This news story originally provided by The Daily Mail

August 26, 2004

Debate over mercury emissions rising

Plant reductions, river sampling pit utilities, environment groups

Brian Bowling
Daily Mail staff

What the government doesn't know about mercury could be dooming some children to a life of developmental problems.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a national compilation of fish consumption advisories.

In 2003, the number of fish advisories increased by 280 to a total of 3,094 advisories in 48 states, the District of Columbia and American Samoa.

But some say they aren't testing enough.

Overall, about 35 percent of the total lake acres and 24 percent of the river miles in the nation have enough pollution to make eating fish from those waters a potential health risk.

The main risk is to pregnant women and young children because methylmercury, which accumulates in fish, is a neurotoxin that has been shown to cause developmental problems in fetuses and young children.

Don Welsh, Region 3 administrator for the EPA, said the growing list of advisories shows states are doing a better job of testing than before.

Most of the new advisories were due to mercury pollution.

"We don't want that to be confused with the idea that mercury emissions are up or that the problem is getting worse," he said.

According to EPA data, mercury emissions from human sources have dropped from 220 tons in 1990 to 120 tons in 1999.

Coal-fired power plants account for about 40 percent of the 120 tons.

Navis Bermudez, a national spokeswoman for the Sierra Club, said the growing number of advisories suggests that mercury contamination is more prevalent than the EPA suggests.

"If there are waters that are still not being monitored, we could find out there are more waters that we shouldn't be catching fish from," she said.

So far, West Virginia only has one mercury-related fish advisory -- for the Ohio River. That doesn't mean, however, that other waters in the state don't have high levels of mercury.

Bill Toomey, a program manager in the state Bureau for Public Health, said the state has been working under an EPA grant for the last couple of years to do more statewide fish samples.

The number of advisories hasn't changed in the last year because the state is still evaluating the results, he said.

Those results could become a political football. Behind the mercury debate is a tug of war with environmental groups on one side and public utilities on the other.

At the end of the Clinton administration, the EPA was working on a proposal that would require coal-fired power plants to reduce their mercury emissions by 90 percent in 2008.

The regulation would require all plants to install pollution controls, switch fuels or shut down to meet that goal.

The Bush administration has proposed a cap-and-trade program that sets a target of a 70 percent reduction by 2018.

Under the program, plants that reduce emissions by more than their targeted amount would have "credits" they could sell to other plants having trouble meeting their targets.

Tim Mallan, West Virginia environmental manager for American Electric Power Co., said the Bush proposal is the only one that wouldn't send the state and national economies into a tailspin.

"The only way (90 percent) could conceivably be done is to switch to natural gas on a nationwide basis and shutdown all the coal units," he said.

By comparison, AEP expects to get an 85 percent reduction in mercury emissions from its largest units, including the John Amos plant, due to pollution controls it is adding to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions.

Installing those controls on just three of the company's 26 units, however, is costing about $1.2 billion.

"You look at our smaller, older plants. The investment is just not there for them," he said.

Under cap and trade, AEP can make the investments that cut some of its largest emissions while eventually replacing the older plants, Mallan said.

An additional factor is that manmade mercury emissions are relatively minor compared to natural emissions such as from active volcanoes, he said.

Consequently, the EPA can't predict how much of a health benefit the country would see from even a 90 percent reduction of mercury emissions from power plants.

"They think there is one, but they can't quantify how much of one," he said.

Bermudez, however, said a Florida study shows there was a significant drop in mercury levels in fish after the state implemented mercury controls on municipal and medical waste incinerators.

"Here's evidence that if we reduce our local emissions we're going to have a local positive effect," she said.

Mallan said mercury emissions from incinerators tend to come from concentrated bursts, such as when a bunch of thermometers are incinerated. Florida also has a different ecology than West Virginia, and those differences mean that pollution controls on power plants here might not produce the same results, he said.

Vivian Stockman, spokeswoman for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said its time for power plants to meet the same requirement as incinerators. "They're the largest, single unregulated source of mercury," she said.

While cap-and-trade programs can work for some pollutants, there's enough evidence to conclude that mercury emissions tend to create "hot spots" downwind of their sources, she said.

"At which end do we want to pay? Do we want to pay a little more on our electric bills, or do we want to pay with our children's health?" she said.

Contact writer Brian Bowling at 348-4842.