Projecting Future Groundwater Availability for Power Generation Plant Licensing

Water sustainability is becoming an issue throughout the United States where population and environmental concerns intensify the competition among municipal, agriculture, industrial, and power generation demands. The demand for groundwater has increased beyond its primary historical uses of agriculture and water supply. Viewed as a problem of sustainability, the long-term challenge for water supplies and regulatory agencies is to maintain steady growth and living standards without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Water resource planners must now account for increased power generation needs for a new generation of nuclear power plants that will compete with other demands that typically comprise the existing water availability projections. Planners typically project future groundwater availability using elusive concepts of sustainable yield, safe yield, optimal yield, and consensus yield. These water use projections, resources availability, and allocations are becoming increasingly under scrutiny as demands stretch the available resources and as water consumption decisions are weighed in public policy debates. In this paper, case studies from proposed plant expansions are evaluated for their consideration of groundwater availability.