Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mercury and coal plants

I've been told that coal burning power plants release a lot of Mercury into the atmosphere, which then diffuses over the earth into water sources, causing much or all of the Mercury contamination of fish that makes freshwater fish unsafe to eat in significant quantities. (Please let's not have the "I haven't keeled over yet" arguments about this particular point - it's not about keeling over, it's about gradually losing mental function and I don't have enough to spare, maybe you do...)

Anyone know if this is true in its entirety, or grain of truth but exaggerated?

If true then it seems a pretty serious strike against coal in my book. Nothing against cities and grocery stores, but we shouldn't *have* to get so much of our food that way...

PS: just to be clear, I'd rather have power plants burning coal than sit in the dark. Just wondering if this is true and what others think of it, especially fishermen ...

Exaggerated.

To get the amounts of mercury needed to be harmful you would have to live entirely on fish including, scales, guts, fins, feathers and all.

Coal fired power plants do have mercury in their emissions. The controversy of course is over how much they emit, how much actually ends up in consumable resources, and how much is bad.

There is going to be a huge variation depending on region and species of fish consumed. I've been out of the environmental testing industry for a number of years, so I'm not as plugged in to what is happening as I used to be. I don't know of any studies that involve testing fresh water fish for contamination. That would be an interesting undertaking.

FWIW the lab where I used to work included mercury testing as one of their services. I don't recall any sample in the 5 years I worked there ever testing out as anything other than BDL (Below Detection Limits), and the detection limit was around 0.00004 mg/L.

They test the waters of the Ouachita River in La. every 5 or 10 years for Mercury. These waters are listed as having high Mercury and there are guidelines for eating the fish.

Of course it is all a bunch of bull, but the government has to have someway to waste our money.

I don't know about detection levels but there's been some studies done on the fish in the Columbia River. We have been told not to eat from big salmon or sturgeon from the Columbia more than a couple helpings a week because of mercury and pcb levels in them.
I could see the levels being high in sturgeon because they spend their entire life in the river (except the ones below the lowest dam that can go out to sea and back, and they do), but it really surprized me to hear that salmon have high levels of mercury and pcb in them because they spend most of their time in the ocean.

yes, it's true that most coal fired powerhouses emit some really bad stuff, including mercury, arsenic and NOx from their stacks... afaik, mercury is the least concern, at least in the near term...

there's a lot of bucks being spent on making coa; fired plants greener...
stack emissions from a newly built coal fired plant with SCR and Bag House technology installed are actually remarkable in their lack of pollutants...

Paper mills used to be the source of most of the mercury in fish, but I think they stopped using it years ago. Some rivers were pretty badly contaminated.

There is not much mercury in coal, but when you run several train car loads a day through a power plant, the amount sent up the stack becomes significant.

Jerry

We have a coal plant here. The fish in the cooling pond are tested and a sign simply suggests bascially don't eat a bunch every day of your life. IIRC.

I know they are retrofitting the plant and the newest stack reports low emissions and the 2 old ones are on course to be the same.

It is very interesting though, that folks claim that since the plant went on line in the 70s, our county has one of the highest rates of cancer in the state, prior to that it did not have that rate.... I don't know for sure, but I do know I know of an AWFUL lot of folks that have cancer here or have died from it.

Jeff

Naturally occurring mercury is quite common in some places. Around here a number of lakes and reservoirs have mercury alerts for bass and such (not so much for trout) and it is all due to natural leaching from the soil. Old timers in the area talk about exploring caves where mercury could actually be found in small puddles. They played with it as kids.

