Poisoning the Great Lakes: 25 Coal-fired Power Plants Responsible For Half the Region's Mercury Pollution

OH, PA and IN Are Home to Region's Worst Mercury Polluters, Followed by MI, IL, WI, MN and NY; Vote in Congress to Test Support of Region's U.S. Senators for EPA Curb on Neurotoxin.

CHICAGO, June 6, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Just ahead of a major U.S. Senate vote on the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to clean up mercury and other toxic air pollutants, a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report shows that the 25 worst coal-fired power plants account for more than half of the dangerous mercury pollution emitted by the total of 144 electricity generation facilities in the Great Lakes region. The report also finds that almost 90 percent of the toxic emissions could be eliminated with off-the-shelf technologies.

According to "Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants In the Great Lakes Region," Ohio emits the largest amount of mercury from coal-fired power plants (21 percent of the total in the Great Lakes region), followed closely by Pennsylvania (20 percent) and Indiana (16 percent). The remaining five states in the region rank as follows: Michigan (14 percent); Illinois (11 percent); Wisconsin (9.5 percent); Minnesota (6.5 percent); and New York (2 percent). Plants from outside the region also contribute to mercury pollution in the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes region's five worst coal-fired power plants for mercury pollution are: Shawville (Clearfield County, PA); Monroe (Monroe County, MI); Homer City (Indiana County, PA); Cardinal (Jefferson County, OH); and Sherburne County (Sherburne County, MN). (See the complete list below of the worst 25.) A dozen power plants in Ohio and Indiana -- owned in whole or part by American Electric Power -- accounted for 19 percent of all mercury emitted in 2010 from the total of 144 coal-fired power plants in the region.

U.S. Senator James Inhofe, R-OK, recently filed a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution (S.J. Res. 37) to void health standards reducing mercury and other toxic air pollution from power plants and to permanently block EPA from re-issuing similar safeguards.

Thomas Cmar, attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council office in Chicago, said: "Mercury is a dangerous brain poison that doesn't belong in our Great Lakes. It puts the health of kids and pregnant women at risk and adds an unwelcome danger to eating what our fishermen catch. That's why it is so important that we support the EPA's standards to reduce mercury pollution by holding polluters accountable. Even more critical is that every single U.S. Senator from the region stand up for the Lakes by rejecting reckless attempts to derail the long overdue Clean Air Act updates that can help tame this problem."

Cindy Copeland, report author and formerly with the EPA Air Program, said: "Mercury is poisoning the Great Lakes and the three states - Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania -- that impose no rules are by far the worst offenders. Airborne mercury from coal-fired power plants in the Great Lakes Region harms our health, and the benefits of reducing mercury emissions are well worth the cost. With a reduction of health costs to the economy at up to $90 billion, it is hard to say no to this."

In the Great Lakes region, there are more than 144 coal-fired power plants which pumped over 13,000 pounds of mercury into the air in 2010. Mercury pollution from these plants' region accounts for close to 25 percent of the nation's total. The Great Lakes region is comprised of the five Great Lakes (Erie, Ontario, Huron, Michigan, and Superior) and the eight surrounding states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Wisconsin).

Eating poisoned fish is the primary cause of mercury poisoning of humans. Mercury is a neurotoxin that harms the brain, heart, central nervous system, kidneys, lungs, and immune system. Young children and developing fetuses are most at risk, and can suffer developmental problems from mercury poisoning.

THE WORST-25 GREAT LAKES REGION COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS

1. Shawville (Clearfield Cty, PA)
2. Monroe (Monroe Cty, MI)
3. Homer City (Indiana Cty, PA)
4. Cardinal (Jefferson Cty, OH)
5. Sherburne County (Sherburne Cty, MN)
6. Muskingum River (Washington Cty, OH)
7. Hatfield's Ferry (Fayette Cty, PA)
8. Walter C Beckjord (Clermont Cty, OH)
9. Wabash River (Vigo Cty, IN)
10. Newton (Jasper Cty, IL)
11. Pleasant Prairie (Kenosha Cty, WI)
12. Belle River (St. Clair Cty, MI)
13. Clifty Creek (Jefferson Cty, IN)
14. Columbia (Columbia Cty, WI)
15. St Clair (St Clair Cty, MI)
16. Rockport (Spencer Cty, IN)
17. Gavin (Gallia Cty, OH)
18. Bruce Mansfield (Beaver Cty, PA)
19. South Oak Creek (Milwaukee Cty, WI)
20. Kyger Creek (Gallia Cty, OH)
21. State Line (Lake Cty, IN)
22. J M Stuart (Brown Cty, OH)
23. Tanners Creek (Dearborn Cty, IN)
24. Boswell (Itasca Cty, MN)
25. Joppa Steam (Massac Cty, IL)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued nationwide rules to require coal-fired power plants to limit airborne mercury emissions and other toxic air pollutants by 2015. The technologies to meet the EPA's mercury limits are widely available and effective.

