EPA Study Stirs Mercury Flap

Internal Study Points To Higher Benefits From Curbing Mercury

(AP) 
The report said the mercury hot spot off the Atlantic coast was produced by "significant rainfall in the offshore area that washes out large amounts of mercury emitted by power plants and other sources." It said U.S. pollution is responsible for 37 percent to 68 percent of the mercury deposits there.

Jason Burnett, a policy aide to Holmstead, said Thursday his agency disagrees with that conclusion.

"The question is how much of that mercury comes from U.S. power plants, and that's the quantification that we don't believe is sufficiently understood to use in a rule-making context," he said.

Mercury concentrations accumulate in fish and go up the food chain, posing the greatest risk of nerve damage to pregnant women, women of childbearing ages and young children. EPA officials also had said mercury-contaminated fish from abroad posed the biggest threat.

Stadler said the unreleased EPA report "paints a different picture — that in certain parts of the country you have a lot of Americans eating fish caught locally."

Douglas Rae, a Boston economist and principal author of the internal report, said the EPA commissioned it two years ago.

"I think it's reasonable, but people can argue about that," he said in an interview Thursday. Rae called it "the kind of analysis that EPA staff do all the time. They don't intend them to be used in a rule-making, because there are a lot of uncertainties."

A "final" version is dated January 2004, 14 months before EPA released its mercury rule for power plants. Agency officials said that report is still being internally peer reviewed, which is why it wasn't considered for EPA's rule. The March rule ordered steps it estimated would cut mercury pollution from power plants in half by 2020, from 48 tons a year now to 24.3 tons.

Environmental and health groups said EPA could achieve quicker cleanups and fewer hot spots if it ordered the nation's 600 coal-burning power plants to install hundreds of millions of dollars in new pollution controls, under a firm deadline.

Last month, the EPA publicly estimated the annual benefits of its nationwide cleanup program at $50 million a year, compared to costs for utilities and electricity users of $750 million a year by 2020. Forty percent of all U.S. mercury pollution comes from coal-fired power plants; those releases have never before been regulated.