07:08 AM PST on Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Associated Press

NWCN.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Bush administration says its new power plant regulations will cut mercury pollution from electric utilities nearly in half by 2020, raising electricity prices but helping protect fetuses and young children from a toxic metal known to cause nerve damage.

Yet critics say the Environmental Protection Agency's rules, which use an industry-favored market trading approach rather than required cuts at each specific coal-burning power plant, fail to do all that the Clean Air Act requires.

"Unless every coal-fired power plant is required to reduce its emissions, dangerously high concentrations of mercury in Maine and other parts of the country will persist," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

The EPA on Tuesday was issuing the regulations - the first mercury controls on coal-burning power plants - to meet a court-ordered deadline in a settlement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that sued EPA 13 years ago to regulate hazardous air pollutants from power plants. Since the late 1990s, the EPA has regulated mercury dumped in water and air from municipal waste and medical waste incinerators.

Environmental and public health groups, including the Defense Council, criticized EPA's approach for not requiring all power plants to use the best available pollution-control technology.

"It's the do-nothing approach to mercury," said John Walke, NRDC's director of clean air programs. "They get a holiday basically ... that requires them to reduce mercury no more than would incidentally be achieved from their smog and soot cuts."

The new EPA rules anticipate that the nation's 450-plus coal-burning power plants that now produce a total of 48 tons of mercury each year will cut that amount to 31.3 tons in 2010, 27.9 tons in 2015 and 24.3 tons in 2020.

The agency's "cap-and-trade" approach sets a maximum on how much pollution should be allowed, then lets companies trade within those limits. Some companies can increase pollution while others turn a profit selling unused pollution allowances.