New Mercury Pollution Rules Coming

(AP)  The Bush administration says its new power plant regulations will cut mercury pollution from electric utilities nearly in half by 2020, raising electricity prices but helping protect fetuses and young children from a toxic metal known to cause nerve damage.

Yet critics say the Environmental Protection Agency's rules, which use an industry-favored market trading approach rather than required cuts at each specific coal-burning power plant, fail to do all that the Clean Air Act requires.

"Unless every coal-fired power plant is required to reduce its emissions, dangerously high concentrations of mercury in Maine and other parts of the country will persist," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

The EPA on Tuesday was issuing the regulations — the first mercury controls on coal-burning power plants — to meet a court-ordered deadline in a settlement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that sued EPA 13 years ago to regulate hazardous air pollutants from power plants. Since the late 1990s, the EPA has regulated mercury dumped in water and air from municipal waste and medical waste incinerators.

Environmental and public health groups, including the Defense Council, criticized EPA's approach for not requiring all power plants to use the best available pollution-control technology.

"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."

The new EPA rules anticipate that the nation's 450-plus coal-burning power plants that now produce a total of 48 tons of mercury each year will cut that amount to 31.3 tons in 2010, 27.9 tons in 2015 and 24.3 tons in 2020.

The agency's "cap-and-trade" approach sets a maximum on how much pollution should be allowed, then lets companies trade within those limits. Some companies can increase pollution while others turn a profit selling unused pollution allowances.

Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the power industry's Edison Electric Institute, said a cap and trade approach is preferable to setting a single deadline for making technology improvements that, once met, gives "little or no incentive" to cut more pollution.

Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power companies, said using market forces to control pollution would result in significant cuts while providing stability for consumers and electricity producers.

"The federal government is wise to avoid overly inflexible mercury control programs," Segal said. "If regulations force utilities to shift from coal to natural gas, the result is predictable" — higher electricity prices.

Utilities could also meet the EPA's targets by switching to cleaner-burning coal or natural gas. But power plants at first will not have to do anything more than what is required to reduce two other pollutants under a rule EPA issued last week to address air pollution that travels long distances, agency spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said.

That's because the mercury rule "relies completely" during first five years, she said, on incidental cuts from scrubbers to reduce fine particles from sulfur dioxide and from chemical processes to reduce smog-forming ground-level ozone from nitrogen oxides.

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, since most Americans consume fish from abroad.

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 power plants, but those emissions have never been regulated as a pollutant.