OMB Watch Challenges New Rules Change for EPA

Each year, power plants draw in more than 70 trillion gallons of water for cooling and in the process destroy trillions of aquatic organisms, from plankton to fish and their eggs to sea turtles. These facilities can reduce deaths by more than 90 percent by switching to a “closed-cycle” cooling process.
Although EPA is required by the Clean Water Act to require these cooling water intake structures to use the “best technology available to minimize adverse environmental impact,” OMB forced EPA to develop a rule using a completely different standard that emphasized keeping costs down for the corporate special interests such as Cinergy, Edison Electric, and Public Service Electric & Gas that lobbied OMB for weaker rules.
Instead of requiring the largest facilities in the most ecologically sensitive areas to meet standards that the new technology would allow and that EPA originally proposed, EPA adopted less protective measures. EPA failed to require closed-cycle cooling at the largest and most harmful plants and allowed industry to lobby state agencies for even weaker guidelines for specific facilities.