THE NATION - Cremation a hazard to the living? - Officials in Colorado worry about emissions from mercury in dental fillings. The industry says there's no danger.

The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash.

Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there. They are concerned about what they see as a potential health risk to the living -- mercury being released into the atmosphere from dental fillings of the cremated.

They want him to do something that may be unprecedented in this country: Install a filter on his crematory's smokestack or extract teeth of the deceased before cremation.

Allnutt refuses to do either, calling the first option too expensive and the second ghoulish.

"I'm not going to be the only one in the world who says I'll pull teeth from dead bodies," he said.

Across the United States, the issue is cropping up: Do mercury emissions from dental fillings of corpses incinerated in crematories pose a threat? And if so, how should it be handled?

In Colorado, it's something that health officials are only now examining, said Mark McMillan, manager of the Department of Public Health and Environment's mercury program.

"We're on the cusp of starting to understand it," he said.

The cremation industry, on the other hand, insists there's no evidence of danger and calls Allnutt's situation "a dangerous precedent."

At issue are amalgam dental fillings. Amalgam -- an alloy of mercury with another metal such as silver, copper or tin -- is commonly used to fill cavities.

When a body is burned, mercury from such fillings vaporizes. Once released into the atmosphere, mercury returns to Earth in rain or snow, ending up in lakes and other bodies of water where it can lead to elevated levels of mercury in fish. In humans, mercury damages the nervous system and can harm childhood development. Power plants, especially those that burn coal, are by far the largest source of preventable mercury releases; Environmental Protection Agency regulations have been adopted to reduce those emissions.

As cremation continues to gain popularity in the United States, the issue may gain more traction.