Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant - Environmental Concerns

Environmental Concerns

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University became concerned that the discharge of heated cooling water from the plant would be detrimental to a crucial element of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, the bay's famed blue crabs. In the late 1960s, litigation borne of Congress's National Environmental Policy Act eventually spawned one of the most celebrated environmental cases in American history, Calvert Cliffs Coordinating Committee, Inc. v. Atomic Energy Commission, forcing the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to consider the environmental impact of building and maintaining such an atomic energy plant.