The M elvin R. Sampson (MRS) Coho Hatchery near Ellensburg, Washington is part of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s (NPCC’s) Fish & Wildlife p rogram (Program) and is a component of the Fish Accord between Action Agencies and the Lower River Tribes. Under the Program, the YN and Yakima-Klickitat Fisheries Project (YKFP) are managing Coho reintroduction efforts in the Yakima River Basin by using artificial propagation to re-establish, supplement, and/or increase natural production and harvest opportunities of anadromous salmonids. The MRS Coho Hatchery is an extension of these efforts. The MRS Coho Hatchery includes Coho spawning, incubation, and rearing facilities, as well as operations that will integrate with the overall YKFP. Target production goals for the facility include the incubation of 1,080,000 Coho eggs and the subsequent production of up to 700,000 Coho smolts per year.
Important objectives in the facility design included 1) maximizing energy efficiency, 2) providing quality process water from both groundwater and surface water sources, and 3) accommodating anticipated changes in water temperature due to climate change. To meet the production goals of the project while satisfying these ancillary objectives, a partial recirculating aquiculture system (PRAS) was coupled with an energy recovery and water-cooled chiller system to provide chilled makeup water for grow-out, chilled water augmentation for adult holding, and cool water for incubation. The PRAS system includes four recirculation modules providing 75% re-use water to ten 26-foot diameter grow-out tanks, with each module outfit ted with a 40-micron drum filter and gas transfer tower with CO 2 stripper and low head oxygenator. Chiller operations were established to meet four operational modes that differ based on ambient water temperature and the reporting needs of the facility. Due to the complexity of the operational scheme, a fully integrated SCADA package was implemented that includes a human-machine interface (HMI; see example screenshot) with full remote manual control of key system components, a programmable logic controller (PLC) designed to run the chiller system’s four operational modes, and an alarm system with pre-established thresholds to notify personnel when monitoring thresholds have been exceeded.
This presentation will walk through the overall facility design and then dive deeper into some of the process flow details, with a focus on the chiller and PRAS systems.