Based on projected reductions in fine particulate emissions due to the combined benefits of various air toxic pollution controls, the EPA has projected that the benefits of its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) far outweigh the costs of pollution controls. The health benefits of the MATS are projected to be worth $37 to $90 billion in 2016 alone. The EPA has projected that the majority of the benefits would be reaped in the eastern United States, including the Great Lakes region.

Mercury emitted into the air from coal-fired power plants is by far the leading man-made source of mercury reaching the Great Lakes and the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great Lakes region. This report lists the top 25 mercury emitting plants in the region. Mercury pollution from plants outside the region also contributes to the overall quantity of mercury found in the Great Lakes. When coal is burned to produce electricity, mercury is emitted into the air. The EPA estimates that coal-fired power plants are the largest man-made source of mercury pollution, accounting for 50 percent of mercury air emissions in the United States.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world's natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, Montana, and Beijing. Visit us at www.nrdc.org and follow us on Twitter @NRDC.

SOURCE Natural Resources Defense Council, New York
Web Site: http://www.nrdc.org

Are compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) a fire risk? Can they catch fire? Are they dangerous?

Just now a warning email came through one of the mailing lists I'm on. It was one of those friendly warnings meant to inform us of a risky thing many of us are doing. It talked about a CFL light bulb danger. The writer witnessed a CFL catch fire and oh my gosh it was lucky s/he was right there or it could have been a horrible fire. It concluded claiming that these compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are dangerous and we'd better wait for LED bulbs rather than switch to CFL's. I've written about this before (see: 'Green' lightbulbs poison workers) but it seems appropos to write about it yet again.

There's a lot of fearism going around centered around CFL lights. They have mercury, mercury is dangerous, so if we want to be green we should stop using CFL's. Or, there's horrible mining conditions in China because of CFL's, that's bad, we don't want to be responsible for that badness, so we should stop using CFL's. etc... I wonder whether there is a disinformation campaign going on by the incandescent bulb industry to discredit CFL's? Or maybe it's the electricity industry instead who want to maintain sales of electricity?

To reiterate my earlier blog post:-

• Electricity generation is usually done from fossil fuels, which themselves emit mercury into the environment. The reduced electricity use reduces mercury emissions by more than is in the bulb.
• The danger of mercury mining in China is probably more to do with lax safety regulations than CFL bulbs. There are known practices to mine mercury safely, and it's a shame that the Chinese can't get it together to do this safely.
• Mercury is a dangerous substance anyway, and we should strive to eliminate its use anyway

FWIW I have started buying LED bulbs but not because of any risk from CFL's (I've been using CFL's since 1990) but because LED bulbs are even more efficient. I started using CFL's in 1990 because of efficiency, and I'm always looking for the most efficient means for anything.

This particular email struck me as a mild form of that fearism. I pasted a couple sentences from the letter into my favorite search engine, and the top result was a snopes.com posting with the exact same wording. Yes, this was one of those email chain-letters that get passed around.

The text reads (analysis below the text):-

Below is a picture of a CFL light bulb from my bathroom. I turned it on the other day and then smelled smoke after a few minutes. Four inch flames were spewing out of the side of the ballast like a blow torch! I immediately turned off the lights. But I'm sure it would have caused a fire if I was not right there. Imagine if the kids had left the lights on as usual when they were not in the room.

I took the bulb to the Fire Department to report the incident. The Fireman wasn't at all surprised and said that it was not an uncommon occurrence. Apparently, sometimes when the bulb burns out there is a chance that the ballast can start a fire. He told me that the Fire Marshall had issued reports about the dangers of these bulbs.

