Radio Shrimp

It’s the spring of 1995 and I’m onboard the R/V Bellows, anchored off the Dry Tortugas. Beside me is my host and senior colleague, Professor L. Scott Quackenbush. Quack is an expert on the endocrinology of marine invertebrates as well as a crack aquaculturist.

Our elbows propped on the rail, as we admire the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. Quack is downwind of me enjoying a smoke, a vice that will take him out three years from now.

“Did I ever tell you about the time we tried shrimp-farming at Turkey Point?”

I am all ears. Turkey Point is the site of two nuclear power generators on the shore of Biscayne Bay operated by Florida Power and Light (FPL). When first opened in the early 1970s, the reactors dumped thermally hot water into the bay, scalding everything and causing a massive sea grass kill. 

Instead of building cooling towers like those handling hot water in every other nuclear power plant on Planet Earth, FPL cheaped-out and constructed an expansive trapezoidal array of leaky cooling canals. The cooling canals cover 10 square miles of the Southeast Coastal Everglades.

The canals released giant plumes of hyper-saline water into the porous limestone rock beneath them, which expanded outward underground in all directions, including towards the well field that supplies fresh water to the Florida Keys. Most of the local biologists who are not on FPL’s payroll consider these canals an environmental disaster, which I’ll explain more about some other time. This story is about shrimp.

FPL contracted Dr. Quackenbush to determine if they could raise shrimp in the warm water of Turkey Point’s cooling canals. 

Quack told me that they blocked off the ends of a couple of canal branches and he stocked them with shrimp.

The shrimp grew and thrived. But, when he harvested the shrimp, they were radioactive. 

Nuclear reactors produce radioiodines, though the radioisotopes that are supposed to be contained in the reactor vessels. Shrimp concentrate iodine.

“We filled in those canals and buried the whole project, and if you ever repeat this story to anyone, I will deny it.”

(FPL contracts are famous for their airtight non-disclosure agreements.)

* * *

Quack passed in 2008, so I figure it’s OK to retell his story today. Make of it what you will – I do have another witness to the telling.