Electric Power Plants and Pollution

Ideally, a risk-free environment is one where all the technologies that are being utilized work together harmoniously, so that no pollution or danger to the public exists. However, creating a risk-free environment is a complex task. Too often efforts to resolve one environmental problem fail to consider the effects this solution will have on other environmental risks. For example, although the industrial release of toxins into the U.S. environment fell in 1992 for the fifth straight year, waste generation rose slightly. Furthermore, while scientists are working on a fuel cell power supply that could power the cares of the 21st century--which would use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electric power with less pollution than other fuels --a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report raises the possibility that the so-called "zero emission," or electric, vehicles may be responsible for more emissions that gas-powered cars. The report cites the polluting smokestacks of electric power plants, especially in the Northeast.

In addition, sometimes even when it looks as though one environmental problem is being resolved, scientists disagree on whether this is, in fact, the case. For example, although the concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs in people's bodies and in the environment across the Great Lakes region have dropped sharply, environmental scientists have disagreed on whether these lower levels mean that people and wildlife are safer. This dispute is o

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tion joined the National Association of Physicians for the Environment (NAPE). NAPE is concerned about the lack of data physicians can rely on when patients raise questions about environmental health risks. The lack of that kind of data in part may explain tension between physicians and those who live in the most polluted places. In Tucson, for example, physicians refuse to answer questions whenever residents with difficult or unexplained health problems say that they live on the south side where wells have been polluted with Trichloroethylene (TCE). The EPA finally made a visit to these wells, and while physicians may be able to feel confident that exposure to TCE does not cause cancer, there is simply not enough data to know whether it causes autoimmune-related disorders, like lupus and arthritis as some residents suspect. A similar tension between community activists and physicians exists in Dallas. According to Luis Sepulveda, president of the West Dallas Coalition for Environmental Justice, local physicians prefer to ignore environmentally induced illnesses. As in Tucson, some Dallas physicians suspect that political motives lie behind the concerns. There is a lead problem, states Dallas County Medical Society exec

Category: Science - E