Oyster Creek Fish Kill Count Hits 1,800

The fish kill count at Oyster Creek is in and 1,800 fish have died, said Suzanne D’Ambrosio, spokesperson for Oyster Creek Generating Station.

Last week, on Thursday, July 28 leading to a power loss at the dilution structure at the nuclear plant.

“No number is usual because we don’t want it to happen,” D’Ambrosio said of the number of fish loss due to the incident. “No number is really acceptable.”

The dilution system mixes cool water with clean, warm water, which is then discharged from the plant. The system lost power at about 8 p.m. on Thursday when a JCP&L breaker that feeds the system faulted, D'Ambrosio said.

“I really want to emphasize that this was a result of an outside power failure. This had nothing to do with any systems within the plant or any work by our operators,” D’Ambrosio said.

Oyster Creek operators and environmental staff responded to the scene promptly to reduce reactor power to stabilize water temperatures and take action to mitigate the loss of fish, she said.

The environmental staff and an independent contractor worked throughout the weekend to clean up, count and monitor for exact species, D’Ambrosio said.

The number of fish affected by this incident is not considered high or low but is unacceptable, D’Ambrosio said. In 2007, over 5,000 fish died after an outage but the number always varies depending on the situation.

Even though the outage was a result of an outside system, Jeff Tittel of the New Jersey Sierra Club said that is part of the organization’s criticism.

“They don’t have enough backup systems in place. They need a backup so there won’t be another fish kill or another problem at the facility. If the problems in Japan taught us anything, you need to have backup systems for backup systems,” Tittel said.

The nuclear plant should have another battery or diesel generator, he said.

“It shouldn’t be that there is a power outage and all of a sudden there’s a fish kill…You really need to have redundancies of systems to prevent things like this. There would be no reason for that big of a fish kill to happen if there was an adequate system in place,” Tittel said.

Exelon Nuclear, the owner and operator of Oyster Creek, worked with JCP&L to determine the cause of the regional power outage, which affected approximately 16,000 customers in the Lacey and Waretown area.

JCP&L found that a goose flew into a power line, said Ron Marano, spokesperson for the company.

The breaker and equipment has since been restored and JCP&L continues to investigate and evaluate the equipment involved, Marano said.

Oyster Creek will be sending in a report on the incident to the State Department of Environmental Protection, D’Ambrosio said.

According to Larry Hajna, a spokesperson for the DEP, once they receive the report, they will evaluate the information and determine whether any enforcement action needs to be taken.