Case Study: Three-Dimensional Hydrodynamic Model of a Power Plant Thermal Discharge

A three-dimensional hydrodynamic model, MIKE 3, was used to assess the effects of the cooling water thermal plume from the 877 MW Charles Poletti power plant that discharges to the East River in Queens, New York City. The East River is a tidal strait that connects New York Harbor and Long Island Sound-two large, out of phase estuaries with complex hydrodynamics. The study was additionally required to account for the thermal discharge of a larger, 1253 MW power plant adjacent to Poletti. The model used a flexible mesh formulation based on unstructured triangular elements and was successfully calibrated with triaxial thermal field survey data. After calibration, the model was used to demonstrate that under worst case conditions the resulting thermal plume did not exceed the regulatory thermal criteria.