Coal ash

After a flood of wet coal ash swept from a power plant containment pond in December 2008, contaminating a river and covering 300 acres of eastern Tennessee, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would decide whether to issue new coal ash regulations by the end of 2009.

As that deadline approached last month, however, the agency admitted its findings would be delayed "due to the complexity of the analysis."

If it were simply a question of how best to protect the public, the decision would have been made weeks ago, health and environmental advocates say. But it appears cost has become as significant a factor as protection.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promised to more strictly regulate coal ash, but it's still promoting use of the toxic waste on food crops as a soil amendment.

This month, the EPA and U.S. Department of Agriculture enter the final year of a three-year partnership that's part of a larger effort by the American Coal Ash Association, the Electric Power Research Institute and others to "promote appropriate increased use of" coal ash in agriculture, according to documents released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The agencies say coal ash can improve the texture and fertility of soil, but environmental advocates raises concerns about its toxic elements. Created by the burning of coal for power, coal ash contains contaminants including arsenic, lead and mercury.

"USDA should pull out of the coal ash business tomorrow morning," says PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "USDA does American agriculture no favors by duping farmers into spreading hazardous wastes across their fields."

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After a dam burst at its Kingston, Tenn., power plant last December and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge into a nearby community and river, the federal Tennessee Valley Authority decided to change the way it stores its coal waste, transitioning from wet landfills like the one that failed to dry storage of ash.

Now, a company is pushing a plan to use dry coal ash from the Kingston plant to fill an abandoned coal mine in Tennessee, but environmentalists are raising concerns about the proposal's health risks.

Smith Mountain Solutions, a company owned by the principals behind Wright Brothers Construction of Charleston, Tenn., has proposed taking dry ash from TVA's Kingston plant and using it to fill a former surface mine 20 miles away atop Smith Mountain in Cumberland County.

An in-depth review of monitoring data from coal ash ponds located next to 13 coal-burning power plants in North Carolina has revealed that all of them are contaminating groundwater with toxic metals and other pollutants — in some cases at levels exceeding 380 times state groundwater standards.

The contaminants reported include arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead — metals known to cause cancer, neurological problems and other serious illnesses.

The analysis was conducted by Appalachian Voices' Upper Watauga Riverkeeper team based on data submitted to state regulators by Duke Energy and Progress Energy, the state's two largest investor-owned electric utilities. The companies conducted the tests as part of a self-monitoring agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The results of this data are very alarming, and we now know that some of these ponds have been leaking into the groundwater for years," said Upper Watauga Riverkeeper Donna Lisenby.

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The toxic flood of coal ash that spilled from a TVA impoundment into Tennessee’s Emory River last winter was a wake-up call for the EPA about the dangers of wet ash storage.

The agency didn’t regulate coal ash at the time and it still doesn’t, but in March, the Obama administration EPA began surveying hundreds of power facilities to assess the danger.

The results of that survey are out now, courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act request from the environmental law firm Earthjustice, and the data show the potential dangers to ground water and nearby property are more widespread than anyone realized.

The majority of the 584 wet coal ash impoundments on the list are over three decades old, many were designed without the expertise of professional engineers, and few of their owners could offer recent state or federal inspection dates. The survey showed that the largest sites, some spreading across dozens of acres, also tend to be the older sites with the least protection.

Under pressure from environmental groups, the EPA shifted course today and published the government’s once-secret list of 44 power plant coal ash impoundments that pose the highest danger to human life if they were to break.

The list is a reminder of just how unclean coal power is, not just through the pollutants and greenhouse gases that its power plants pump into the air but also in the residue left behind.

These impoundments hold millions of gallons of fly ash, bottom ash, coal slag and flue gas desulferization produced as waste by coal-fired power plants. The mixture can contain arsenic, selenium, cadmium, lead and mercury that can pose a danger to human health, water supplies and the environment.

The 44 impoundments on the list – largely in the eastern mountains, but also in Arizona, Indiana, Illinois and Montana – aren’t necessarily in danger of breaking, the EPA stressed. They made the list out of 427 nationwide because of their location and what might happen if they did.

“The presence of liquid coal ash impoundments near our homes, schools and business could pose a serious risk to life and property in the event of an impoundment rupture,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in releasing the list.

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The Tennessee Valley Authority's Inspector General released a critical audit this week on the federal company's response to last December's massive ash spill disaster at its Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee's Roane County.

The incident involved a failure in a coal ash containment pond that released more than a billion gallons of toxic waste into a nearby community and river.

The interim report finds that TVA:

* Failed to implement the National Incident Management System in accordance with a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, which hampered communications and delayed emergency response following the spill.

* Released inaccurate and inconsistent information to the media.

* Failed to communicate claims policies and decisions to victims of the spill in a timely manner.

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There is no escaping the poisonous byproducts of coal combustion. Clean up the smokestack, you end up with solid waste that contaminates the earth; capture CO2 and liquefy it, you still have to pump it into the earth and keep it there. It's like quitting smoking and taking up chewing tobacco instead. You still have to spit.

The truth of this was brought home again today in the NY Times in an excellent story on the coal ash situation in America called Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps, with Virtually No Regulation.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved.

Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

There are 1300 hundred dumps across the country similar to the one in Tennessee which last month released a billion gallons of toxic fly ash; they contain concentrations of heavy metals that can cause cancer and birth defects; and they remain unregulated and unmonitored because of coal industry campaigns opposing controls.The coal industry has even been selling the dangerous fly ash as "filler" -- for agricultural land, for golf courses, and for construction. They've been laundering poison.

It's become painfully clear yet again that there's no such thing as clean coal, just Mean Coal.