Environmental Disaster in Tennessee - Coal Ash Spill
12/24/2008
SustainableBusiness.com News
An environmental disaster unfolding in Tennessee is a stark reminder of the prices we pay for reliance on coal-based power in the U.S.
Early Monday morning a retaining wall collapsed at the Tennesse Valley Authority's (TVA) Kingston coal-fired power plant near Knoxville, Tennessee, releasing 2.6 million cubic yards of toxic fly ash across hundreds of acres--damaging 11 homes and ultimately endangering the Tennessee River watershed.
Pictures from the scene show a house buried up to its first-story windows in dark sludge.
Bulldozers, dump trucks, and backhoes have been brought to the site to begin cleaning up the fly ash, which is roughly six feet deep and contains mercury, lead and arsenic.
The Knoxville Sentinel News reported that from above it's obvious that the Emory River is being dirtied by the spill. The Emory leads to the Clinch, which flows into the Tennessee.
Workers reportedly are testing water sampled from the rivers. Other reports state that dead fish have already begun washing up on the banks, but the danger is not limited to aquatic life.
A December report in Scientific American stated that "fly ash emitted by a power plant-a by-product from burning coal for electricity-carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."* (Link to that report below.) As airborne polution, the radiation poses a slim risk to human health according to the article, However in a concentrated spill the threat to water sources becomes more serious.
Clean up is expected to take several weeks, by which time ground water and surface water could be seriously contaminated.
Wendy Redal, at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism, said the spill is "nearly 50 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989."
"This holiday disaster shows that there really isn't such a thing as a clean coal plant," said Chandra Taylor, staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
"The United States Environmental Protection Agency should immediately establish national safeguards for the disposal of coal wastes and enforceable regulations," said Taylor. "At a minimum, these safeguards should include siting restrictions, structural requirements and long-term financial assurance to clean up any resulting pollution."
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*Editor's note: the sentence marked with an asterisk has been changed, and the sentence following the asterisk has been added. The Scientific American article was changed on 12/30/08 after the publication of this story. The original sentence read "A report last December in Scientific American stated that several studies show coal fly ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste."
Website: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste