SPENCER, N.C. - The Bush administration is giving coal-fired power plants up to 20 years to remove 70 percent of the toxic mercury in smokestack emissions, citing as one factor that a key technology remains unproven.
But here on North Carolina's Yadkin River - at a type of plant where mercury removal was thought to be near impossible - a test shows that technology is already close to getting the job done.
"By 2010, we could outfit easily every plant in the country," said Sid Nelson Jr., president of the Ohio company that supplied the plant with a mercury-capturing "sorbent."
You know what's coming next, and here it is...
Officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency say that such claims are overly optimistic and that more testing is needed. Environmentalists accuse the agency of favoring industry at the expense of public health, filing lawsuits almost immediately after the EPA rule was published last month.
("Overly optimistic" meaning that we think it would cost businesses too much to perform these tests until we're all safely out of office.)
The article goes on to describe a couple of different types of mercury removal tests, one by blowing carbon treated with bromine into the stream of plant exhaust gases, and another by installing plant scrubbers currently used to remove sulfur dioxide, though they can be used to capture mercury.
And the payoff...
A study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, funded partly by the EPA, pegged the potential impact of mercury control at 800 fewer fatal heart attacks a year, for an annual benefit of $4.8 billion. That's 96 times the health benefits estimated by the EPA.
Critics say if the EPA had included the heart benefits in its analysis, it would have been forced to require faster cleanup. (Jeff) Holmstead (head of the EPA's air pollution control program) countered that the evidence of a connection between mercury and heart attacks was "speculative."
Somehow I don't think it would be "speculative" if he ingested too much mercury from contaminated fish and then dropped dead on the spot (I certainly don't wish that).
To me, this is what Bushco does. It makes lazy, uninformed and downright evil (at times) decisions affecting us and our families, and one way or another, we always lose.
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