The Crystal River Energy Complex in Florida emits approximately 1,800 pounds of mercury/yr. from its 4 coal fired generators. Other heavy metals include cadmium, arsenic(950#), barium(2200#), chrome(1200#), copper, lead, selenium(7600#), vanadium and nickel(1100#). Other emissions include dioxin, naphthalene(880#), hydrochloric acid(11,000,000#),hydrogen fluoride(740,000#), styrene(10000#), sulfuric acid(190000#)

The numbers above are culled from EPA and I may have confused elemental emissions with compound emissions. Either way it mostly sucks in my opinion. Only way you're going to like coal is it it's in somebody else's state. Florida waters have sufficient mercury levels that all have consumption restrictions, including coastal waters. Most are considered impaired by the State DEP.

http://oaspub.epa.gov/enviro/multisys2.get_list_tri?tri_fac_id=34428FLRDP15760

It's no secret that coal is nasty stuff and even the cleaneds "clean coal" (can't say that with a straight face) plants are far more polluting than most any other source of electricity.

Unfortunately, coal is a necessary evil because we need to have a good supply of baseload power and very few of the "renewable" sources of electricity provide base load power. We COULD have some renewable baseload if we could put a few more restrictions on the building of new coal plants, but until then, providers are going to choose cheap over any environmental concerns.

For now, our best hope in the baseload category is nuclear, which for the first time in 30 years, is again moving full steam ahead...even with the support of Obama. The left has finally figured out that the EVIL nuclear is the best source of emission free energy.

Yeah, lots of nasty stuff in coal but lower standards of living will do more to increase morbidity than an absolutely clean energy source will do to decrease morbidity.

Paying more for energy will do nothing to increase the energy's value and only impoverish the people who have to pay for it. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to be sick and die prematurely.

Thanks, lots of good info in all the replies.

Global warming doesn't concern me too awfully much even if it is man made (hell I have no clue), but I don't like metals and other toxins in the food, especially when it disproportionately affects outdoorsmen.

Nukes ain't emission free, difference is mostly their emissions have half lives. Most folks are blissfully unaware of that fact. Which you choose is a matter of which Devil you prefer to dance with I suppose. I'm inclined to prefer nukes to coal but have jaundiced view of both.

Either way, there's no free lunch with current technology as embraced. Fusion, mebbe, someday. Gas, probably better, Solar is now cost competitive with gas and there are other options. Preferring we snuggle up with something else at the moment.

Give a wish to a frog and he'll still bump his azz.

I don't pretend to be an expert in this area but I'm pretty sure it's generally acknowledged that there's more radioactivity coming out of a coal plant than out of a nuclear plant.

That would be incorrect.

Interesting thread...Considering how historically important and how wide spread coal use was in the UK, I've never heard of the mercury issue before.

Is mercury present in all coal seems, or does it vary by locallity?

As far as I am aware we have no consumption limits on any of our fisheries due to mercury contamination, although we have had problems with various other forms of pollution of the years..

Explain the difference with examples if possible?

Suggest you do your own research on the subject. For starters try the PEF Levy 1&2 COLA before NRC at present. The entire 8700+ pages is available on the NRC web site as well as docket information and addendums. Therein you will find explanation as to why PEF declined one alternative site location for blowdown discharge, that being a reluctance to have a self inflicted tritium spill on their own property. Otherwise the remaining 47 nuclides represented by the PEF application for airborne and liquid pathway discharge may not concern some folks. I am not one of those folks.

Fact of it is that nukes have discharge issues, so do coal plants. Nukes are not known for heavy metal emissions, coal is. Coal also has limited nuclide discharge on an order which might slightly exceed natural background, albeit with different components in this region.

As for comparison, information such as contained in the link above is widely available thru EPA and other sources, all of which are sufficiently documented to address both elemental and nuclear emissions of coal. In both cases the comparative file information is too lengthy to post here and I suspect you know that too.

None of this is really relevant to the topic at hand, ie. coal and mercury contamination, but a question asked is fairly answered.

Dan

A little google-fu (try "radioactivity from coal") will easily show you that it is indeed correct.

Raw coal has naturally occurring radioactive elements in it. Burn the coal, at least some of that is going out the stack. There are no government controls on this.

Nuke plants are so tightly controlled that very little of anything is allowed to go out the stack, and the nuclear fuel is sealed up in the reactor anyways.

It's obviously more complicated than I've described, but it's not hard to see how it really is the case.