Nuclear Fishing

It’s looking pretty certain that nuclear power is going to play an important role in meeting the UK’s energy demands in a low(ish) carbon future. Various other schemes, perhaps most notably the planned Severn barrage, are starting to look too expensive and, ironically, environmentally unacceptable. I say ironically, because nuclear power has long been unpalatable to the environmental movement. But, faced with the choice between the certain destruction of large areas of ecologically sensitive wetlands, and the remote possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, many environmentalists are starting to think that uranium’s not such a bad option.

Now, I don’t want to enter the debate about how safe nuclear power really is, nor about the actual carbon emissions (factoring in building, running and decomissioning) of ‘carbon free’ nuclear power. Frankly, if I want to be able to power this laptop and see the occasional landscape free of turbines, like Lovelock I can’t see much alternative. But, there is an interesting environmental impact of nuclear power stations that is not widely appreciated: their effects on fish stocks.

Nuclear power stations in the UK are all situated on the coast, for the simple reason that they require a constant supply of very large quantities of water to cool the reactors. This water is not contaminated (except thermally – bays and estuaries near the power stations tend to be rather warm, altering growth and phenology of some marine species) – but, there is still an impact. As well as sucking in sea water, these installations also, of course, suck in anything living in it.

Big things – fish, for example – do not mix well with power stations, and so are removed using a large screen. Everything over a minimum size will be retained. Survival is not high.

Of course, any callous ecologists reading this (is there any other kind?!) will immediately think, ‘that sounds like a fabulous sampling strategy’. Well, you’re too late – I only know all this because of a series of really interesting papers involving Peter Henderson, a fish ecologist from the University of Oxford and PISCES conservation who has been collecting data monthly from one power station (Hinkley Point, on the Severn esturary) for almost 30 years.

In a recent paper, Henderson and Anne Magurran, one of his regular collaborators in this work, confirm that

The sampling method will… catch adults and juveniles older than six months for all known British marine fishes

What struck me, reading this particular paper, is that the numbers presented allow some very rough guesstimates of the fish catch of the UK’s nuclear power stations. For instance, they describe a (mightily impressive) sample over 24 hours across 4 intake screens in Hinkley. I don’t know how many screens there are in total, but even just taking these 4, the intake trapped ‘approximately 20000 individuals from 49 fish species’. Simply multiplying by 365 gives an annual take on the order of 7.3 million individual fish. Times eight power stations in the UK, and with catches of decapod crustaceans (crabs, shrimp, and so on) around four times those of fish – the numbers quickly become colossal.

In the grand scheme of things, the fish killed by nuclear power stations pale into insignificance against the catch of the monstrous global fishing fleet, and the unprecedented threat of global climate change. But, power stations can be designed to eliminate this, using recirculation of water or even dry cooling. I wonder, if more people were aware of the terrific waste of prime marine protein that currently occurs, might we be prepared to pay the extra for such a system?

Return from the Frontiers of Science

My plan to blog nightly from the Royal Society / Australian Academy of Sciences FoS meeting in Perth, which started promisingly, was stymmied rather by the packed and punishing schedule. Add on >24h travelling either end of a 4 day meeting, and I’ve basically been away from a keyboard for a week. But, I did want to give some closing thoughts on the whole process. First, anyone who is at all environmentally aware will feel pangs of guilt about flying to any scientific meeting, let alone UK-Australia-UK in less than a week (especially when I should really have been manning the Science is Vital barricades). When half the meeting is spent discussing the consequences of similar patterns of consumption over the last couple of centuries – climate change in the broadest sense, with particular focus on ocean acidification – there is a special irony. But this is one kind of meeting where Skype doesn’t cut it, and on balance I feel that the carbon has been well spent.

Certainly, seeds of several ideas have been sown in my head – the kinds of ideas that almost never arise when attending a standard ‘disciplinary’ conference (meaning, a conference based around a single discipline, rather than anything kinky…). In part this was due to the structure of the sessions (each one consisting 1h of talks followed by a further hour of general discussion), and the broad mix of people there. But also, the total immersion in the meeting (to the extent that I only managed to stick my toe in the Indian Ocean, fully 5 minutes walk from the hotel, just before leaving) meant that ideas continued to ping around late into the night. (If this makes the experience sound horribly formal, let me add that these later ideas were inevitably generated in the bar, and, on sober reflection the following day, proved not all to be quite as superb as originally thought.)

