You flip a light switch on and a grizzled Appalachian heads back into a coal mine in Virginia. He brings out some coal that they ship to Texas. Another grizzled guy loads that into a coal fired power plant. The resulting smoke has mercury in it...and it drifts along with the prevailing winds. Eventually the mercury falls or is washed out of the air.
It lands on mostly land where it sits waiting for a heavy rain to wash it into a watershed. Farm land makes it especially easy for the mercury to get caught up in the run off.
The mercury is then eaten by micro organisms in the water that change the mercury into methyl mercury. That's when it becomes dangerous because methyl mercury is "bio available" meaning it now can be absorbed into animal and human tissue.
As it wanders downstream, stuff eats it, and then stuff eats the other stuff and before long big fish are eating a little methyl mercury every day. The mercury and fish are in all our oceans lakes and rivers but the concentration is the issue. How much bio available mercury accumulates in that particular area and that particular fish?
So we now have warnings from the EPA and FDA that pregnant women and young children should limit the types and quantities of fish they eat! We hear of people getting mercury poisoning from eating too much sushi! Everyone has to pay attention to the amount and type of fish they eat for fear of accumulating too much methyl mercury.
Bottom Line - We are talking about "clean coal" but its too late, too expensive and too unproven. What we need is "clean fish"!
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I notice that terrible coal draining pond or whatever it's called thing has disappeared from the news as well. But at least there is a halt to taking the tops off mountains.
ReplyDeleteI think its more of a delay until they can rally the lobbyists and their hand picked Senators and Congressmen.
ReplyDelete80,000 jobs, nation's energy, blah blah blah. Oh, ya, clean coal, Nextgen, blah, blah blah.
Back to mining boys.