Posted on 03/14/2005 7:19:56 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration planned to issue the nation's first regulations to cut mercury pollution from electric utilities Tuesday, relying on a market trading system that gives companies 15 years to reduce it nearly by half.
The Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites)'s regulations are aimed at reducing levels of a toxic chemical that can severely damage nervous systems, especially in fetuses and children. They result from a lawsuit brought by an environmental group 13 years ago.
The EPA expects to reduce the current 48 tons a year of mercury from smokestacks of coal-burning power plants down to 31.3 tons in 2010, according to a copy of the rule provided Monday by environmental groups. The regulation would further reduce that to 27.9 tons in 2015, and to 24.3 tons in 2020. EPA officials did not dispute those numbers.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said the mercury rule for the first five years "relies completely on the reductions" that power plants must make to comply with companion regulations issued last week to reduce interstate pollution from fine particles and smog-forming ground-level ozone.
The agency believes significant reductions in mercury will result as a "co-benefit" when plants install new equipment to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, she said. After that, power plants are expected to find ways to specifically reduce mercury.
"While this rule is protective of public health, most of the mercury that creates health risks for Americans comes from fish contaminated from sources that we can't control," Bergman said Monday. "This is a global problem."
In the meantime, she said, pregnant women and women of childbearing age should heed government warnings to limit fish intake.
Sens. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said they were disappointed with the new rule. Snowe called it "woefully inadequate and profoundly disappointing" that it would not reduce and could even increase local mercury concentrations. Boxer said she was "appalled that the Bush administration is ignoring the clear science."
Mercury concentrations accumulate in fish and work up the food chain, which has prompted most states to issue fish consumption advisories. Forty percent of mercury emissions come from the smokestacks of more than 450 coal-burning power plants, but those emissions have never been regulated as a pollutant.
The agency's "cap-and-trade" approach, setting a cap on how much pollution should be allowed and then letting companies trade within those limits, was favored by industry. That lets some companies increase pollution while others turn a profit by selling unused pollution allowances.
Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power companies, said a cap-and-trade program is the best way of dealing with mercury pollution. He said it combines significant cuts while providing stability for consumers and producers.
Environmental and public health groups — including the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose 1992 lawsuit and subsequent court agreements prompted the mercury regulations — favored a stricter approach requiring each plant to install new controls. They said Monday the agency still hadn't met its obligations under the Clean Air Act.
"It's the do-nothing approach to mercury," said John Walke, NRDC's director of clean air programs. "They get a holiday basically ... that requires them to reduce mercury no more than would incidentally be achieved from their smog and soot cuts."
___
On the Net:
Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov/mercury
Natural Resources Defense Council: http://www.nrdc.org
I heard a sound blurb somewhere today by some gal that too much mercury exposure is why kids can't learn in schools today..
From Steve Milloy at Fox News:
"Incredible as it may seem, none of the benefits estimated by the EPA for either option are tied to human health improvements resulting from lower mercury emissions, according to the GAO.
"The GAO recommended that the EPA go back to the drawing board and include in the cost-benefit analysis the human health benefits of reductions in mercury emission from power plants or at least to provide qualitative information on how these benefits are likely to compare under the technology-based and cap-and-trade options.
"But this would be an exercise in futility. Although mercury emissions from power plants have never been regulated before, no scientific study documents a single adverse health effect attributable to mercury from power plants.
"In September 2001, researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated the incremental health risk to fetuses -- supposedly a highly vulnerable population -- from power plant emissions of mercury to be between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 100,000. In EPA-land, such minuscule and hypothetical risks typically do not warrant regulatory action.
"A November 2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “confirmed that the blood mercury levels in young children and women of childbearing age usually are below levels of concern.”
"One reason for the absence of data linking power plant mercury emissions with health effects is that U.S. power plants simply aren't a major source of mercury emissions. Including natural sources of mercury, U.S. electric utilities are responsible for only about 0.6 percent of global mercury emissions.
"The glaring fact is that there likely will be no health benefits resulting from reduced mercury emissions, regardless of whether they’re brought about by the Green-supported technology-based option or Bush administration-supported cap-and-trade option.
"So how did the EPA estimate that its proposed mercury control options would bring about billions of dollars in annual health benefits even though reductions in mercury emissions have not been demonstrated to bring such benefits?
"The vast majority of the estimated human health benefits for the two options were based on supposed reductions in premature deaths, heart attacks and respiratory ailments allegedly attributable to reduced levels of emissions of fine particulates (soot) from the plants -- a hypothesized by-product of proposed mercury control options.
