I read with interest, the New Times article on Diablo Canyon sea water intake and discharge, “Changed habitat” (Dec. 17, 2020).
Clearly, evidence does exist of the huge volume of planktonic sea life killed every year. However, it has apparently been forgotten that in the early days of Diablo Canyon, we still had an abalone fishery in San Luis Obispo County. Similarly, the red sea urchin fishery was founded at Port San Luis about 1972. At this time, too, we could still fish for clams at Pismo Beach and Morro Bay.
Most of these shellfish resources went away before and during the early Diablo days. Did Diablo Canyon Power Plant eliminate these food resources? No. This loss was caused by sea otters, not fishing, not Diablo Canyon seawater intake/discharges. And, this did not occur just at Point Buchon. These fishery losses occurred over an approximate 300 miles of coastline, north of Monterey to northern Santa Barbara County.
Now the game is to extort money out of PG&E by making them out as “killers.” There is a whole lot more of this story which has been left out. I trust the $5.9 million will be spent on real restoration projects.
Steve Rebuck
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Year in Review December 2020.
Well said. But, in addition, there are 320 million cubic miles of sea water on the planet. The percent of it warmed above 58 degrees F is probably on the order of a single grain of sand on a mile long beach. One of the great failures of the “environmental movement” is the absence of hard analytics. The result of that failure is expressed outrage by those who lack the necessary foundation for many of its judgments, whether from the catastrophic damage to northwestern forests from suppressing regular forest fires, or the irritation of government regulatory burdens on those who might interfere with a red legged frog (which is a dominant frog species from the Oregon to the Mexican border).
I wonder if you have actually been to “Diablo Cove”? One needs only look around that place since the plant began operation and can obviously see there is a serious problem even without any college-level course work in marine biology. I have been there and it is covered with a blackish/brownish slime with a foam floating on the surface of the water. Also, normal marine creatures such as “Limpets”, “Sea Cucumbers”, along with aquatic plants such as “Algae”, “Sea Lettuce”, and “Sea Weed” are completely non-existent too!
In terms of ambient sea temperatures, it should be apparent that the discharge is directly into the four “Intertidal Zones” and not miles away from the shoreline in deeper water where the effects would be more efficiently dispersed. Also, there is more to the equation than simply water temperature, for the water is also injected with chlorine to reduce unwanted sea life growth causing blockages inside the piping of the plant. It is impossible for chlorine at any concentration not to have an adverse deleterious effect being then pumped out into the ocean.
Also, in terms of Sea Otters, they have populated the California coastline for uncounted thousands of years, and even so there was more than enough abundant shellfish and other marine life to support them and in the last 30 thousand years, Native Americans too, of which these creatures were a staple of their dietary requirements and allowed their very survival on the coastline.
It will be an exciting and long-awaited experiment to see what positive changes occur in our county’s coastal waters and shoreline once this plant is finally put out of every resident’s misery at the degradation since the opening of the plant for operation.