AP: EPA Releases Mercury Pollution Report

By JOHN HEILPRIN
The Associated Press
Friday, April 29, 2005; 2:36 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/28/AR2005042801466.\
html

WASHINGTON -- An internal Environmental Protection Agency report
estimates the Southeast alone could reap up to $2 billion a year in
benefits from reducing mercury pollution _ far greater than the $50
million in benefits the agency projected publicly for the entire nation.

Critics said the report shows the Bush administration sought to minimize
the benefits of reducing mercury pollution in order to justify not
requiring power plant owners to buy the most effective technology for
lowering mercury emissions.

"EPA has a track record of withholding information that doesn't support
their agenda, and this is the latest example," said Felice Stadler, a
National Wildlife Federation policy specialist.

A separate EPA-commissioned study released in February by the Harvard
Center for Risk Analysis estimated there could be $5 billion a year in
public health benefits from a 62.5 percent cut in the mercury released
by power plants. That study too was excluded from consideration in the
new rule EPA released in March.

The report on Southeast benefits, a copy of which was obtained by The
Associated Press, looked at reducing mercury concentrations in marine
fish and shellfish.

It did not estimate the cost of achieving this reduction but said
reducing national mercury emissions by 30 percent to 100 percent would
produce Southeast benefits of between $600 million to more than $2 billion.

This report also found a mercury "hot spot" _ deposits of the toxic
metal stretching across 50,000 square miles in the South Atlantic, from
North Carolina to South Florida.

The existence of such a large mercury concentration raises questions
about public assertions by EPA officials that their new rule would
prevent such hot spots.

Announcing the new regulations in March, EPA's air quality chief,
Jeffrey Holmstead, said, "We don't think there will be any hot spots.
We're quite confident of that."

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.

___

On the Net:

EPA: http://www.epa.gov/mercury

© 2005 The Associated Press

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