Fighting Mercury Pollution in North Carolina
SELC pushes North Carolina to issue strong mercury regulations
After months of pushing by SELC, medical professionals and environmental and public health professions, the state of North Carolina issued regulations that will require the state's utilities to install effective mercury pollution controls at all units in North Carolina no later than 2017. The regulations are likely to among the strongest mercury regulations in the country.
©Robert Llewellyn
In North Carolina, a 90 percent or better efficiency in controlling mercury pollution would only cost utility customers between 33 and 77 cents a month.
North Carolina's regulations will require existing power plants to install the “maximum level of reduction” of all units no later than 2017 regardless of the level of controls the plants already receive through the Clean Smokestacks Act. New sources will be required to install the best available control technology, which is expected to result in state of the art levels of mercury control.
Existing units can avoid installing the necessary controls if they are determined not to be technically or economically feasible. However, this determination can only be made if the utility proves that continued operation of the unit without such controls will not contribute to health problems and that they will achieve deeper controls at other units. Industry trade groups have said that technology that will effectively control mercury is affordable and available. In North Carolina, significant mercury reduction technology can be installed at a cost of less than one percent of utility profits – as little as 33 cents per month on the average household utility bill.
North Carolina is among the top 12 states with the highest mercury emissions from power plants.When it comes to mercury pollution, North Carolina faces a triple threat. First, the state's large number of coal-fired power plants release an exceptional amount of mercury into the state's air - the 9th highest amount in the country. Then, the region's abundant rainfall carries the pollution into rivers and streams in high volumes. Finally, the area's backwater streams and wetlands convert the mercury into a particularly toxic form that puts humans and wildlife at risk. The threat to the state is so great in fact, that in one part of southeastern North Carolina, residents have the highest mercury levels in their blood and hair in the country - three times higher than EPA's safe threshold.
The link between mercury pollution and developmental and learning disabilities is so serious that pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable and warned against eating certain types of fish altogether. These routine fish advisories pose a threat to North Carolina's economy as well, which enjoys the $2.3 billion impact the fishing industry has on the state - among the highest in the nation.
Controlling mercury pollution by avoiding contaminated fish and polluted rivers is not the answer. Real solutions must focus on slashing mercury emissions at the source so that fish populations have a chance to recover. Like the rest of the nation, in North Carolina, the largest source of mercury pollution is coal-fired power plants. In fact, according to the EPA, North Carolina power plants are responsible for more than 70 percent of in-state mercury emissions, far above the national average.
For these reasons, EPA rightly determined in 2000 that mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants must be regulated as a "hazardous pollutant" and be subject to the the most state-of-the-art pollution controls. However, this common-sense approach to mercury pollution ended in 2005 when EPA reversed itself to declare that mercury would not be regulated by requiring plants to adopt the most effective pollution controls to curb their mercury emissions. Instead, through adoption of the Clean Air Mercury Rule, EPA attempts to control mercury through a cap-and-trade scheme that will delay clean-up by years, allowing even the dirtiest power plants to continue to pollute by buying "credits" from a cleaner plant across the country. In fact, EPA projects that U.S. power plants will continue to emit nearly 20 tons of mercury into the air every year as late as 2030 under the federal rule. States, including North Carolina, had the option of either adopting this weak federal rule or developing their own mercury rules that are at least as stringent.
