Mercurial

"Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit."--George Carlin

Review of Control Technologies for Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants offers a succinct overview of mercury control technologies and the recently promulgated MATS-Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.

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Review of Control Technologies for Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants; Plus, The connection of human health risks to mercury air emissions from coal-fired power plants
Larry Gray
MANE 696H01 – Air and Water Pollution Prevention and Control, Rensselaer (RPI) Hartford, Hartford, CT, USA
October 24, 2013
Introduction
Air pollutant control devices, such as electrostatic precipitators, fabric filers and flue gas desulfurization units, used to control NOX, SO2 and particulate matter are effective at removing the oxidized and particulate forms of mercury. However, the vapor form of mercury has proven to be very difficult to remove from the flue gas and extensive research has been devoted to developing control technologies for this form of mercury in the flue gas. The state-of-the-art control technologies of activated carbon injection and enhanced or chemically-treated activated carbon injection are described in the paper as mercury specific control options. The development of mercury emission standards and regulation are described following the control technology section. The final section of the paper reviews the status of mercury emissions from an old coal-fired power plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut to provide a local perspective to the review. Dispersion modeling will be applied to show the downstream effects from emissions control technologies, again, from a local perspective. There has been significant progress in developing control technologies to reduce all three forms of mercury emissions.
Free Full Text Source: http://www.ewp.rpi.edu/hartford/~grayl3/AWPPCE/Air/Project/A_Review_of_Control_Technologies%20_for_Mercury_Emissions_from_Coal-Fired_Poweplants.pdf 
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The author also provides a link to a page on the EPA website …

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On December 16, 2011, the EPA finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from new and existing coal- and oilfired power plants, (www.epa.gov/mats/powerplants.html ). This is the first national standard on Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPS) to apply to power plants.
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