By Gabriel Filippelli, Indiana University
People fishing along the banks of the White River as it winds through Indianapolis sometimes pass by ominous signs warning about eating the fish they catch.
One of the risks they have faced is mercury poisoning.
Mercury is a neurotoxic metal that can cause irreparable harm to human health – especially the brain development of young children. It is tied to lower IQ and results in decreased earning potential, as well as higher health costs. Lost productivity from mercury alone was calculated in 2005 to reach almost $9 billion per year.
One way mercury gets into river fish is with the gases that rise up the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.
The Environmental Protection Agency established a rule in 2012 limiting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants in an effort to improve air quality and public health. The first Trump administration moved to weaken the rule in 2020, arguing that the costs to industry outweighed the health benefit to the public. Then, the Biden administration tightened the regulations a few years later.
Now, the Trump administration is proposing to weaken the latest regulations and, in addition, to repeal Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, moves it hopes will boost coal power production.
I study mercury and its sources as a biogeochemist at Indiana University. Before the EPA’s original mercury rule went into effect, my students and I launched a project to track how Indianapolis-area power plants were increasing mercury in the rivers and soil.
Mercury bioaccumulates in the food chain
The risks from eating a fish from a river downwind from a coal-burning power plant depends on both the type of fish caught and the age and condition of the person consuming it.
Mercury is a bioaccumulative toxin, meaning that it increasingly concentrates in the flesh of organisms as it makes its way up the food chain.
The mercury emitted from coal-burning power plants falls onto soils and washes into waterways. There, the moderately benign mercury is transformed by bacteria into a toxic organic form called methylmercury.
Each bacterium might contain only one unit of toxic methylmercury, but a worm chewing through sediment and eating 1,000 of those bacteria now contains 1,000 doses of mercury. The catfish that eats the worm then get more doses, and so on up the food chain to humans.
In this way, top-level predator fishes, such as smallmouth bass, walleye, largemouth bass, lake trout and Northern pike, typically contain the highest amounts of mercury in aquatic ecosystems. On average, one of these fish contains enough to make eating only one serving of them per month dangerous for the developing fetuses of pregnant women and for children.
How coal plant mercury rains down
In our study, we wanted to answer a simple question: Did the local coal-burning power plants, known to be major emitters of toxic mercury, have an impact on the local environment?
The obvious answer seems to be yes, they do. But in fact, quite a bit of research – and coal industry advertising – noted that mercury is a “global pollutant” and could not necessarily be traced to a local source. A recurring argument is that mercury deposited on the landscape came from coal-burning power plants in China, so why regulate local emissions if others were still burning coal?
That justification was based on the unique chemistry of this element. It is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and when heated just to a moderate level, will evaporate into mercury vapor. Thus, when coal is burned in a power plant, the mercury that is present in it is released through the smokestacks as a gas and dilutes as it travels. Low levels of mercury also occur naturally.
Although this argument was technically true, we found it obscured the bigger picture.
We found the overwhelming source of mercury was within sight of the White River fishermen – a large coal-burning power plant on the edge of the city.
This power plant emitted vaporous mercury at the time, though it has since switched to natural gas. We found that much of the plant’s mercury rapidly reacted with other atmospheric constituents and water vapor to “wash out” over the city. It was raining down mercury on the landscape.
Traveling by air and water, miles from the source
Mercury emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants can fall from the atmosphere with rain, mist or chemical reactions. Several studies have shown elevated levels of mercury in soils and plants near power plants, with much of the mercury falling within about 9 miles (15 kilometers) of the smokestack.
When we surveyed hundreds of surface soils ranging from about 1 to 31 miles (2 to 50 km) from the coal-fired power plant, then the single largest emitter of mercury in central Indiana, we were shocked. We found a clear “plume” of elevated mercury in Indianapolis, with much higher values near the power plant tailing off to almost background values 31 miles downwind.
The White River flows from the northeast to the southwest through Indianapolis, opposite the wind patterns. When we sampled sediments from most of its course through central Indiana, we found that mercury levels started low well upstream of Indianapolis, but increased substantially as the river flowed through downtown, apparently accumulating deposited mercury along its flow path.
We also found high levels well downstream of the city. Thus a fisherman out in the countryside, far away from the city, was still at significant risk of catching, and eating, high-mercury fish.
As of 2022, in Indianapolis, pregnant women were still advised to avoid eating some fish from the White River altogether.
Reviving the MATS rule
The EPA created the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule, or MATS, to deal with the exact health risk Indianapolis was facing.
The original rule stipulated that mercury sources had to be sharply reduced. For coal-fired power plants, this meant either installing costly mercury-capturing filters in the smokestacks or converting to another energy source. Many converted to natural gas, which reduces the mercury risk but still contributes to health problems and global warming.
The MATS rule succeeded in reducing mercury emissions from power plants. It also helped tilt the national energy playing field away from coal. In 2020, the Trump Administration, in an attempt to bolster the declining U.S. coal industry, rescinded a “supplemental finding” that it is “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury from power plants.
In 2022, the Biden administration moved to reaffirm that supplemental finding, and it followed with stronger regulations in 2024. Now, the Trump administration is planning to pull back again. The new EPA proposal will go through a comment period, which will take time, but it sends a signal to the industry. Environmental groups expect to challenge the moves in court.
Some economists initially calculated the net cost of the MATS rule to the U.S. electricity sector to be about $9.6 billion per year. This is roughly equal to estimates of productivity loss alone from the harm mercury emissions cause. The overall benefits of the rule were estimated to be higher.
To a public health expert, this math problem is a no-brainer. Protecting the health of generations of Americans today and in the future matters.
Gabriel Filippelli is a professor of Earth sciences and executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Banner photo: The smokestacks of a coal-fired power plant in Florida (iStock image).
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