Upon doing some Internet research, it seems that bulbs made by ??oGlobe??? in China seem to have the lions share of problems. Lots of fires have been blamed on misuse of CFL bulbs, like using them in recessed lighting, pot lights, dimmers or in track lighting. Mine was installed in a normal light socket.

I bought these at Wal-Mart. I will be removing all the Globe bulbs from my house. CFL bulbs are a great energy saver but make sure you buy a name brand like Sylvania , Phillips or GE and not the ones from China .

But if you want to be safe and protect your family from toxic mercury in CFL bulbs, use LED bulbs to save energy or Incandescent bulbs until you switch to LEDs.

Almost exactly the same as it appears on Snopes' website. Hence this is one of those emails that gets passed around.

The email specifically refers to Globe branded bulbs, and Snopes says there's no reports anywhere of fires with Globe branded bulbs. None. It does refer to a recall issued in October 2010 for a different brand of Chinese CFL bulbs, that's related to less than 10 incidents of fire in CFL bulbs. 10 incidents out of how many CFL bulbs in the world? This sounds like an excellent track record.

The Snopes article also says it's quite normal for CFL bulbs to emit some smoke as they burn out. They're designed to do this. It's normal. etc. It wouldn't be normal for actual flames to be emitted. Of course.

At the top I pondered whether there's a disinformation campaign. I don't have any knowledge, it's largely a brain fart, with some reasoning behind it:-

There are a couple industries which stand to lose out if CFL's become the norm. a) incandescant bulb makers, and b) electricity companies

Writing like the above is geared to raise doubt within the reader's mind ... "hmm, maybe __fill in the blank__ is bad" ...

It's interesting how it names specific brands, saying that this one brand is cheap Chinese crap and instead we should use those other brands, name brands, because name brands are safer?

The last paragraph reads like a delaying tactic...

The fact is that incumbent industries want to continue business as usual. The electricity generator companies want to continue increasing the amount of electricity they sell. As a business they're expected by their shareholders to continue growing the company. Hence anything which threatens to decrease the amount of electricity being used is dangerous.

The electricity companies therefore have a motive to fight against anything that improves efficiency, because efficiency decreases the electricity being sold.

It's known that modern marketing techniques are very closely tied to mass psychology manipulation. And that there are subtle forms of marketing such as having people pose on the street as being excited about some new piece of technology, but instead it's marketing agents planting ideas in the population. It seems possible that emails like the ones above could be manipulated fakery planted by the same sort of marketing efforts.

In any case it's time for me to put down the keyboard, shower, shave, hop on my electric bicycle, and ride to work (where I'll pick up another keyboard). Why an electric bicycle? Because it's hugely more efficient than any other transportation method I've found.

Links: 

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/cflbulb.asp

'Green' lightbulbs poison workers

'Green' lightbulbs poison workers presents a screwball slanted view of a problem arising from the rising use of compact fluorescent lights. It isn't widely known but these lights contain a small amount of mercury to aid the fluorescing process, and of course mercury is a well known poisonous metal that causes damage to the nervous system, lungs, kidneys and more. It poses a particular threat to babies in the womb and young children. The problem is that this article spins it as a problem with the lightbulbs, when the real problem is lax environmental regulations in some countries.

The amount of mercury in each compact fluorescent lightbulb is very small. There is a fearism scare going around about the exposure risk from breaking individual CFL bulbs, but that risk is overhyped. However at the other end of the process, mercury has to be mined and processed in factories in industrial quantities. This means exposing workers to risky work where they may be exposed to mercury. Fortunately in advanced countries there are worker protection and hazardous materials laws that require corporations to maintain safety, keeping workers in advanced countries safe.

Globalism however is involved. Globalism being the process that's undermining industrial production in the advanced countries, and causing industrial production to move to places like India and China where the workforce can be bought for less cost, and where laws are weak or nonexistent. In this case compact fluorescent lights are being built in China, causing a rise in mercury mining in China. Because China has lax environmental laws "hundreds of employees have found dangerously high levels of mercury in their bodies and many have required hospital treatment, according to interviews with workers, doctors and local health officials in the cities of Foshan and Guangzhou.... In one case, Foshan city officials intervened to order medical tests on workers at the Nanhai Feiyang lighting factory after receiving a petition alleging dangerous conditions...The tests found 68 out of 72 workers were so badly poisoned they required hospitalisation."

The article describes "medieval" mining conditions with miners lacking any protection gear, and working in toxic dust and vapours. However cinnabar mining has occurred in China for nearly 1000 years and the article has this quote: “Our forefathers had been mining for mercury since the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] and in olden days there was no pollution from such small mines,” said a 72-year-old farmer, named Shen. “But in modern times thousands of miners came to our land, dug it out and poured chemicals to wash away the waste. Our water buffaloes grew stunted from drinking the water and our crops turned grey. Our people fell sick and didn’t live long. Anybody who could do has left.” Indicating that historically these people mined cinnabar in small quantities without problem, but the modern era has them mining it at a larger scale resulting in medical problems.

Let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Is this a problem of the light bulbs? The referenced article states the CFL's are the problem. Are they? Or is the real problem lax environmental regulations?

Clearly mercury is a known problem material that causes known health problems. It's not like a situation of "I didn't know it would cause that problem" because everybody clearly knows that mercury exposure causes health problems. Therefore if mercury is to be used it must be used safely.

The principle here is to treat materials with the care required to use those materials without negative side effects. One way is to simply not use the material but that's not always an option. So if you do have to use a given material then it must always be used safely.

The Chinese are violating this principle by not applying known best practices to address known problems. But that's not the extent of the diagnosis. Also at issue is the use of mercury in the first place. The best way to mitigate mercury poisoning is by not mining the mercury in the first place. That mercury is perfectly fine where it is, and if left in the ground does not cause problems. The problem comes when it's dug up, refined, and put into use among human beings.

This is not a purely local concern to a few people in a remote part of China. Mercury is among a group of pollutants called persistent bioaccumulative toxins or PBTs. These pollutants "persist" in the environment, meaning that they do not break down or go away. Mercury cannot be destroyed, it cannot be combusted, and it does not degrade. Mercury also "bioacccumulates" in the environment, meaning it builds up in the food chain over time. Because mercury bioaccumulates the mercury released in China will eventually spread elsewhere as animals eat other animals spreading the contents of each others bodies throughout the environment. (Biomagnification of Pops and Mercury in Canadian Freshwater Subsistence Fisheries and Food Webs, Bioconcentration, Bioaccumulation, and Biomagnification in Puget Sound Biota: Assessing the Ecological Risk of Chemical Contaminants in Puget Sound., THE GREAT LAKES TODAY: CONCERNS)

Algae eat up mercury in Chinese lake outlines research into algae blooms in China’s largest natural lake, Lake Baiyangdian. The lake is an important source of fish for the local population and is also heavily poisoned with arsenic and mercury. Algae blooms are resulting from the pollution and are mitigating the arsenic and mercury poisoning. However I can't imagine that is a complete solution, because of bioaccumulation.

zeromercury.org is looking into the mercury problem on a global scale with several projects to educate locals and mitigate mercury problems.

Mercury-free compact fluorescent bulbs? has some interesting answers. First, there are some improvements to reduce mercury use in fluorescent bulbs. Second, LED bulbs do not have mercury. Third, even if you use existing mercury-containing CFL bulbs there is a net decrease in mercury release into the environment. That's because fossil fuels like coal contain many poisons, including mercury, and that decreasing electricity use causes a decrease in coal being burned causing a decrease in the release of these poisons from burning coal.

External Media

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

There's a growing awareness of the compact fluorescent lights. That's a good thing because they're generally a good thing, they last longer than incandescent bulbs and use less electricity to produce the same amount of light. BUT, if you're observant you'll see a notice on the package saying they contain Mercury.

Mercury poisoning has played a role in many environmental toxin disasters. There was a fishing village in Japan where mercury was dumped into the ocean near their fishing grounds and the villagers became desperately sick. And mercury poisoning is also known as Mad Hatters Syndrome, because in old England hatmakers used mercury for something or other and ended up injesting lots of mercury and going mad as a result.

With over 150 million CFL bulbs sold every year it's an interesting problem. Yes the lights last longer than incandescent bulbs, but eventually they'll break or wear out and be tossed. So what happens to the mercury afterward? And I think we shouldn't stop at the mercury, because the CFL bulbs I've examined all have a printed circuit board on them with various electrical components, and its well known that other toxic chemicals like PCB's generally are used in the components in electrical circuits.

This is another case of solving one problem and creating several others.

Article Reference: 

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists