State pushing to remove more air-borne mercury from coal-fired power plants, but legislators may block the effort. In dispute: Just how dangerous are the high levels to our health?
By Ad Crable
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:58
Is it a long-hidden danger that, now discovered to be a highly toxic pollutant, needs to be eliminated from Pennsylvania’s air as quickly as possible?
Or, is the mercury scare another overstated health threat, much like the Alar-in-apples alarm of 1989?
In an increasingly bitter campaign, environmental and medical groups, sportsmen, teachers and faith-based groups have aligned themselves behind the state’s push for drastic mercury reductions at the state’s 36 coal-fired power plants.
At the same time, legislators, the utility and coal industries, Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry and others are trying to scuttle the plan.
The controversy should be of more than passing interest to Lancaster County residents.
State monitoring has found mercury levels in rainfall here among the highest in the state.
And fish found contaminated with high levels of mercury have prompted fish advisories on portions of both the Conestoga and Susquehanna rivers.
A power play has unfolded in recent days by legislators who want to force the state to abandon its plans and instead use less stringent mercury-reduction standards recently put in place by the federal government.
On Tuesday, the state Senate voted 40-10 for a bill that would block the stricter mercury cutbacks on coal-fired power plants sought by the Gov. Ed Rendell administration.
The bill customarily would go to the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, where its Republican chairman warned that any bill that is not tougher than the federal standards wouldn’t get out of his committee.
Instead, the bill has gone to the House Rules Committee. A full vote by the House could happen as early as Tuesday.
Rendell has indicated he may veto any bill that does not clear the air of more mercury.
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The mercury dropping out of the sky is indeed a pressing health threat that needs attention now before it poisons any more children or guts the state’s recreational fishing, say backers of the state initiative.
Proponents point to the startling warning in 2003 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that as many as 630,000 newborns in the United States each year are at risk for serious developmental problems because of mercury poisoning from fish their mothers eat.
State Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty, who has been the lead advocate for the initiative, also cites statewide advisories against eating mercury-contaminated fish.
In the closest thing to a mutiny against a federal air-pollution edict, Pennsylvania is one of 16 states that has sued the federal government over its new mercury-reduction standards for coal-fired power plants, the country’s biggest source of mercury pollution.
The state is “morally compelled” to protect Pennsylvanians against the “flawed” federal plan, McGinty says.
Five states have implemented their own tougher mercury standards and at least 15 more are considering doing so.
Pennsylvania’s sweeping plan would remove 80 percent of coal plant mercury emissions in the next four years and 90 percent by 2018.
In comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury limits project a 21-percent reduction in allowable levels by 2010 and 70 to 80 percent by 2018, depending on successes of a prior imperative that power plants reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. That cleansing also will remove some mercury emissions.
Pennsylvania says those estimates are exaggerated.
The state had earlier been petitioned to take action on mercury by 35 citizens groups.
The Pennsylvania plan would require all power plants in the state to comply and not allow them to meet compliance by paying for improvements at other, sometimes out-of-state, plants, as allowed under the federal rules.
Failing to curtail mercury from each plant could result in localized “hot spots” of mercury contamination, state environmental officials say.
Hot air, the plan’s many critics retort.
Besides health concerns which opponents say are unproven, critics say the mercury in Pennsylvania’s air floats here from all over the globe and local power plants’ contribution is just a drop in the bucket.
Opponents question the validity of studies into the dangers of eating fish and say fish consumption has more benefits for pregnant women than dangers.
Mercury is a national and global problem and best handled at those levels, the reasoning goes.
An overzealous plan by the state to put the screws to power plants would only drive up residents’ utility bills and force small power plants to close or switch to western coal, hurting Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal industry and miners’ jobs, they charge.
Critics also charge that Pennsylvania’s plan would be struck down as unconstitutional because it would illegally give disparate treatment to bituminous coal mined in the eastern United States.
Both of Lancaster County’s state senators, Noah Wenger and Gibson E. Armstrong, voted Tuesday in favor of the bill to pull the plug on the state’s mercury proposal.
All eight of Lancaster County’s state representatives are co-sponsors of a bill identical to the Senate’s to stop the tough DEP standards on mercury emissions.
“They haven’t shown the scientific basis that these levels are a problem,” says Rep. Tom Creighton of Rapho Township, a member of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.
“We don’t see a real need to be that drastic,” he says, adding that existing cleanup technology would make it burdensome for older power plants to comply with the state’s plan.
However, another local committee member, Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong, says his mind isn’t made up on the issue, even though he signed on as a bill co-sponsor.
“I want to see Pennsylvania do what’s right for women and for babies that could potentially be affected by mercury poisoning, as well as the rest of us. At the same time, there should be no undue burden on our power companies already being crushed by regulations,” he said.
Both Armstrong and Creighton think a compromise may be in the making.
While the battle lines have been drawn, the debate over the dangers of mercury continues.
Although the Pennsylvania proposal also claims to encourage the use of Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal that the new federal rule discourages, much of the in-state debate over the proposal is over mercury’s health threats.
And at the heart of the wrangling is the question of whether mercury vapor released by Pennsylvania’s coal plants soon falls back to earth in rain and snow, creating “hot spots” of contaminated fish and entering grains, milk and beef liver.
Or, as others contend, is the mercury whisked away to settle somewhere else in the world?
Pennsylvania power plants pump more mercury into the atmosphere than any other state except Texas, about 8,000 pounds a year.
