The BOOKPRESS | October 1999 |
Cornell
University’s determination to build a Lake Source Cooling (LSC) Project
has figuratively and literally torn Ithaca apart. Citizens, alumni, environmental
groups, and sovereign Native American nations oppose the $55 million project
to air-condition Cornell’s campus with cold water drawn from Cayuga Lake.
But Cornell stubbornly pushes on—digging up streets, cutting down century-old
trees, burying miles of giant pipes from its campus to the very edge of
Cayuga’s waters.
One wonders why
Cornell clings so tenaciously to LSC as opposition mounts and superior
energy alternatives are adopted by other universities and institutions.
How much criticism is Cornell’s Board of Trustees willing to absorb? How
much environmental damage is it willing to inflict?
Cornell currently
air-conditions its campus with cold water generated by eight giant chillers
that, with one exception, depend on chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants (CFCs)
whose production and importation has been banned by the U.S. Clean Air
Act as a threat to the earth’s protective ozone layer. While Cornell has
reportedly stockpiled enough CFCs to last for years, that supply will eventually
become depleted and the chillers will have to be retrofitted or replaced.
Cornell proposes
to continue to utilize its environmentally threatening, energy-inefficient
chillers for an indeterminate period, while supplementing its chilled water
supply by tapping Cayuga Lake for up to 46 million gallons of cold water
per day.
This plan has three
fatal flaws. Cornell would: unnecessarily prolong damage to the ozone layer;
eschew far superior energy alternatives that could better meet its air
conditioning and power generation needs; and subject Cayuga Lake to an
environmental impact with potentially irreversible and disastrous consequences
that no scientist can accurately predict. With all due respect, Cornell
has sailed into dangerous, uncharted waters and should change course before
it is too late.
First and foremost,
Cornell’s search for non-CFC air conditioning alternatives was insufficient
and must be reinvigorated. Many economically and environmentally superior
air conditioning and power generating solutions are being rapidly developed
and should be researched further. For example:
• Cornell’s CFC
chillers could be replaced by units that use non-CFC refrigerants for a
tiny fraction of the $55 million price tag of Lake Source Cooling. This
would be the fastest, easiest way to reduce Cornell’s CFC threat to the
ozone layer, leaving Cayuga Lake untouched. Moreover, the cost savings
could fund other energy and environmental improvements.
• Cornell could
produce chilled water by utilizing ground-source based cooling systems
or tapping cold groundwater supplies under and around the campus. This
would avoid subjecting Cayuga Lake to environmental risks by using closed
loop, open loop well water or other ground-source based cooling alternatives.
Because these systems could be built far closer to Cornell than the middle
of Cayuga Lake, inherent energy and construction cost savings could be
garnered.
• Cornell’s existing
CFC chillers are driven, in part, by electricity supplied by a coal-fired
power plant that contributes to air pollution, ash disposal and global
warming problems. The environmental threats posed by this facility dwarf
the impact of Cornell’s CFC chillers. Cornell could easily purchase power
or burn clean natural gas instead of coal in its existing cogeneration
system. This would produce electricity and steam with far fewer pollution
hazards. The electricity could drive non-CFC chillers or ground-source
cooling systems. Steam-driven absorption water chillers could replace the
CFC units. Even better, state-of-the-art cogeneration alternatives could
be utilized, such as the innovative gas-fired cogeneration system recently
built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Finally, Cornell
should vastly reduce its energy use and environmental impact by immediately
adopting comprehensive, campus-wide energy conservation measures. Cornell’s
energy-wasteful ways are notorious to students and faculty and should be
halted irrespective of its air conditioning quandary.
Instead of pursuing
these tried and true water-chilling and energy-saving alternatives, Cornell
fixated on a LSC Project that was utterly unprecedented in its scope and
potential environmental impact. This alternative was promoted as a cost-effective,
energy-efficient, endlessly renewable way to replace dangerous CFC chillers.
If that sounds too good to be true, it is.
In reality, LSC
clearly violates state and federal environmental protection statutes for
Cayuga Lake’s shallow southern end because it would exacerbate the lake’s
existing water quality violations instead of eliminating them as required
by law and common sense.
LSC would draw cold
water (41° F) from a depth of 250 feet near the bottom of Cayuga Lake
and pipe it more than two miles to a heat exchange facility located near
the southern terminus of the lake. The cold lake water, which contains
phosphorus, would pass continuously through heat exchangers, absorbing
heat from a huge five-mile closed loop that would send chilled refrigerant
to the campus and return heated refrigerant to be re-chilled.
After passing through
heat exchangers, the temperature of the lake water would be raised as much
as 15° F. All of the heated, phosphorus-containing water would be continuously
discharged 500 feet off-shore into an area of Cayuga Lake only ten feet
deep.
That specific portion
of Cayuga Lake has extensive pollution problems, notably non-point source
hazards associated with storm water and agricultural run-off, leaking toxic
sites, and erosion from streambanks and roadbanks. Consequently, LSC would
exacerbate water quality impairments that have persisted in southern Cayuga
Lake since the early 1960s, including phosphorus concentrations that produce
vast algae and aquatic weed infestations; turbidity that has banned swimming
at Stewart Park for decades; and turbidity that threatens fish spawning
and drinking water quality.
In 1996, the New
York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) included the southern
5,000 acres of Cayuga Lake—an area that stretches from Stewart Park nearly
to Taughannock Park—in its Priority Waterbody Listing of known or suspected
impaired waters.