"While these estimated health benefits sound great, they are most likely illusory. Though the EPA has claimed since 1996 that soot causes premature deaths and other health problems, this assertion has never been credibly substantiated.
"I’m all for reducing air pollution to the extent further reductions will provide real and measurable benefits at a reasonable cost. That is quite different than the current mercury circus featuring fabricated risks and fake benefits"
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150086,00.html
I think people believe this stuff because they didn't learn anything in school.
Yeah, I wish I had a nickel for each time I've done that.
Okay. What's a Hagan Ring Balance Transmitter?
What's coming out the stack can't put as much mercury in the environment as is released when you valve in a Hagan Ring Balance Transmitter the wrong way.
Yeah, I wish I had a nickel for each time I've done that.
Okay. What's a Hagan Ring Balance Transmitter?
My guess it is a transmitter attached to one of Saturn's rings and keeps the rings balanced.
I think that stems from the erroneous assumption that mercury toxicity causes autism.
Who elected these people to make "regulations"? Who decided these faceless nameless bureaucrats could do science and issue edicts based on unreviewed, unpublished findings by faceless, nameless scientists?
Who decided these blinking bleeps would control everything done by industry for any purpose whatsoever in favor of arbitrary unproven hypotheses?
And who in the name of all that's reasonable decided that TAXPAYERS would pay to have these blinking bleeps castrate industry on the altar of the freaking environment?
Few things make me angrier than bleeping NOBODIES issuing REGULATIONS that stifle production, invention, industry, innovation, building, manufacturing, business, and simple human use of private property!
Bleep them all to the lowest depths of hell!
The American public has been led to believe that nuclear power is extremely dangerous and that nuclear waste disposal is an unsolved problem. Those beliefs are based on preposterous distortions perpetrated by irrational environmentalists and an irresponsible mass media. In reality, a reactor meltdown would have to occur every two weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as the routine emissions from coal-fired power, from which we get about half of our electric power in the United States. And if the United States went completely nuclear for all its electric power for 10,000 years, the amount of land needed for waste disposal would be about what is needed for the coal ash that is currently generated every two weeks.
Anti-nuclear activists like to scare us with horror stories about the "thousands of tons of nuclear waste" that have been produced since nuclear power began some four decades ago. That sounds like a lot -- until you put it into perspective, which anti-nuclear activists and the mass media never do. Consider that one pound of plutonium can produce as much energy as the Yankee Stadium full of coal. And coal-fired power generates something like a billion tons of waste annually in the United States, or about 30 tons of ash per second. In a few hours, more coal ash is generated than high-level nuclear waste has been generated in four decades!
Oh, but nuclear waste is far more dangerous than coal waste, isn't it? Actually, it isn't. For a given amount of energy produced, coal ash is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste. How can that be? Simple. The quantity of coal ash is literally millions of times greater than the corresponding quantity of nuclear waste, so even though the radioactive intensity of the coal ash is much less, the overall amount of radiation and radioactive matter is greater.
But nobody worries much about the radioactivity of coal ash because the chemicals in it are far more dangerous. They include several thousand tons per year of mercury and other heavy metals, along with huge amounts of lead, arsenic, and asbestos, for example. Yet even the huge quantities of chemical waste in coal ash are of little concern compared to the gaseous emissions from burning coal, which kill an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 Americans every year, depending on which study you believe. As a point of reference, even the lower estimate approaches the rate at which Americans died in the Viet Nam war, and the higher estimate greatly exceeds it, yet the media rarely report on those deaths.
So let's get this straight. For a given amount of energy produced, coal waste has more radioactive matter than nuclear waste, yet the radioactivity of coal waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the solid chemical waste, which in turn is nowhere near as dangerous as the gaseous emissions. Are you starting to get the picture yet?
But even those staggering figures fail to capture the major environmental advantages of nuclear power over coal-fired power. Why? Because the solid and gaseous emissions from coal burning are generated in such a huge quantity that they cannot possibly be contained. They can only be spewed into the atmosphere and dumped into shallow landfills. There is no conceivable way to isolate waste that is generated at the rate of 30 tons per second. Nuclear waste, on the other hand, is so miniscule in comparison that it can be almost completely isolated from the environment at a very modest cost. And even though that cost has been greatly inflated by the anti-nuclear hysteria, it is still very managable.
