Application of a population dynamics model to the probabilistic assessment of cooling water intake effects of Millstone Nuclear Power Station (Waterford,CT) on a nearby winter flounder spawning stock

A major concern of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection at Millstone Station has been the long-term effects of the station’s Cooling Water Intakes System (CWIS) on a small stock of winter flounder spawning in the Niantic River. Following the selection of a population modeling approach for long-term impact assessment in 1983, sampling programs were directed to collect data specifically for this purpose. These data were used to estimate the size of the local flounder stock and the fraction of its annual production lost to CWIS effects, and also evaluate a possible relationship between late-winter water temperatures and recruitment success of flounder. Since the mid 1980s, the main assessment tool at Millstone has been an age-structured population model that incorporated uncertainty in selected model parameters and provided output suitable for probabilistic analyses of simulation results. This model projected annual population sizes resulting from different fishing rates, larval entrainment losses, and impingement of juvenile and adult fish. Compensation was introduced via a Ricker stock-recruit function with an additional term to describe the effect of water temperature on recruitment success. Ricker’s α parameter, which describes the species inherent capacity to increase in numbers, was derived by four indirect methods based on life history parameters. In the basic simulation strategy, an unfished flounder stock was simulated first, and then fishing effects and mortality of the young attributed to CWIS effects were added. Combinations of different fishing rates and CWIS effects, either estimated or hypothesized, could be simulated for comparing the effectiveness of different mitigation alternatives. This approach helped identify fishing mortality as the driving force shaping the future size and viability of the local flounder population at Millstone and suggested that larval entrainment mitigation measures, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, would be ineffective in reversing currently declining trends of that population.