There is a single power plant -
Oyster Creek Plant - located on one of the Bay's tributaries. The plant, which
has a single boiling water nuclear reactor, uses once-through cooling. It pumps
approximately a million gallons a minute, 186 acre feet/hour, through two
intake structures. Like other (generally nuclear) power plants, Oyster Creek
has been the occasional target of environmentalists. It has been suggested,
sometimes strenuously, that a  cooling tower should be installed there to
prevent the entrainment, impingement and thermal impacts it is having on the
Barnegat Bay.
A mass of water equivalent to entire volume of
Barnegat Bay passes through the cooling system of the Oyster Creek generating
station in about 50 days.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection calculated that 6,000 boats could "comfortably" use
Barnegat Bay at any one time. Assuming that 5,000 of them are powered vessels
capable of cruising at 30 miles an hour, at this level of boating, which allows
for perhaps 1/3 of the boats on the bay being in use, the propellers of the
5,000 powered vessels would come in contact with a volume of water equivalent
to the bay's total volume in about 11 hours of combined operation. In the
average 10 week residence time for water in Barnegat Bay in the summer, each
gallon - and the organisms in it - must be intimately exposed to propeller
generated turbulence and cavitation dozens of times.
What does it all mean?
We wrote in 1992
| "Through contacts
with marine researchers, environmentalists and resource managers it was found
that, with the exception of a few narrowly defined areas of investigation,
virtually no recent work has been done on the impact of boating activity on the
estuarine environment. Some studies were completed in the 1960's and early 70's
(when recreational boating was carried on at a level significantly less
intensive than it is today, boats being smaller and with much less power), some
questions were raised, and then the research community directed its attention
elsewhere." |
While it's kind of hard to believe, that
attention is still being directed elsewhere (For the current state of boating
research see www.boatingresearch.com).
Recreational boating is without question one of the most ubiquitous activities
in our coastal and near-shore waters. It is also one of the most conspicuous.
During warm weather our estuaries are crowded with boats and personal
watercraft, and there are few or no restrictions on their number or their
operation. On the average summer weekend in crowded estuaries like Barnegat Bay
it's hard to imagine that these vessels don't have the same effect on the
organisms in the water column as a food processor would. And it would seem to
be fairly easy to determine how accurate this comparison is. Looking at the
plankton from the prop wash of a speeding vessel and from undisturbed water out
of the prop wash would seem to be a good starting point. Yet as far as we've
been able to determine, no one's performed even such rudimentary research (and
this in the face of supposedly well-researched ongoing declines in the
populations of hard clams and Eastern oysters, both of which have planktonic
embryonic forms in the water column during late spring and early summer in many
of our estuaries - see www.nefsc.noaa.gov/nefsc/publications/crd/crd0310). |
