I never let my daughter have a tuna fish sandwich It's not that I'm a food purist. She had her share of peanut butter sandwiches larded with fat and ham laced with nitrate. But I drew the line at tuna fish.
That's because I was thinking ahead, to the possibility that one day there might be grandbabies. And when you think about babies, you don't want to have to think about neurological damage. That's why I'm glad the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing rules that would slash the amount of mercury — and it is way too much — that comes out of coal-fired power plants. Because mercury exposure can mess with developing nervous systems in ways that interfere with thinking, learning and memory.
We've already tackled many of the major sources of mercury. The biggest single source that remains is the power plants that burn coal and spew the by-products, including mercury, into the air. It ends up deposited in rivers, streams and lakes and on the land, where it can run off into water.
Once mercury gets into the water, little fish take it in, and bigger fish take them in, and so on up the food chain until the fish near the top accumulate problematic amounts in their tissues.
When people eat them, the mercury accumulates in their bodies. High levels in the bodies of women can interfere with the neurological development of their babies, and in children can cause impairment. Hence no tuna in the lunchbox. Not all tuna is equally problematic. It depends on how much you eat, of course. And albacore is apparently not as likely to have mercury as the cheaper chunk light tuna. But I figure, why take chances? The same goes for swordfish, king mackerel and other predatory species where mercury accumulates.
The EPA tried several years ago to make power plants clean mercury out of their emissions, but the effort petered out in courts and Bush-era policy. Currently, there's no limit on how much of this substance they spit out on us. Now, the EPA's trying again, with a rule that targets not only mercury but also emissions of other heavy metals, including arsenic, which cause cancer, and toxic gases, which cause heart and lung problems.
The industry, of course, will balk, and so will big electricity consumers. Installing equipment and changing processes to cut toxic emissions will cost $11 billion a year in 2016, the EPA estimates. That's a lot of money. But it's no more than Americans spend on bottled water. I'd rather spend it on clean water.