More on Mercury Contamination

[Jerry Blake]

I received this email from the Director of U.S. Public Interest Research Group today if anyone is interested:

"Dear U.S. PIRG supporter,

I want to thank everyone who called and asked their U.S. Representative to sign on to the mercury letter being circulated by U.S. Representatives Thomas Allen (ME) and Jim Cooper (TN) calling on the EPA and the Bush administration to strengthen its weak mercury plan. Your calls are making a difference, and a number of representatives have signed on to the mercury letter.

We're also asking the U.S. Senate to get involved. We think more Congressional oversight is needed, and are calling on the U.S. Senate to take action to reduce mercury pollution.

Please take a moment to ask your senator to ensure that the Bush administration fully complies with the Clean Air Act and reduces mercury pollution. Then ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:
http://pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=748&id4=ES


Background

Mercury is a dangerous toxic metal that can cause severe neurological and developmental problems in fetuses and very young children whose brains are still developing. People are exposed to mercury mainly by eating fish. The EPA and forty-three states have now issued advisories warning people, especially women and children, to avoid or limit eating local fish because of mercury. But even with these warnings, the EPA's scientists estimate that 1 out of 6 U.S. women of childbearing age has levels of mercury in her blood that are unsafe for developing fetuses. This means that as many as 630,000 children are born every single year at risk of neurological problems due to mercury exposure.

The best way to protect women and children from mercury is to eliminate it from its largest source: power plants. Smokestacks spew mercury pollution into the air, where it rains and snows down into our waterways, accumulating in fish and making them unsafe to eat. Amazingly, power plants have yet to be regulated for mercury pollution under federal clean air standards, and the electric and coal industries are pressing hard to avoid limiting their mercury emissions.

After years of work by us and other public health advocates, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now under a deadline to reduce the dangers of mercury from power plants. Two years ago, the EPA's own scientists said current technologies could achieve a 90 percent reduction of mercury from power plants. But last December, the EPA put forward a weak proposal that would, in effect, treat power plant mercury emissions as non-toxic air pollution. The Bush administration's plan allows power plants to emit six to seven times more mercury over the next decade than they would be able to under the Clean Air Act. Some facilities would even be allowed to continue polluting completely unabated simply by purchasing pollution "credits."

In March, EPA Administrator Leavitt - after an immense public outcry about the Bush administration's inadequate proposal for addressing power plant emissions of mercury - announced that the EPA would begin studying options for strengthening the mercury proposal. But since that time, we have not heard a thing from the EPA on what its plans are for this proposal. It seems that we have not yet succeeded in getting the EPA to strengthen its mercury proposal, and that Congressional oversight is needed.

Please take a moment to ask your senator to ensure that the Bush administration fully complies with the Clean Air Act and reduces mercury pollution. Then ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:
http://pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=748&id4=ES

Sincerely,

Gene Karpinski
U.S. PIRG Executive Director
[email protected]
http://www.USPIRG.org

P.S. Thanks again for your support. Please feel free to share this e-mail with your family and friends."

The make it real easy to contact your legislators to voice your opinion.

[Roberta]

Thanks for the update. There is an article in this morning's Dayton Daily News about high murcury content in the rain that falls in the Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio areas.
Our local electric company is a head-in-the-sand rural co-op that refuses to believe in the dangers of burning high suphur coal. I'm sure that they are one of the contributors to the polluted rainfall. It's very frustrating. - Roberta

[Moose1am]

Thanks for posting this information Jerry.

Hopefully everyone will read this and be more informed about mercury. I live right in the middle of the Coal Fields, The Ohio River ( cheap transportation for coal and water for cooling) and have witness how the mining and burning of coal helps and hurts us. Coal provides us with power and is cheaper than oil and nuclear in many ways but it also has some drawbacks.

I also worked in a coal testing lab and was present when the coal was tested for the power companies.

I have toured some of the biggest power plants in the USA with the Indiana Air Pollution Board members over the years.

I have measured the air pollution myself and reported those research results to USEPA and the State Air Pollution Control Agency in Indiana.

Indiana, Kentucy and Illinois all are major producers of coal and even though coal is a dirty fuel it can be burned much clearer. I started working to reduce the amount of pollution that comes out of smoke stacks back in 1977 when I first got out of college. I studied environmental science and preveternary medicine while at Purdue University. I chose those fields because I grew up fishing and hunting and enjoying the great outdoors. My father taught me to fish when I was very young. He also taught me to swim. Both those endevers are effected by pollution today. So it was a natural thing for me to gravitate to some field that would allow me and our children to live in a cleaner environment.

We have made great strides over the past 25 years in cleaning up many forms of pollution. But there are still many other forms that are still being emitted into our environment that we still have to control.

It's up to us the citizens to clean up the pollution. Only by voicing our concerns to the proper channels (Senators and Congressman, State Legislatures, Governors and Mayors can we get something done. It's not easy to write a letter but it's not that hard either. It's our country and it will be what we make it. It's up to each and every one of us to pull together to help clean up the environment.

Sure it's complicated but if you care and want a cleaner environment then it's worth the small price that we have to pay to get this done.

Jerry makes it very easy to contact your Federal Senators so why not take a few seconds to ask for their help. Your kids and grandkids will thank you.

Will it cost more? Sure it will cost a little more. I can remember when the local utilities were buring coal back in 1977 when the clean air act was first passed and I was beseigned by three TV channels to give them some news on the CAA. I had just started working at the local EPA air pollution control office. I had not read the new CAA yet and the directory would not talk to the news media and sent them to me instead. You can bet that after than I got a copy of the Clean Air Act and read it over a few times. Well I have been reading the CAA ever since that time and many other regulations dealing with Air Pollution Control. I also remember the utilities claiming that if they had to put on SO2 Scrubbers it would bankrupt them. Well I am happy to report today that many of those same utilities today are using SO2 Scrubbers to clean the flue gasses and that the price of electricity is still relatively cheap here in the midwest. The same utilities today exclaim how proud they are of their new pollution controls and how that has helped the environment. They have gradually greened up a bit over the last 25 years. But they fight new controls. This year one of the largest power plants in the world has installed new NOX controls on it's stacks and we all are hoping that it will help reduce the amount of Ozone Pollution this summer and for summers to come.

