Introduction

Although my parents, my four brothers and I live in Pennsylvania, my mother is from New Jersey. Growing up, we continued my mother's custom of spending summers exploring the New Jersey shore. For four years I attended marine biology camp along New Jersey's Barnegat Bay and caught my mother's abiding passion for the Barnegat Bay Estuary and its surrounding habitats, including the magnificent and unique Pine Barrens, a forest like no other in the world.

This was the third year I had worked in the Barnegat Bay Estuary. During the first year, I studied whether the bay's water quality has declined over the past five decades, as the population around it has more than quadrupled. I collected and analyzed water samples for 11 indicators of water quality. I compared my data to 40 years of historical water-quality data from public databases. I concluded that there has been a decline in the bay's water quality.

The second year I studied the relationship between water quality and the presence of gram-negative pathogen-indicator bacteria. I cultured and counted bacteria, and prepared and studied microscopic slides of bacteria. I concluded that temperature, pH, nitrate-nitrogen, and dissolved oxygen affect bacteria growth in the bay, but salinity does not.

For each of these projects, I have benefited from people who were willing to talk to me about my projects and about Barnegat Bay. I also saw firsthand how careless and thoughtless some people are about the bay, treating it like a giant trashcan and being unmindful of how human activities impact the bay. I applied for and received two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored grants to write and illustrate a pamphlet about what people can do to conserve and protect the bay. I distributed copies of the pamphlet to every realtor on Long Beach Island. To date, over 12,000 pamphlets have been given to people who rent homes along Barnegat Bay.

As I traveled around the bay collecting samples, I learned there is a nuclear reactor operating in the Barnegat Estuary. I learned more about the reactor and how it was constructed and became increasingly intrigued about the impact of the reactor on the estuary.

This essay summarizes my study of the surface water in the intake and discharge creeks of the oldest of the nation's 103 operating commercial nuclear power plants, Oyster Creek. Oyster Creek came on line in 1969, five years before the United States established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (History of Nuclear Energy, 2003). Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, one of 34 remaining in the United States. It is near Forked River, a sleepy town in the Pine Barrens, on the Barnegat Bay Estuary in New Jersey. The reactor sits at the artificially created confluence of the South Branch of Forked River (the intake creek) and Oyster Creek (the discharge creek). The reactor draws over 4.5 billion liters of water daily from Forked River Creek, heats the water, and discharges it into Oyster Creek (O'Malley, 2004). The Atlantic Ocean is 16.09 kilometers (10 miles) away. I studied the reactor's impact on its intake and discharge creeks. I compared the two creeks' microbial communities, bacteria counts, and 11 water-quality parameters to those in a nearby, but not directly impacted, control creek. My field research was conducted from July through November 2005. I collected samples at three sites in each of three creeks in the Barnegat Bay Estuary. I am not aware of any prior study comparing these intake and discharge creeks.