U.S. Power Plants Slow to Clean Up Their Act
"To think that well over half of the plants burning coal still don't have any significant pollution controls -- it's really an extraordinary evasion of the law that the industry has perpetrated here," said Peter Lehner, chief of the New York Attorney General's environmental protection bureau.A loophole in the 1970 Clean Air Act allows older plants to avoid installing advanced pollution controls that would slash these deadly emissions.
"Older power plants, when the Clean Air Act came on line, were not required to meet the same emissions requirements of new power plants, because of the potential expense and engineering difficulty. So that led them to not need to install the same emissions controls. And that perpetuated over the decades," Levy says.
"These are much smaller than the width of a human hair, so they can deposit very deep in the lungs and can contribute to a lot of respiratory effects, as well as cardiovascular effects," says Jonathan Levy, a professor of public health at Harvard University who studies power-plant pollution.
Exhausts from coal-fired power plants also create haze, which mars scenic views, and cause acid rain, which kills trees and pollutes streams. Coal-fired power plants are the biggest emitters of sulfur dioxide and major emitters of nitrogen oxides.
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