In April 1998, the
DEC listed the same portion of Cayuga Lake as a threatened Class AA(T)
water quality limited segment for nutrient and silt pollution pursuant
to section 303(d) of the U.S. Clean Water Act. This listing identifies
waters where effluent limitations required by federal law are insufficiently
stringent to achieve applicable water quality standards.
To date, no comprehensive
environmental assessment, management plan or pollution control program
has been proposed or carried out to solve these water quality problems.
Pursuant to section
122.4 of the U. S. Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C.§1313(d), no permit may
be granted: "To a new source or a new discharger, if the discharge from
its construction or operation will cause or contribute to the violation
of water quality standards."
LSC’s clear violation
of this key provision for both phosphorus and turbidity was first documented
in a legal memorandum submitted last December to DEC Commissioner John
Cahill by Peter Lehner, a prominent water quality lawyer with the respected
Natural Resources Defense Council. After providing invaluable assistance
to Ithacans opposing LSC, Mr. Lehner left NRDC and currently serves as
the head of the Environmental Protection Bureau for New York Attorney General
Elliot Spitzer.
The EPA-approved
narrative water quality standard for phosphorus provides that it shall
be limited to "[n]one in amounts that will result in algae, weeds and slimes
that will impair the waters for their best usages." 6 N.Y.C.R.R. §703.2.
Cayuga Lake clearly
violates that standard because its waters are often so inundated with giant
mats of floating weeds and algae that swimming and boating are all but
impossible. This summer, islands of weeds and algae the size of football
fields clogged the southern lake.
LSC’s discharge
would undoubtedly contribute to the violation of that standard because:
a) phosphorus is the limiting growth factor for algae and aquatic weeds
in Cayuga Lake, especially the soluble reactive form of phosphorus; b)
Cayuga Lake at a depth of 250 feet reportedly contains between two and
four times more soluble reactive phosphorus than the surface water near
the discharge; and c) any discharge of soluble reactive phosphorus would
be rapidly uptaken by aquatic plants upon discharge.
The New York State
Department of Environmental Conservation granted LSC’s discharge permit
by simply failing to enforce the narrative standard for phosphorus. Instead,
the agency determined that LSC’s discharge would not be expected to exceed
the "guidance value" for total phosphorus near the middle of Cayuga Lake.
The phosphorus guidance value has no enforcement authority under state
or federal law and utterly fails to assess the environmental impact of
soluble reactive phosphorus in the highly impaired area of the discharge.
This stunning regulatory
failure was coupled with a parallel failure to enforce the water quality
standard for turbidity. That narrative standard provides that suspended
and settleable solids, such as silt, shall be limited to "[n]one...that
will cause deposition or impair the waters for their best usages." 6 NYCRR
§703.2.
Public bathing at
Stewart Park along the southern shore of Cayuga Lake has been banned for
decades due to high turbidity levels. Construction of LSC’s intake structure
along more than a mile of the shallow bottom of the lake would exacerbate
existing water quality violations associated with silt. Section 122.4(i)
specifically prohibits permits when water quality violations are caused
by the construction of new sources or discharges.
Even though construction
of LSC is moving ahead, the project faces its greatest challenge as community
opposition intensifies. For example, the Cayuga Nation and representatives
of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (often referred to as Iroquois) recently
opposed Cornell’s efforts to obtain a land easement required to build the
LSC’s intake and discharge pipes on the bottom of Cayuga Lake. This easement
is absolutely essential for LSC and may prove to be the project’s undoing.
The Cayuga Nation
is engaged in a 20-year-old lawsuit to obtain aboriginal lands that they
contend were illegally taken away by the State of New York. Cayuga Lake
is partially encompassed by those aboriginal lands. A judge has already
determined that the lands were illegally taken, but no settlement has yet
been reached. As those issues are being decided, the Cayuga Nation and
representatives of the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force are meeting
with representatives of Cornell as well as state and federal environmental
authorities regarding their concerns about LSC.
Concurrently, the
failure of government pollution control programs to solve Cayuga Lake’s
pollution problems has catalyzed citizen action that could thwart LSC.
Toxics Targeting, Inc., a local environmental research firm, undertook
a preliminary watershed characterization of southern Cayuga Lake last spring.
That investigation surveyed known or potential pollution problems through
visual inspection in order to spur the public as well as government agencies
to clean up the lake. Nearly 800 known or potential pollution sources were
identified, including landfills, garbage dumps, miles of eroded streambanks,
unregulated wastewater discharges and toxic dumps. Individual citizens
and groups are now taking direct action to clean up problems on a site-by-site
basis. To view detailed reports for each of the 28 stream segments that
were surveyed, please visit www.toxicstargeting.com.
Citizens should
continue to support rescinding or fundamentally altering LSC’s discharge
permit to make it comply with the 122.4(i) moratorium provision of the
Clean Water Act. If that law is not strictly enforced, a policy precedent
would be set by both state and federal environmental authorities that would
hinder cleanup efforts across New York.
By monitoring the
progress made by government authorities to clean up identified hazards,
citizens can gauge the effectiveness of New York’s regulatory programs
for themselves. That is a critical first step toward developing a model
of active, sustained public participation that could reverse the continued
degradation of Cayuga Lake.
Walter Hang
is a resident of Ithaca and an avid 470 sailor.
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