Abstract
Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act requires that cooling-water intake structures (CWIS) use Best Technology Available (BTA) to minimize adverse environmental impacts (AEI). The U.S. EPA has not defined AEI, and there is no clear consensus regarding its definition. Nonetheless, operational definitions are necessary to evaluate design alternatives and to measure the success of mitigative measures. Rather than having to develop measures of aquatic health that are highly site-specific, controversial, and often unlikely to elicit agreement from all sides of the environmental “fence”, it may be more productive to use existing ecological assessment tools. Aquatic Life Uses (ALU) already provide a regulatory framework to assess the quality (health) of the aquatic community in various habitats (e.g., warmwater habitat, exceptional warmwater habitat). Attainment of the ALU indicates that further point source controls are unnecessary, whereas nonattainment indicates that those pollutants or stressors causing the nonattainment must be reduced. A similar approach for existing water intakes is recommended. That is, attainment of the designated ALU will be taken as an indication that there is no AEI. Although attainment of the ALU may not be a foolproof indicator of a lack of AEI, this approach seems more reasonable that using scarce monetary resources to fix problems that likely do not exist, or having both regulators and the regulated community expend their resources debating whether various observed biological responses do or do not constitute AEI.
Highlights
In 1972 the U.S Congress passed Public Law (PL) 92-500, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972
This section required that "... the location, design, construction, and capacity of cooling water intake structures reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact (AEI)." Despite the passage of nearly 30 years, scientists, regulators, and resource managers have yet to reach a consensus on what constitutes AEI[1]
This lack of consensus is reflected in the title of this Symposium, "Defining and Assessing Adverse Environmental Impact." Based on the titles of their papers, more than half the authors at this symposium attempted to define what level of organization was appropriate to assess AEI or how AEI should be measured at the chosen organizational level
Summary
In 1972 the U.S Congress passed Public Law (PL) 92-500, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (the "Act" or "CWA"). Rather than continuing the 30-year old debate over what constitutes AEI, or how, when, or where to measure it, I recommend an alternative approach, which is determining whether or not the Aquatic Life Use (ALU) for the waterbody in question has or has not been attained. It indicates that (given nonattainment), “the director shall, whenever possible and reasonable, implement regulatory controls or make other recommendations regarding water resource management to restore the designated use.” This evaluation is used by the Ohio EPA during each NPDES permit renewal cycle to determine whether or not more stringent effluent limits are needed. Further flexibility can be gained by varying the benchmark(s) over some spatial scale (e.g., by ecoregion, river basin, or even waterbody-specific)
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