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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Necropsy-based Wild Fish Health Assessment
Published on: September 11, 2018
Population level impacts of cooling water withdrawals on harvested fish stocks
Stephen C Newbold1, Rich Iovanna
1U.S. EPA, National Center for Environmental Economics, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC, USA. newbold.steve@epa.gov
Abstract:
Trillions of gallons are withdrawn every year from U.S. rivers, estuaries, lakes, and coastal waters to cool the turbines of power plants and other equipment in manufacturing facilities. In the process, large numbers of aquatic organisms die from entrainment into the plant or impingement against the outer portion of the intake structure. In this paper, we develop a generalized age-structured population model with density dependent survival of sub-adult age classes, and we use the model to perform a screening analysis of the effects of entrainment and impingement for 15 harvested fish stocks off the California and Atlantic coasts. Stock sizes are estimated to be depressed by entrainment and impingement by less than 1% in 10 of the 15 cases considered, between 1 and 3% in two cases, and between 20 and 80% in three cases. A variety of sensitivity analyses are conducted to evaluate the influence of several sources of model and parameter uncertainties.
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