If all the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been generated were simply dumped into the middle of the ocean, it would be many thousands of times less harmful than the coal waste generated over the same period. But the nuclear waste is so miniscule in quantity that it can be isolated almost completely from the environment. In fact, that is exactly what is being done all over the world. Basic technology exists to convert nuclear waste into a solid, water-impermeable glass form, encase it into stainless-steel-lined concrete containers, and put it thousands of feet underground where water hasn't flowed for hundreds of thousands of years. And nuclear power produces no gaseous emissions, of course.
Yet, amazingly, a large percentage of the American public has been hoodwinked into believing that nuclear waste disposal is an "unsolved" problem. In order to perpetuate the absurd mythology of nuclear waste, anti-nuclear extremists have concocted the absurd idea of a "nuclear priesthood" to warn people of the dangers of buried nuclear waste thousands of years in the future. Never mind that coal waste contains more overall radioactivity and is not contained at all. The idea of a "nuclear priesthood" is based on another absurd anti-nuclear distortion: the idea that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years."
Oh yes, nuclear waste would indeed be "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" if we were stupid enough to leave it lying around untreated, but did someone forget to mention that coal ash is dangerous forever? That's right: solid chemical waste never decays. It will be as dangerous in ten million years as it was the day it was generated. And there is so much of it that we have no choice but to leave it lying around untreated. So do we need a "coal-ash priesthood"? Only if we've lost our sanity and common sense. Note, incidentally, that uranium comes from the ground in the first place, where it is neither encased in stainless-steel-lined concrete containers nor isolated from groundwater.
The whole notion that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" is fundamentally misleading. Nuclear waste contains a combination of many radioactive materials with a wide range of halflives, ranging from a fraction of a second to millions of years. The short-lived materials radiate very intensely but for a short period of time (they are safely dissipated at the power plant long before they are ever put into long-term storage). The long-lived materials such as uranium and plutonium, on the other hand, radiate for a very long time but at an extremely low level -- so low that their danger is essentially chemical. The materials with intermediate halflives on the order of a few decades are the most problematic, but even they are easily managable.
Coal-fired power is thousands or perhaps even millions of times more dangerous and harmful to the environment than nuclear power. Does that mean coal-fired power should be stopped? Absolutely not. Even coal-fired power is far better than no power at all. Without economical electric power, we will rapidly degenerate into a third-world nation, and average lifespans will drop precipitously. Even though coal-fired power costs many lives, its net effect is to extend lifespans. The point is not that coal-fired power is bad, but rather that nuclear power is thousands of times cleaner and safer. And the fact that so many so-called "environmentalists" vociferously oppose nuclear power -- even while they agitate for draconian measures to stop "global warming" -- should tell you something about them: they are either ignorant or they have ulterior ideological motives -- or both.
It was Congress -- when they created the EPA and created various environmental protection acts. A result of a vague and bogus reading of the Constitution.
But your post started me thinking about how the line item veto was declared unconstitutional because it in effect abrogates Congressional legislative authority to the president.
But isn't that what Congress does when they give these bureaucracies rule-making powers? Why isn't that unconstitutional?
The latest environmental industry's cash cow and reason for being.
I can see it now. Some hungry environmental lawyer is going to read this and start salivating. Remember the lawsuits over mandating PCB dredging in the Hudson & St Lawrence Seaway?
Regulations are associated with and required by laws passed by Congress. Therefore YOU elect these people who are part of the administrative bureaucracies: state, local and federal as well as scientists, businesses and legal authorities.
Before they are finalized the American People are asked to submit comments on the proposed regulations. These comments, generally from interested parties and scientific experts in the field, are sometimes accomodated by changing what is proposed. Anyone, including you, can submit comments while the writing is going on.
Because it occurs at Congress's command as opposed to an action CONTRARY to Congress.
Would that it were true. I don't recall ever seeing these bureaucrats names or the positions they hold appear on any ballot I've ever cast.
Not only that, the article states that no ill effects have ever been demonstrated from mercury particulate in power plant discharge, and that medical associations state that in women and children mercury levels are generally below any level that would cause concern.
Sounds like they've already gotten input from scientists and the medical community but they've decided on some hypothetical number of lives that will be saved FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER if these regulations go into effect. And I don't recall seeing any notice that citizens in general are invited to send comments, do you? Did such a thing happen? What would happen if they were FReeped, for instance, to prevent these burdensome and apparently UNNECESSARY regulations from going into effect? It doesn't sound like the EPA is responsive to the scientific or medical community to me, which is my opinion anyway.
BTTT
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.