Read part one: To save sea life, power plants face tough new rules

Read part two: San Onofre cooling towers: An expensive eyesore?

Part three: New power plant rules raise desalination doubts

New rules proposed by the State Water Board would likely bring radical changes to the ocean-water cooling systems of 19 coastal power plants, two of them nuclear plants.

But the proposed regulations also throw into question future plans for seawater desalination.

Poseidon Resources hopes to build a desalination facility next to Huntington’s AES power plant by 2014, drawing its seawater from the plant’s intake pipe. It would be similar to the desalination plant being built alongside another power plant in Carlsbad.

If AES were forced to abandon its ocean-water cooling system, Poseidon would have to get a separate permit to pull in seawater on its own, said spokesman Brian Lochrie.

Lochrie said the amount of seawater needed would be far less than that for a coastal power plant, making destruction of eggs and larvae less of an issue.

But Joe Geever, California policy coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group that supports the proposed regulations, said he believes Poseidon’s plan is doomed.

“Poseidon is out,” he said. “Poseidon’s system is not going to work.”

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Read part one: To save sea life, power plants face tough new rules

Part two: San Onofre cooling towers: An expensive eyesore?

New state rules could force coastal power plants, including the San Onofre nuclear plant, to make radical changes in their cooling systems.

The seawater-intake systems now used by such plants take a toll on sea life, the State Water Board says, sucking in billions of eggs and larvae and millions of fish. Marine mammals such as sea lions are sometimes killed as well.

A technological alternative would involve building huge cooling towers across the freeway from the plant, officials at Southern California Edison say.

But while the company created a realistic rendering of what the cooling towers would look like, Stuart Hemphill, Edison’s senior vice president of power procurement, says such a massive construction project would likely cost billions, and would not be economically feasible.

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