This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Extracting gold from the ground these days takes a lot more than a pick and a shovel. And it leaves behind a lot more than just dirt. And while the owners of the gold mines in Nevada have been milking the profits, fish, fowl and families in Utah and Idaho have been left to deal with the toxic debris.
Thus it is good news that, after years of consideration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finally adopted rules that are expected to cut down on the amount of mercury that can drift away from those gold mines and find its way into the Great Salt Lake and other Utah waterways.
Now, our environmental guardians can move on to a newly raised, and probably much more complicated, issue: chromium 6. That's the cancer-causing substance that made environmental crusader Erin Brockovich famous, and that, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group, is found in drinking water supplies in Salt Lake City and many other communities.
That will be more difficult, perhaps, because it may be harder to trace the sources of chromium 6 and distinguish it from more benign forms of the element.
But there was little question about the sources of the mercury. While most of it is from coal-fired power plants, a significant 10 percent of it has been traced to gold mines.
The result is a satisfyingly stringent set of rules, estimated to reduce the amount of mercury released into the environment by gold mines by as much as 77 percent compared to what was drifting away just three years ago, and by as much as 97 percent below what would be released in an unregulated environment. And all at a cost, says the EPA, of less than 1 percent of the industry's annual sales.
In the biosphere, mercury is transformed into the particularly toxic compound known as methylmercury. That builds up in fish and birds and can be transferred to the humans who eat them. Ducks found near the Great Salt Lake are the only ones in the country that we are advised not to eat because of high mercury levels. There are many more advisories warning us away from eating fish, including those found in 16 Utah rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs.
Methylmercury is particularly risky for young children or women of child-bearing age, as it can harm the development of nervous systems and has been suspected in a range of disorders including autism and attention-deficit disorder.
The threats to our environment are many and complicated, and the solutions are sometimes expensive. But the need to identify, investigate and mitigate them is constant. The work of the EPA, and of those who watch it, is never done.