Survival of Striped Bass Entrained into the Cooling Systems of Two Hudson River Power Stations

Abstract

Data from entrainment survival sampling programs conducted in 1979, 1980, and 1988 at the Indian Point generating stations and in 1977, 1978, and 1980 at the Roseton generating station, both located on the tidal Hudson River estuary, were reanalyzed using a series of failure time models to estimate the survival of entrained striped bass Morone saxatilis based on sampling stress, mechanical entrainment stress, and thermal stress. The model with the lowest Akaike information criterion value was the most complex model examined, with year- and station-specific parameters for both sampling and entrainment. However, the lowest Bayesian information criterion was achieved with a model that had year- and station-specific sampling parameters but only station-specific entrainment parameters. The models indicated that survival was positively related to fish length and salinity and negatively related to discharge temperatures above 30°C. Parameter uncertainty was addressed via a bootstrap resampling procedure to estimate parameters for the station-specific model, and the results were applied to entrainment abundance data from each facility from 1983 to 1987. The distribution of the estimated mean annual entrainment survival after 1 d for Indian Point had modes at 0.48, 0.60, 0.70, and 0.81. For Roseton, the distribution of mean annual entrainment survival was normal, with a mean of 0.41 and a variance of 0.0028. Survival differences between the two stations were due to inherent differences in entrainment stresses, as indicated by differences in the parameters for the model as well as differences in the length of entrained striped bass, discharge temperature, and salinity.