EPA to force US power plants to reduce toxic pollution

• 12 years ago (2011-12-13)
• Junior Isles

North America 998

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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced it plans to change air pollution exemption granted to coal and oil burning power plants. It will set new rules to limit mercury and other harmful pollution from these power plants.

Paediatrician Lynn Goldman, dean of George Washington University's school of public health, has been researching pollution effects since the early 1990s and says he studies show mercury from industry damages children's developing brains, impairing their verbal ability, when it gets into the water supply or food chain in high concentrations.

"Children who live closest to the plants are most affected by them," Goldman says.

Goldman headed the EPA's toxics office during the Clinton administration and worked on limiting mercury pollution. She claims the power industry and its supporters were particularly resistant.

During President George W. Bush's term the power industry persuaded the EPA to adopt soft limits on mercury, but now Federal courts have set a deadline of Friday for the EPA to issue a new rule.

The EPA wants rules so that within three years, power plants that burn coal would have to cut more than 90 per cent of the mercury from their emissions.

Power companies would also have to slash emissions of arsenic, acid gases and other pollutants linked with causing premature deaths, asthma attacks and cancer. The EPA's deadlines are proving particularly contentious though.

"It's physically impossible to build the controls, the generation, the transmission and the pipelines needed in three years," says Anthony Topazi, chief operating officer for Southern Company, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million homes.

Topazi says electricity rates will go up, putting marginal companies out of business. Unless his company gets six years, it will not be able to keep the lights on. "We will experience rolling blackouts or rationing power if we don't have simply the time to comply," Topazi says.

Paul Allen, senior vice president of Constellation Energy, says his company's experience is very different. Constellation installed controls for mercury and other pollutants on its big power plant outside Baltimore, and he says it took a little more than two years. It additionally put 1300 people into work at the peak of construction as well.

"We don't believe jobs will be destroyed, and we do think that it's time to get on with this work," Allen says.

Allen says the power industry had plenty of warning that this was coming. About a dozen states inducing Massachusetts have already required power plants to clean up mercury.

Ken Kimmell, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, says that even despite slashing mercury pollution, his department still has to advise people not to eat fish caught in streams and lakes.