NIH Wants New Water Storage Structures On Bethesda Campus

National Institutes of HealthIn need of more chilled water and worried about the reliability of the local water supply, the National Institutes of Health wants to build a new set of water storage structures on its 70-acre Bethesda campus.

The “Assure/Expand Chilled Water Capacity” project will be the subject of a public meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 24 on the NIH campus.

As explained in a Federal Register notice on Thursday, the NIH will be required to do an environmental impact statement for the project.

The NIH says its demand for chilled water has “exceeded the design capacity several times during the previous years,” and that the agency “has also become increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of the local water utility system, and the risk of reliably delivering water to the NIH Bethesda Campus infrastructure.”

Chilled water is commonly used in air conditioning systems. According to a capital budget report from the National Capital Planning Commission, the project consists of renovating an existing chiller plant on the campus (one of the largest on the east coast) full of equipment that has been decommissioned.

“These chillers are absolutely essential in providing cooling capability for NIH’s 240 bed hospital, over 1.3 million research animals, three data centers and over 12 million square feet of sophisticated biomedical research facilities,” read the report, which estimated the cost of the project at just less than $83 million.

The NIH has already presented a campus master plan that would mean renovations to a number of older laboratory buildings and the construction of new ones, as well as 3,000 additional employees at the campus over the next 20 years.

The Scoping Meeting on Sept. 24 will include a formal presentation on the project. All comments and questions on the meeting or the project should be directed to Valerie Nottingham, Deputy Director, Division of Environmental Protection at nihnepa[at]mail[dot]nih[dot]gov.

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