“There is a connection to what’s happening in the neighborhood and mercury,” McGinty recently declared before a hostile state Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee at a hearing.
She cites a recent DEP study that found that mercury levels in rainfall at a site in Cambria County that’s downwind from 13 in-state coal power plants were 47 percent higher than at a sampling site in Tioga County that is not near any power plants.
McGinty, who has two coal-mining brothers in Wyoming, refers to other monitoring studies from Massachusetts, Ohio and Florida in claiming that 70 percent of mercury emissions from Pennsylvania power plants fall back to earth within 90 miles.
And while some of the mercury pollution does come from elsewhere, she maintains 78 percent of Pennsylvania’s mercury pollution comes from its coal-burning power plants.
“The kind of mercury we have stays home. If you really are concerned about respect for life and exposing fetuses and young children, mercury is a toxicant that needs to be on top of your worry list,” McGinty said in an interview.
Mercury-scrubbing controls would cost no more than $1 million to $2 million per plant, plus several hundred thousand a year for operation, McGinty said.
Answering a direct question from doubting senators recently, state Health Secretary Calvin B. Johnson readily acknowledged people are not dropping dead from mercury poisoning.
That’s because the danger to humans is from a slow, cumulative and potentially debilitating exposure to mercury, especially in women of childbearing age whose babies’ intelligence, language skills and development could be retarded, he answered.
“If we can reduce more sources (of mercury), that’s desirable,” Johnson said.
Scoffed state Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango County, one of the proposal’s most outspoken foes, “The hot spot issue is just a total red herring. There’s no data to support any health threat.”
She urged McGinty to “deal in health issues, not fear.”
Referring to statewide fish advisories because of mercury in fish, White said studies show most anglers don’t eat their catch.
Besides, the fish of choice in Pennsylvania — trout — are mostly stocked and caught promptly and do not live long enough for mercury buildups, she averred.
Most people’s source of mercury is canned tuna and other fish that come from the ocean, not local fish, adds Doug Biden, president of the Electric Power Generation Association, a coalition of the coal, chemical and utility industries, miners and others who oppose Pennsylvania’s mercury proposal.
The coal industry and state miners had initially joined DEP in opposing the federal rule.
“All the research that we’ve seen shows that most of the mercury deposition comes from outside this country. Even if we shut down all the coal-fired plants in the United States, we wouldn’t see any reduction in fish advisories because so much mercury comes from other areas,” Biden says.
Biden does not believe in mercury “hot spots.”
“Most of the Pennsylvania plants’ emissions fall out over the Atlantic someplace,” he says.
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It wasn’t that long ago that students poked at mercury in school laboratories, parents dabbed bright-colored mercurochrome on cuts and any thermometer contained a bulb of mercury.
Factories were allowed to discharge mercury directly into lakes and rivers.
The awareness of mercury as a highly toxic threat to humans and other living things dawned slowly.
In 1971, EPA named mercury as a potentially hazardous air pollutant. Limits on mercury in public water systems followed in 1974. Two years later, mercury was declared a hazardous material.
Controls accelerated and mercury was phased out of batteries and paint.
Alarmingly, high levels of mercury were increasingly showing up in fish across the United States, even in remote areas. Some 46 states now have fish advisories because of mercury in fish, especially fish that eat other fish.
When a record 873-pound bluefin tuna was caught off the coast of Delaware last summer, it was found to have nearly twice the highest level of mercury ever found by the Food and Drug Administration in fresh or frozen tuna steaks.
The first-ever nationwide study of mercury in fish in the United States by the EPA in 2004 found more than half of 2,547 freshwater fish had mercury levels considered unsafe to eat by women of childbearing age.
Mercury emissions in the air were the next to be regulated. Medical-waste and municipal-waste incinerators were targeted first, beginning in 1995.
A recent study found that mercury concentrations in fish and wading birds in Florida’s Everglades dropped dramatically after South Florida incinerators installed pollution controls.
Now, it’s the coal-burning power plants’ turn. And it hasn’t been easy.
In 1998, under the Clinton administration, EPA found that mercury from coal-burning power plants, not smog, not soot, not acid rain, was the greatest health concern among air pollutants.
Mercury was classified as a hazardous air pollutant. The Clean Air Act required every coal-fired power plant to reduce emissions to the maximum achievable control.
Last year, the Bush administration reversed that decision and ruled that mercury emissions from coal plants “do not pose hazards to public health.”
EPA’s subsequent mercury-reduction plan, announced in March 2005 and in effect since last month, sets national limits on mercury emissions.
Most controversially, it allows “cap and trading,” enabling utilities to do nothing at some plants by paying for reductions at other plants.
Both the agency’s inspector general and the nonpartisan General Accounting Office have criticized the EPA plan, saying it ignored scientific evidence. Sixteen states, including Pennsylvania, are challenging the standards.
Pennsylvania environmental officials are afraid that cap and trading will be widespread in Pennsylvania and some plants will not have to reduce mercury emissions, resulting in mercury “hot spots.”
If it survives the challenge in the legislature, Pennsylvania has until Nov. 17 to finalize a plan more stringent than the EPA’s, or accept the federal plan and start complying.
Regional public hearings to gauge Pennsylvanians’ sentiment on DEP’s proposal are scheduled to begin next month.
The final decision on the Pennsylvania plan lies with the Environmental Quality Board, an independent board of state officials, legislators and the public that reviews all of DEP’s regulations.
Pennsylvania would be the first coal state to adopt tougher mercury standards.
