Multispecies impingement in a tropical power plant, Straits of Malacca

Abstract

Marine organisms comprised about 70% of the total impinged materials by weight at water intake screens in the Kapar Power Station (KPS), Malaysia. The general groupings of "fish", 15 "shrimp", "crab", "cephalopod" and "others" contributed 26%(87 species), 65%(29), 2%(17), 2% (3) and 5%(42) of the total number of impinged organisms, respectively. In general, higher impingement occurred during spring tide, at nighttime and in shallow water. The glass perchlet, anchovies, ponyfishes, mojarra, catfishes, hairtail, scat and young croakers were the most vulnerable fishes. Vulnerable invertebrates included cephalopods, sea urchin, rockshells and 20 jellyfishes, but penaeid shrimps were the most susceptible in terms of both mortality and body injury. Annually, KPS is estimated to kill 8.5 x 10 6 marine organisms (42 tons) by impingement.This amount, however, is minimal compared to commercial fishery harvests. Multispecies impingement at Malaysian power plants poses the problem of finding the best mitigation options for tropical situations.

Real‐timePCRidentification of lake whitefishCoregonus clupeaformisin theLaurentianGreatLakes

“…For example, a major hindrance to accurately estimating entrainment rates at power plants is the identification of species composition (The Committee on Entrainment, ). Visual identification of entrainment samples remains a challenge because of the degradation of samples (Azila & Chong, ; Rabin, ), yet this information is key to assessing ecological impact. The success of the assay described in this laboratory study, and the validation of the primer and probe set on both a portable and on a high‐throughput platform, suggests that this method would be a suitable means to address the presences of a target species in entrainment ichthyoplankton samples.…”

Response of marine copepods to a changing tropical environment: winners, losers and implications

“…It has been operating since 1987 to cater to the high power demand in the hinterland, which includes the city of Kuala Lumpur. Six cooling water intake points withdraw a total of approximately 6 million m 3 seawater daily from Klang Strait and the heated seawater is discharged back into the strait via two outfalls ( Azila & Chong, 2010 ). Temperatures of up to 36°C have been recorded in the thermal effluents but the heat generally dissipates beyond 0.5 km from the outfall ( Anton, 1990 ).…”

Biomass and number of fish impinged at a nuclear power plant by the Baltic Sea

“…Large numbers of fish are impinged and killed in the cooling systems of thermal power plants worldwide (Kelso and Milburn 1979;Greenwood 2008;Azila and Chong 2010). The mortality of fish has been identified as the largest of the potential environmental concerns associated with cooling systems of nuclear power plants in Sweden (Ehlin et al 2009;2012).…”

“…Of the world's 463 nuclear power reactors, 373 (86%) use water from natural ecosystems for once-through cooling-water circuits and the remaining reactors use other types of cooling (IAEA 2011). In thermal power plants, the number of impinged fish increases by an increasing amount of water required to cool reactor condensers (Kelso and Milburn 1979;Greenwood 2008;Azila and Chong 2010). The cooling water requirement is in turn correlated to the electrical effect (MWe) of the reactor (Kelso and Milburn 1979).…”

“…Impingement studies have been performed in many parts of the world (Ringger 2000;Greenwood 2008;Azila and Chong 2010), although impingement in nuclear power plants around the Baltic Sea has not been covered in the peerreviewed literature. Moreover, only a few studies (e. g., Kelso and Milburn 1979;Greenwood 2008) have attempted to compare impingement and other cooling system losses across systems.…”