Sulfur Dioxide

The Environmental Protection Agency, meeting a court-ordered deadline, on Thursday adopted new rules aimed at discouraging the use of tall smokestacks to disperse air pollution. In the latest round of a 15-year battle, Charles L. Elkins, EPA's acting assistant administrator for air pollution programs, said the rules could mean a reduction of up to 1.7 million tons of sulfur dioxide from utility stacks by 1995--about 8% of the current national total.

Announcing its first major step to combat acid rain under last year's sweeping Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it will hold an annual auction of emissions permits required for polluting power plants to stay in operation.

As an issue, acid rain was as dead as the forests and lakes it was killing in Canada and the northern United States until the fall of 1990. Then Congress was shown how to ease the cost of deeply reducing the sulfur dioxide that pours from electric utility smokestacks, drifts into the clouds and turns to acid rain. The first step was imposing an overall ceiling on smokestack emissions calling for cuts of 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide by 1995 and another 5 million by the year 2000.

A leak in a sulfur dioxide storage tank at the sprawling Douglas Aircraft complex on Lakewood Boulevard in Long Beach caused injuries to 44 workers Thursday and forced a three-hour evacuation of up to 2,000 others, company and fire officials said. Fourteen of the injured--all complaining of respiratory problems, eye irritation or dizziness--were taken to hospitals and most were treated and released. The rest were treated at the company infirmary, a Douglas spokesman said.

Grape growers say a major crisis is on hand for the San Joaquin Valley's harvest if federal officials enforce a new environmental standard limiting sulfur dioxide levels on table grapes. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has set an interim tolerance level for sulphur dioxide on table grapes, saying no more than 10 parts per million of the chemical shall be on grapes sold in markets.

Federal food and drug laws make it clear that consumers should have information that helps them make decisions affecting their health. But consumers at the beer, wine and liquor counter are still denied information about alcoholic-beverage ingredients to which they could be allergic or that could cause other health problems. The House will vote this week on a measure that could prolong that unhealthy ignorance.

The Environmental Protection Agency would require oil- and coal-burning power plants to dramatically reduce hazardous air pollution under an agreement announced Friday that ends a long-standing lawsuit filed by environmentalists. The agreement -- which would probably boost electricity prices but could potentially save thousands of lives -- commits the EPA to set pollution standards by 2011 for the power plants that are responsible for nearly half of all emissions of mercury, which can harm brain development in fetuses and children.

The Environmental Protection Agency, extending a California pollution standard to the rest of the nation, Monday proposed slashing sulfur levels in diesel fuel to reduce acid rain and airborne carcinogens. The measure, subject to final agency approval, would require fuel refiners to reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuel to .05% from current average levels of about 0.25% beginning Oct. 1, 1993. The proposed EPA standard is similar to a recently enacted California law.

More than a quarter of the lakes studied in Upstate New York's Adirondack Mountains are so acidic that they contain no fish or very few fish, concludes a study on the effects of acid rain that was released Friday. Shallow lakes in the southwestern Adirondacks are the most susceptible to high acidity, according to the study by the Adirondack Lakes Survey Corp., a company formed by utilities and state environmental officials. The survey of 1,723 lakes, mostly in the Adirondacks, is the most comprehensive work ever done by a state to examine the effects of acid rain, said James Mahoney, director of the federal Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, which hopes to finish a 10-year study on acid rain next year.

Long-abandoned 80-year-old aerial photographs found in a Danish basement document the unexpectedly rapid response of Greenland glaciers to changes in average temperatures, researchers have found. The studies show that landlocked glaciers were melting faster in the 1930s than they are now, but that those extending into the ocean are melting faster now, a team headed by climatologist Jason E. Box of Ohio State University and graduate student Anders A. Bjork of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.