So a lot has been done to control air pollution today. I am not familar with how to properly control the mercury emission on coal. I was once hounded by an old retired engineer that I worked with. His idea was to make COKE out of coal and burn the coke to produce electricity. Coke was basically just pure carbon without all the impurities. However to make coke you have to release all the contaminates in the coal to seperate out the pure carbon and coke ovens are some of the dirties sources of pollution that I can think of. I guess he though we could control the coke ovens and then transport the ligher weight pure carbon coke to the power plants. I guess it like taking the impurities out of gasoline while it's being make out of oil at the refinerys before it's sold to the gas stations. We never went that route with coal though. We dig the coal and sometimes we wash the coal before buring it. We mix the coal (Low Sulfur Coal with High Sulfer coal) and then burn it. We scrub the smoke stack gases with Scrubbers and we take out the particulates with electrostatic precipitators to clean the air. Today we also scrub out the NOX emissions.

One power plant that produces 250 MEGAWATTS of power can burn (50) 100 ton train car loads of coal every day. A ton of coal weights 2000lbs. If just 5% of that coal becomes air born pollution then that can really add up in the environment over the years. And that is just from one power plant smoke stack. Imagine what we get when we look at all the power plants in total. Note the 5% is after pollution controls are added on. Effective controls only work when brand new and propery tuned. Over the years the effectiveness of new controls dwendles. Also some power plants actually turn off the controls at times for various reasons. Some power plants like the one in RockPort, IN I&M just use tall stacks and I think that they have no pollution controls on them at all. They were grandfathers by the CAA of 1977 and were not required to install Scrubbers or Precipators. They just were told to make their smoke stakes tall so that the pollution would blow hundreds of miles to the east and not land locally. Well that does not get the job done. Hopefully these types of power plants will have install pollution controls in the future.

Fishing is a multimillion dollar business and there are more fishermen than most any other sport. So we have the power to get things cleaned up. But you have to know what the problem is first and be given some direction on what to do.

Hopefully Jerry has provided us with just that today.

Remember we can have a cleaner environment and still have jobs. I have a neighbor who got a job working at the power plant and he runs the SO2 Scrubber. My other neighbor works in the coal testing labs. He is a IU graduate and has his degree in Geology. He helps test the coal that is being burned by the power plants. Without the CAA both this guys would not have the jobs they have today. Both are doing something worthwhile and helping to clean the environment for all of us while providing us with the power to run our AC's, our houses and our factories. They are providing us with power that is not so dependent on middle east oil also.

When I was in school taking an Environmental Engineering course I learned that we can burn the coal cleaner than we had been in the past.





[QUOTE=Jerry Blake]I received this email from the Director of U.S. Public Interest Research Group today if anyone is interested:

"

[Moose1am]

While reading the morning paper online I came across this article

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EVA&SECTION=US

This article concerns me a great deal. I normally don't like to think about radiation as it's invisible and you can't tell that it's there unless you have a giger counter or some other testing device.

However, when I was working for an Air Pollution Control Agency I went on vacation at KY Lake on Oct in 1983 and caught several deformed bass. On LM bass had a deformed lower lip that was 1/2 as big as the bass's upper lip. This was a four pound largemouth bass which may have been about 6 years old. It had lived long enought to have something cause it's malformation. The other 4 pound bass had a humped back and it too was deformed. We caught another bass which was the largest of the series and it went 6lbs. That fish looked weird also. Can't remember what was wrong with that big bass but it was strange looking. Now it's been years since this occured and I am going on my memory here.

I returned to work from the vacation and was determined to try to find out why the bass were so deformed. I scratched my head and though what is upriver from Kentucky Lake that could be putting something into the water that could cause the fish to be so malformed. I did some research and found a map of the TN river sytsem. I follow the river all the way up to Oak Ridge TN. Then it finally dawned on me. They built the A bomb at that sight back in 1945. And they have been doing atomic research there ever since. Now KY lake was built in the 1940's or about that time. Now I don't know of any water sample or reports of water having radiation in the water but that may not mean that radiation does not exist inside the food chain. Maybe like PCB's the radioactive materials could bioaccumulate up the food chain and have a more pronounced effect on the upper levels of the food chain ie the LargeMouth Bass and Larger Fish.

But when I read articles about ground water contamination in the NW it makes me wonder just how much radiation was released from other US nuclear processing sites.

I also read about the Plutonium Reprocessing Plant in Paducah KY being a source of ground water contamination a few years back. The news articles suggested that the radiation could reach the OHIO RIVER and leach into the river. Now if they method they used to try to clean up the radioactive contamination in the ground water was not working in the North Western area of the USA then I wonder then if they tried to use the same methodolgy to clean up the underground water at the Paduch KY site. I have not read much in the papers about the Paduch KY reprocessing site lately.

But this is always something that I wonder about.

I was fishing in one of the local fish and wildlife areas in Southern IN and while casting for crappie I noticed two rusty 55 gallon barrels lying up on the bank about 100ft from the waters edge. I wonder why those barrels are still there and have not been removed by AMEX coal company before the land was sold to the State of Indiana DNR?

[Moose1am]

I found this article today and wanted to let everyone in here see it that is interested. Bear in mind that there is a lot of politics (ECONOMICS) that effect the science at times.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...c/fish_mercury