Asked to sum up the conference, I chose one word: interdependence. Partly, this was to reflect the repeated message that to study the ocean is inevitably to enter the realms of interdisciplinary science. You can’t undestand marine ecology without some understanding of physics (e.g. ocean circulation) or chemistry (e.g. the availability of biologically essential trace metals); but equally the production and transfer of biomass through ecological networks affects both the physics and chemistry of the marine environment.

There was a lot of other intedependence on show too. The mutualism between modellers and empiricists, for example. A model not grounded in real data is perhaps diverting, but ultimately useless; collecting data with no theory for guidence is unlikely to be particularly profitable. And the need to integrate insights from the past – whether from the fossil record, or from the historical record of people’s exploitation of the sea – with contemporary data, both to understand the present and to predict the future as we enter climatic conditions unkown in human history.

Finally, there is always the temptation among the scientifically minded to take an engineering approach to managing natural systems. This leads to the mentality that human intervention is required to ‘fix’ the marine environment. Unquestionably, some such interventions are needed – setting some limits on fisheries, for example, and curbing carbon emissions (although I remain sceptical of some of the more drastic geoengineering suggestions, such as iron fertilisation to induce phytoplankton blooms – how much energy is needed to extract and transport that much iron to the Southern Ocean?). But this conference reminded us that really it is us who depend on the seas, and that the most convincing argument for managing them more wisely is simple self interest.

Despatches from the Frontiers of Science (I)

Just don’t ask me what day it is. I know I arrived in Perth, WA, yesterday afternoon, and have been fully involved in this Frontiers of Science meeting ever since, but I’m damned if I know if it’s Sunday, Monday, or Saturday just now. But I know it’s been really really good, in a way that standard scientific conferences can’t match, so I thought I’d share with you a bit of the magic. So, FoS meetings work like this (and avid readers – if indeed such a species exists -will note certain similarities with the NESTA Crucible programme I wrote about last (or this??) week):

The Frontiers of Science programme is a prestigious series of international meetings for outstanding early career scientists, initiated by the US National Academy of Sciences in 1989, and which has since been adopted by the Royal Society and a number of other prestigious national science academies… These multidisciplinary meetings aim to bring together future leaders in science to discuss the latest advances in their fields, and to learn about cutting edge research in other disciplines in a format that is designed to encourage informal networking and discussion, and to explore opportunities for collaboration.

The exciting thing about this particular meeting (apart, that is, from the sound of the Indian Ocean that I can hear from my hotel balcony) is that, for the first time, it is themed – glorying, no less, in the title of Frontiers of Marine Science. What this means in practice is that all of us here, from microbiologists to global climatologists, start with a certain vocabulary in common. So, as an ecologist, I may know nothing about the physics of eddies or the chemistry of carbonates, but at least I know what they are, and how they might impact the ecological communities that I study. For an interdisciplinary enterprise, such shared language is both vital and unusual.

Take today, for example – the first full day of the meeting, we’ve already had sessions on the feasibility of geoengineering solutions to climate change, the significance of symbioses (for example, between sponges and bacteria, or between animal and plant in corals), and the importance for global climate models of small-scale water turbulence, involving biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and geologists. But underlying themes are already emerging. The desire to understand the carbon cycle, for example, or the pervasive effect of climate change (in all its many guises – including temperature rises and pH declines) on every facet of the natural world.

We still have two days left to get to the bottom of these issues, with discussions of ecology, physics and geology to come. What’s great, though, is the chances offered to formulate plans of action in the bar at the end of the day. Until you’ve listened to someone with an entirely different training to your own talk about the kinds of problems that really interest you, it’s impossible to see what insight a physicist, say, may be able to offer an ecologist. But it’s almost certain that insight will arrive, if you get the right people together. Within the next few days, I expect to be blogging on various far-reaching solutions to the crises in marine ecosystems (to my previous plea to restore the great whale populations, you can already add, for e.g., re-planting seagrass beds for carbon sequestration, fisheries replenishment, and coastal defence).

To those sceptics among you who might suggest that my optimism is fuelled by the excellent Western Australian wine that has been forced upon me since arriving, I would concede that you may have a point. But – I have seldom felt more inspired than when attending these kinds of multidisciplinary meetings; it can’t all be put down to the grape, and getting the right people in a room, talking about science, policy, and solutions, is a tremendously valuable process.