Damage Control

Susan Brown lives in Dearborn, Missouri, with her husband and two kids at the top of a long, pebbled driveway lined with trees. She grew up on a farm, so when her husband accidentally backed over the family's black dog a month ago, her instinct said "Shoot." Her husband was the one who insisted on taking the animal to the vet (it now lopes around the yard in a blue cast). Clearly, Brown is no bleeding heart. She says she joined the Sierra Club for the free backpack and swears she's not really an environmentalist. She says power plants aren't an environmental issue to her. They're a health issue.

Brown was alarmed to read in the Sierra Club's newsletter that the Weston Bend plant would be within 10 miles of her home. She started trolling the Internet for information on the health risks of burning coal. Her reading brought Brown to the subject of mercury, a metal in the earth's crust and in coal.

Anything that flings rock around at high temperatures can potentially release mercury into the air. When it's burned, elemental mercury becomes a gas that's soluble and clings to water particles. Burning a charcoal briquet might release an incidental amount of mercury into the air, but power plants burn freightloads of coal every hour. The mercury clings to water particles in the air and eventually falls to the earth in rain and runs off into lakes and streams. Reacting with bacteria in water, some of this mercury will become poisonous methylmercury. Methylmercury is absorbed into the food chain from algae to little fish to big fish -- to the people who eat them.

For customers who are concerned about mercury, KCPL provides a booklet titled "Straight Answers About Electric Utilities and Mercury" (published by the Edison Electric Institute). A short definition of methylmercury in the booklet adds, "Electric power plants do not release organic mercury, and, therefore, electric utilities do not emit methylmercury."

It is true that coal-burning power plants don't emit methylmercury. They do, however, emit the mercury that reacts with water particles, drops into rivers, streams and lakes, and becomes methylmercury. Arguing that methylmercury doesn't come from power plants is a bit like saying Big Macs don't come from cows.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services issues an annual fish advisory, and largemouth bass have been singled out every year since 2001 for potentially dangerous mercury levels. The advisory urges pregnant women, nursing mothers and children not to eat largemouth bass caught in Missouri if the fish is longer than 12 inches.

For Brown, this translates to "Don't eat fish. Any fish. Ever."

Brown also worries that lakes and rivers in her area could become mercury hot spots -- places where the measurable levels of mercury in fish tissues are at their highest. Preliminary EPA research indicates that hot spots occur in areas where local mercury emissions are high. Two 800-megawatt power plants next to the Missouri River could create a hot spot in a place where eating fish from the river is already discouraged.

At issue within the EPA right now is how it will regulate mercury emitted from power plants. The White House's proposed Clear Skies Act suggests that mercury should be regulated the same way that, for instance, sulfur emissions are regulated: with a "cap and trade" program. If a utility has a power plant that's spewing more sulfur than it's supposed to, it can trade "credits" with another utility plant anywhere in the United States that is under its limit for sulfur emissions. For example, if Great Plains clustered its power plants around the Missouri River and each plant emitted more than its share of mercury, the company could trade for mercury credits with another company in, say, Oregon. That would be legal, but it could increase the hot-spot potential for Kansas City's northland.

The EPA is re-examining its goal of a 70 percent cut in mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants by 2018. The agency is expected to hand down the first mercury regulations by December of this year. The cap-and-trade program for mercury and the Clear Skies initiative will likely undergo legislative debate during the next session of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In December 2003, Brown appeared on the front page of the The Platte County Landmark, where reporter Mark Vasto was beginning to write critically about KCPL's proposed power plants. Vasto asked doctors to explain the effects of pollution on asthma sufferers. He followed the swelling opposition to the plants. And he began to expose KCPL's doublespeak.

Vasto's stories made a local celebrity out of Brown, who had prodded the leaders of a group called the Platte County Concerned Citizens to oppose Great Plains Energy. The owner of R.J.'s bar in Weston, who also is named Susan Brown, had to start explaining to her patrons that she was not the one making a fuss about power plants. The competing Platte County Citizen published a letter calling Brown "a bored housewife with Erin Brockovich fantasies."