In this NY Times article, the wire service photo in the thumbnail shows a concrete structure splitting the water channel in two. My best guess is this is a loop of cooling water, with the building in the foreground housing pumps.
Anyone know what the purpose of this concrete structure is?
Google maps shows that the structure continues around the curve of the river and maybe the right side of the channel is receiving heated water.
If my guess is correct and this is a cooling pond, is it isolated from the nearby Pigeon lake?
I believe those are ash ponds (leftover ash from burning coal). The plan was to remove all of the ash and use it to make concrete once the plan was shut down, which was originally supposed to happen this year. However, Trump ordered the plant to stay open, despite the fact that the power company said it doesn’t need that plant to remain open. So for now the ash will remain in the ponds.
The ash ponds are far to the right. That is certainly hot/cold water – I read about the wall replacement a while back. I don’t know if it’s a pond, or what: I think the warm water goes back into the lake, but I don’t know how it gets there.
Note that although the plant is closing/closed, that was a policy decision too – the plant is still good for another 10-15 years, it wasn’t closed because it had reached end-of-life.
Local community was pissed off about the ash ponds, but decision had already been reached to convert to a different disposal methond.
Looks to be a cooling water intake. Some original info here:
At some point, it looks like the canal was redesigned. The exit to Lake Michigan was closed off and the canal was split so that the intake and exhaust was from Pigeon Lake. It goes nearly to Lake Michigan but makes a U-turn.
Between '75 & '80. Looks like Historic Aerials: Viewer can only provide direct links via Xitter but you can plug in “17000 Croswell St, West Olive, MI 49460” to pull up the relevant aerial & topo.
Weird how the topo map from '91 still shows the old configuration.
Maybe. Windsnest Park is where the discharge used to be. But I haven’t been able to find info on its founding.
It’s also possible the canal has been converted to offshore discharge. That might explain the buildings on the end of the canal. But then the split has to be explained.
There’s no way the tiny loop back to Pigeon lake could dissipate the heat that used to flow into lake Michigan. Is there a new cooling tower that isn’t in the google maps imagery?
To be fair, @Melbourne got it in post #3. Just without a cite.
Putting everything together:
Units 1 and 2 of the plant were built in the 60s. For cooling, they built a canal that pulled cool water from Pigeon Lake and discharged directly into Lake Michigan.
Around the mid-late 70s they built Unit 3 (which has a larger capacity than 1+2 combined). This exceeded the cooling water capacity of Pigeon Lake. So they widened and split the canal using a concrete divider. Units 1 and 2 continued to pull from Pigeon Lake, but the northeast part of the canal now pulled cool water from an offshore source in Lake Michigan. And the southwest portion now handled the discharge from all 3 units, and likewise had an offshore exhaust. There’s a small pump building to handle this.
Since both intake and discharge were now offshore, the shoreline was back to being continuous, and somewhere along the way they built Windsnest Park.
Still, you got the hot/cold thing, which was the most important aspect of the division.
Doesn’t look like anyone actually opened the PDF above, but it’s one of those amusingly specific but huge papers:
524 pages!
I don’t know if the conversion to off-shore discharge was for practical reasons, or if the locals demanded their shoreline back, or if the EPA started requiring that sort of thing, or some other reason.
I opened it in a new tab which doesn’t increment the counter. It appears very thorough, but was digitized without OCR so isn’t easily searchable. My mostly random flipping through it brought me to this section (page 284 of the PDF, 276 of the printed document) which at least points to environmental concern around Unit 3 (I ran this through OCR).
Entrainment–Until operation of Unit 3, slimy sculpin larvae were rarely entrained by the J. H. Campbell Plant. During the first 2 yr of preoperational sampling (1977-1978) no slimy sculpin larvae were collected in entrainment samples for Units 1 and 2 (Jude et al. 1980). In 1979 an estimated 3790 slimy sculpins were entrained based on one occurrence of 2 larvae/1000 m in mid-June. During the first complete year of operation (1981), Unit 3 entrained an estimated 1.24 million slimy sculpin larvae (Table 28). This total was sufficiently high to rank Cottus cognatus as the fourth-most abundant species entrained, comprising 12.1% of the total.
but I’m not claiming priority: