Environmentalists fear ‘clear skies’

Friday, April 8, 2005 | 8:48 a.m.

A bill now in Congress would erode already weakened standards for controlling mercury, a toxic pollutant, from Nevada's power plants, a report from an environmental advocacy group said.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group said the "clear skies" bill now stalled in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee would allow three of the four boilers at the Reid Gardner Generating Station north of Las Vegas and both boilers at the North Valmy station near Battle Mountain to continue throwing pounds of mercury into the air.

The bill would create an exemption for boilers, or units as they are called in the industry, from cleanup rules if they produce less than 30 pounds of mercury annually. Both the North Valmy and Reid Gardner plants are owned by Sierra Pacific Resources or its regional subsidiary, Nevada Power.

The only plant in Nevada that would not receive an exemption under the proposal, which is backed by the Bush administration, would be the Mohave Generating Station, which is owned by Southern California Edison and may be closed in a few years because of other environmental emission issues anyway.

The plants that would be exempted emit almost 64 pounds of mercury into the air annually, activists in Nevada and Washington, D.C., said Thursday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the provision criticized by PIRG wasn't part of the original "clear skies" bill, but was added during discussion in the Senate.

The agency on March 15 instituted rule changes, some of which mirror the bill. Both the rule, which environmental groups are challenging in the courts, and the bill allow mercury producing industries to trade pollution credits while aiming for national caps on the amount of mercury that the industries can produce.

Supryia Ray, a "clean air advocate" with U.S. PIRG, said the bill, though, is worse. The bill would roll back so-called "source review," which requires polluting industries to install the best available pollution control technologies when doing significant upgrades to their plants.

The rule as it is now does not allow an exemption for any power plant boilers, she said.

"The bill also would prohibit states from taking action to crack down on pollution," a move that some states, particularly on the East Coast, are taking, Ray said.

The U.S. PIRG study titled "The Fine Print" used EPA data from 1999 to calculate that, nationally, loopholes in the bill could exempt 441 of 1,120 mercury-emitting power plant units from regulation.

Some forms of mercury contamination can be deadly in even small amounts, and accumulated levels in fish have become a significant health concern. The EPA and federal Food and Drug Administration last year advised people, especially pregnant or nursing women, to limit their consumption of some kinds of fish that tend to accumulate mercury.

Brad Johnson, Nevada organizer for the group, said mercury pollution from the Silver State plants affects significant areas of the West.

"Anyone who is concerned about the quality of the air, but also the quality of the water in Lake Mead, should be concerned about the emissions," Johnson said. "This bill would exempt a number of units in Nevada from mercury controls, some of them just outside Las Vegas. Three units at the Reid Gardner plant would be completely off the hook.

"That's quite a bit of mercury, 64 pounds, coming from units exempted from mercury controls," Johnson said.

The Bush administration says the "cap-and-trade" approach to controlling mercury emissions nationally embodied in the bill would reduce the amount of mercury by 69 percent, from the national total of about 50 tons annually today to 15 tons in 2018, with a "proven market-based approach." President Bush originally proposed the measures in 2002.

In the Senate committee last month, Sen. James M. Jeffords, I-Vt., and Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, R-R.I, joined Senate Democrats to block the bill from going to the Senate floor. Ray, with U.S. PIRG, said the measure could return to the Senate, and House Republicans have scheduled an April 21 hearing on the clear skies initiative.

Thomas Fair, environmental services director for Sierra Pacific Resources, said his company does not have a formal position on the bill, which he said appears to be locked up for the moment.

"I understand it's dead, tied up in (the) Senate Environment and Public Works (Committee)," Fair said. "It didn't make it."

He said Sierra Pacific is working to understand the scope and impact of the March 15 rules already instituted by the EPA.

"We have to study the rule," Fair said. "There are a lot of ways it could be implemented. You have a lot of things yet to play out in terms of what its impact could be." Three units at the Reid Gardner plant would be completely off the hook.