It isn't testing the fish.

Not to be outdone, the state of Nevada has a perfect way to make sure that the state's gold mines don't exceed limits for mercury emissions.

It hasn't set any limits.

While the nation rightly concerns itself with the amount of mercury that enters our air, water, fish and humans from coal-fired power plants, the tons of nerve-toxin that come from gold mines have largely been ignored.

The Environmental Protection Agency, criticized for weak steps against power plants, has taken temporary measures to limit the amount of mercury that is allowed to rise from five gold mines in northeast Nevada. Those mines are the source of, according to learned estimates, between 9 and 11 percent of the entire nation's airborne mercury emissions.

It's a voluntary system and, even trusting the mine's self-reported figures of emissions tumbling from nearly 12,000 pounds in 2001 to about 4,400 pounds in 2003, each mine is still many times more poisonous than the more widely noted power plants.

Still, citizen and official environmental watchdogs in Idaho and Montana are rightly worried about the amount of mercury that's been turning up in their economically as well as ecologically important fish populations. Idaho has issued seven warnings about excessive mercury levels in its game fish in recent years, while Montana has issued 28.

Utah has issued none, not because there's no contamination but because it isn't testing for it.

That's absurd. Utah's low-lying Great Salt Lake is already known as a mercury sink, and Utah's excuse that they haven't come up with a way to test and evaluate mercury levels is spurious. All they have to do is call Idaho.

Mercury is known to cause learning disabilities in children and is increasingly linked to maladies from autism to Alzheimer's. There are ways of generating power, and mining gold, that emit a lot less of it.

And an internal EPA report that the administration has suppressed suggests that the economic benefits of mercury control are far greater than previously reported.

Neither Utah nor Nevada should wait for the feds, or for a frightening cluster of mercury-related diseases, to act. At the very least, serious testing of Utah's fish should begin yesterday.