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Show ( CAPITOL . mQSSSt WATCHDOG By Bill Hendrix Can the air be too clean? Clean air and clean water are commodities com-modities that most Utahn's are interested in-terested in preserving. With some reservation, our citizens are willing to make sacrificesto guarantee these precious time, but the overkill by some Federal agencies, like the Environmental Environmen-tal Protection Agency (EPA), are becoming frustrating and downright ridiculous. Take, for example, the EPA order in South Carolina to stop air pollution by the Savannah River Power Plant, a coal fired electrical generating facility. The plant has a minimum number of employees and no one lives on the 300 square mile plant site 25 miles southeast of Augusta, Georgia. The plantsite is closed to the public except for guided tours, controlled deer hunts, traffic along a South Carolina highway and the Seaboard Coastline Railroad. EPA decided that two powerplants, in the middle of the reservation, some 175 miles from anyone, were exceeding established standards for flyash. One hundred percent of the flyash, however, was deposited within the confines of the plant property. EPA was informed of this total onsight control of the air pollutants and the fact that vegetation, mainly fir trees, were benefiting from the sulfer content in the flyash. The federal agency, as you might have guessed, was not impressed. The order went out to the plant operators to clean up the air or go to court. Rather than face a legal battle the plant proprietors pro-prietors complied with the EPA and added ad-ded $14 million in precipatators, ash retention pits and all the added expense to accomplish the EPA order. The bottomline is this. The plant, the trees, the property and the flyash all belong to the federal government. This was no private utility company. The EPA was threatening the Department of Energy and denying U.S. Forest Service Ser-vice trees the sulfur from the flyash which they could use for better development. develop-ment. The taxpayers, you and me, paid for the clean-up project satisfying this example of inter-governmental squabbling. squab-bling. THE HA ASH Concerning the flyash, and its potential poten-tial for good in the production of healthy vegetation. J.C. Noggle, a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) soil chemist, has shown through extensive scientific testing that cleaning the sulfur out of the atmosphere is actually reducing plant yields and limiting farm productivity produc-tivity potential. According to Noggle, oyer the 200 odd years that the land in the U.S. has been farmed, soil sulfer supplies have been substantially reduced. Most vegetation is, therefore, taking its sulfer needs out of the air. Noggle now concludes, "If we continue con-tinue to clean up the air, we'll soon be faced with a food shortage." The soil expert warns, "We must replace what we are taking from the atmosphere or face a minimum 10 percent reduction in crop yield in the very near future. Replacemnt of 40 to 50 pounds of sulfer fertilizer per acre is necessary if we are to maintain current crop yields." Here is a case where clean air could actually cause a shortage of food. |