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Water is an important resource. It is a consideration and part of the permitting process when ethanol plants are built. A typical ethanol plant capable of producing 40 million gallons of ethanol per year, could use up to 330,000 gallons of water per day or120 million gallons of water per year. This is equivalent to water used by a town of 5,000 people or a standard-sized golf course. The average home uses 107,000 gallons of water per year. An average person uses 50 gallons of water each day.
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Large fossil fuel and nuclear plants require incredible quantities of water for cooling and ongoing maintenance. The Salem Nuclear Generating Station alone takes 3 billion gallons a day from the Delaware Bay. Studies of the environmental consequences of this phenomenal water demand indicates that Salem is responsible for an annual 11 percent reduction in weakfish and 31 percent reduction in bay anchovy. At the Indian Point 2 and 3 reactors on the Hudson River, the number of fish impinged totaled over 1.5 million fish in 1987. The 90 power plants using once-through-cooling on the Great Lakes kill in excess of 40 million fish per year due to impingement (Pace University, Environmental Costs of Electricity, p. 287).