Power plants are being given flexibility in achieving this, including augmenting lesser technological upgrades with mitigation measures, such as stocking fish or building wetlands. All of which allows plants to avoid using what simply amounts to the best technology available, said van Rossum.

"The EPA is saying, 'you can keep killing fish, just do something pretty,'" she said. "But the bottom line is, unless Pennsylvania is requiring closed cycle cooling, they're nowhere on this."

Closed cycle cooling doesn't draw water continually, it recycles instead, which means needing to replenish just one to five percent of water a year. Because it reduces volume and velocity, fish kills are reduced by 95 to 99 percent, van Rossum said. Plants can be retrofitted with cooling towers that accomplish that, she said. "In ESNG's case, even if you accept their inflated figures, it would come to $1.10 a month for ratepayers to save 3 billion fish."

Her group has joined in the lawsuit seeking a stay of the EPA rule. That rule, if it takes effect as planned, gives companies 3 1/2 years to develop a plan and another five years for implementation. Once baseline fish kill studies are performed, it could take years to measure whether new intake practices are working.