"Children who live closest to the plants are most affected by them," Goldman says.
Goldman headed the EPA's toxics office during the Clinton administration and worked on limiting mercury. It wasn't easy, and she says the power industry and its supporters resisted.
"I think from day one everybody knew that regulating mercury from especially power plants wasn't going to be easy," she says. "I don't think anybody thought that today, 21 years later, we would still be in a position where this had been controlled."
New Rules - When President George W. Bush took office, the power industry persuaded his EPA to adopt soft limits on mercury, but federal courts said that regulation was too weak, so it never went into effect.
Now, the court has set a deadline of Friday for the EPA to issue a new rule. The language the EPA wants would require quick action, stating that within three years, power plants that burn coal would have to cut more than 90 percent of the mercury from their exhaust.
They'd also have to slash arsenic, acid gases and other pollutants that cause premature deaths, asthma attacks and cancer. But even now, some power companies have been furiously fighting the EPA's rule — especially its deadlines.
"It's physically impossible to build the controls, the generation, the transmission and the pipelines needed in three years," says Anthony Topazi, chief operating officer for Southern Company, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses in the Southeast.
