Nov. 10--North Carolina set its first limits Thursday on the amount of mercury that coal-fired power plants may release, joining several states that have set tougher standards than the Bush administration's for the widespread contaminant.

Mercury, which occurs naturally in coal, takes especially hazardous form when it spews from smokestacks and falls into water. Pregnant women who eat contaminated fish risk giving birth to babies with lower intelligence and learning problems.

In March, state health authorities broadened their warnings about eating mercury-contaminated fish. In addition to four freshwater species caught in Eastern North Carolina, the list now includes largemouth bass caught anywhere in the state.

The state Environmental Management Commission, which held packed mercury hearings in Charlotte and other cities last spring, struck a compromise Thursday that utilities and environmentalists praised.

It gives Duke Energy and Raleigh-based Progress Energy until 2018 to install mercury controls on their 14 existing power plants or shut them down. That's six years sooner than had been earlier proposed.

New plants, such as the two units Duke plans to build in Rutherford County, must come equipped with state-of-the-art mercury controls. Duke estimated that would drop emissions 90 percent, compared with older plants.

George Everett, Duke's environmental affairs vice president, called the rules a reasonable approach.

"We'll see how reasonable it is in 2013," he joked, referring to when utilities have to file detailed plans describing controls they will install at existing plants.

John Suttles of the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill, which pushed for tough restrictions, said the N.C. rules "should stand among the strongest in the country."

Public concern and rapidly evolving technology to control mercury, he said, led the commission to adopt rules that are stronger than earlier state proposals and those the Bush administration enacted last year.

Because they use so much coal, power plants account for more than 70 percent of the state's mercury releases.

A study released this year by UNC Asheville researchers found that 15 percent of the 175 N.C. residents who volunteered for testing carried potentially unhealthy mercury concentrations.

Charlotte's Todd Glasier, policy chair of the Carolinas Clean Air Coalition, called Thursday's action "a compromise that strengthens the (federal) mercury control legislation, but not to the extent that we had hoped."

Glasier said the group had preferred a shorter deadline for pollution controls to be in place at existing plants, as other states have done. But he said he was pleasantly surprised that new plants would fall under the rule as soon as 2007.

Unlike most states, North Carolina got a head start on mercury. Its 2002 Clean Smokestacks Act, adopted to reduce ozone- and haze- forming pollutants from power plants, also removes mercury.

The 2002 act alone will reduce mercury emissions 74 percent by 2013, the N.C. Division of Air Quality estimates.

Fish-Consumption Advice on the Web

North Carolina: www.epi.state.nc.us/epi/ fish/safefish06.pdf

South Carolina: www.scdhec.gov/water/fish/