You know what I like?
Lake perch. A fried lake perch sandwich.
I'm not talking ocean perch. That won't do. It has to be a fried Lake Perch sandwich. Yellow perch. And begging the pardon of anybody outside the Lake Michigan lakeshore, but I have yet to find a good lake perch ANYWHERE else in America. Even 30 miles inland. And no, Chicago does not count, I have not been able to find a lake perch sandwich there, either.
There's nothing like going to a local restaurant, picking up a menu and seeing "market price" where the price should be for lake perch. Sadly, the price has been going up. It's nearly $15 a pound if you're going to try to buy lake perch at the fish market, and that's not even local stuff. It's Canadian farm raised.
So it was a bit more upsetting than usual on a personal and gastronomic level to read THIS:
Across Lake Michigan from Chicago, the Cook nuclear plant near Benton Harbor, Mich., kills more than 1.3 million fish annually, most of which are yellow perch. An additional 196 million eggs and other organisms die each year inside the plant's cooling system. In Waukegan, the lone Illinois power plant on the lake kills up to 5.2 million fish a year.
New data is showing power plant water intakes have been killing a LOT more fish than previously thought. While the Great Lakes Fisheries are struggling to keep fish populations up, spending millions in taxpayer dollars to do so, water plants along the Great Lakes are killing them by the hundreds of millions, and killing eggs and small fish by the billions. Every year.
The Tribune obtained thousands of pages of industry reports documenting power plant fish kills through Freedom of Information Act requests to the eight Great Lakes states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Michigan and New York provided only limited information, while Indiana failed to respond in time to be included in this story, but the available records highlight a threat to the Great Lakes ecosystem that has largely gone unaddressed for years.
Despite decades of efforts to restore and protect the Great Lakes, dozens of old power plants still are allowed to kill hundreds of millions of fish each year by sucking in massive amounts of water to cool their equipment.
Records obtained by the Tribune show that staggering numbers of fish die when pulled into the screens of water intake systems so powerful that most could fill an Olympic swimming pool in less than a minute. Billions more eggs, larvae and juvenile fish that are small enough to pass through the screens are cooked to death by intense heat and high pressure inside the coal, gas and nuclear plants.
Then the water is pumped back into Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes up to 30 degrees hotter, encouraging the growth of oxygen-depleting algae that kills fish and fouls beaches.
And this has been going on for DECADES. Hundreds of millions of fish, billions of eggs and juvenile sucked into the power plant cooling system Every Year.
Meanwhile, people are worried about wind turbines on environmental grounds. Adorable!
But hey...those are old power plant cooling systems. What about the new ones?
See, the old power plant cooling systems used something called "Once Through" cooling systems. As in, they suck water from the lake to cool the power plant and then they spray the now hot water back into the lake. Newer power plants use cooling systems that merely intake water to replace evaporation. How's that working out?
At the Nine Mile Point nuclear plant on Lake Ontario in New York, a reactor that has a once-through cooling system killed 154,541 fish in 2007, but a second reactor with a cooling tower killed just 34,128, documents show.
Sweet...so you can see how the cooling tower reduce kill rates to just 22% of what the once through systems did. So instead of Hundreds of Millions of dead fish, there will merely be Tens of Millions of Dead Fish.
Thank goodness for progress.
(In other news, did I mention there are those who oppose wind turbines on environmental grounds? Adorable.)
Not surprisingly, this...
Industry lawsuits have delayed the phaseout of once-through cooling at older plants. Echoing their arguments about tougher air-pollution rules, power company lobbyists say the expense would force dozens of plants to close, costing jobs and making the nation's electrical grid less reliable. Some plants have tried to reduce fish kills by building intakes offshore away from spots where fish congregate. Others have installed systems designed to deter fish with sound or air bubbles.
So let's summarize:
Power plants are sucking billions of fish organisms into their water intakes every year...
While Great Lakes Fisheries spend millions to stock dwindling fish populations...
...to help support an eco system and a lucrative commercial fishing industry...
...and in the end, my lake perch sandwiches are getting more expensive and fish markets have to sell farm raised Canadian yellow perch.
No sir...I don't like it.
Add to that the fact that the EPA iscaving to industry demands and delaying emissions regulations and it's just a mess out there. A great big mess.
On the bright side, I've got a ton of bluegill in my freezer. I should go out with my boy tonight and get some more.