More Problems With Coal

Yesterday a study was publicized which claimed a correlation between mercury emissions from coal-fired powerplants and the incidence of autism.

On Tuesday the EPA issued a new "Clean Air Mercury" rule.

You would think this rule, which requires a 22% cut in mercury emissions by 2010, would gain some credit for the Bush administration, which has often been accused of weakening environmental regulations to the short-term benefit of industry. But it's not so simple. According to a Knight Ridder news article:

The Bush administration... [hailed] the reductions as the deepest cuts technologically possible... But nearly a dozen power plants nationwide have [cut] cutting mercury emissions by as much as 94 percent -- in test projects paid for by the same Bush administration.

Not long before the Three Mile Island incident, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a paper comparing total expected deaths from radiation, for
two types of powerplants: coal and nuclear. They concluded that nuclear power was safer. (!) If you consider other factors such as environmental damage caused by sulfur emissions (acid rain) and now mercury, the only advantages to burning coal are that: we have a lot of it; it's mined in areas which would otherwise be economically impoverished (e.g. West Virginia).

I think the paper was:
Union of Concerned Scientists. The Risks of Nuclear Power Reactors (Cambridge, MA: 1977).