TVA now estimates the cost to clean up the Kingston coal fly-ash spill will run from $675 million to $975 million, and the time it takes may be “several years,” according to a regulatory report it filed last Friday. Given the agency’s progressive run-up in time and costs of the clean-up since the spill occurred on Dec. 22, it now seems likely that the final costs will easily exceed $1 billion. As for the time it takes to clean up and restore the site, several years seems an adequately elastic time frame to cover that contingency.
Clearly the clean-up will be a hard lesson for TVA’s managers, and a terribly expensive burden for TVA’s ratepayers. It’s a lesson that should not go to waste.
Clean-up costs are likely to rise because, as TVA has learned, the availability of disposal sites for the spilled coal ash sludge, now being removed from the 300-acre spill site and the adjacent Emory River, is limited and expensive. TVA not only must pay the removal, dredging and transport costs; it must also purchase and prepare safe storage sites, and there just aren’t that many places to bury this toxic waste.
Its consideration of old quarries and mines, for example, would necessarily entail precautions to prevent leakage of heavy metal contaminants from the toxic sludge to aquifers and ground water, in addition to regulatory and community approval.
The larger lesson to be learned from TVA’s spill — by far the nation’s largest industrial spill, yet just one of many similar spills that have occurred around the country in recent years — is that wet storage of coal combustion waste in retention ponds near rivers must end.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposed banning such open retention ponds in 2000, but backed away when electric utilities complained about the potential cost. The EPA’s proposal called for storage of coal combustion waste in dry, lined, monitored landfills situated away from water sources, a step Europe took years ago. The electric utility industry claimed that would add a couple of billion dollars to their costs, making electricity more expensive.
Compared to the number of ash retention ponds around the country that are now known to be leaking toxic heavy metals into adjacent water sources, and that are all subject to failure under severe conditions, that cost now seems nominal against the pending bill for TVA’s singular Kingston clean-up.
The EPA’s annual toxic inventory report, for example, shows that nearly 100 unlined, wet-ash retention ponds in 13 states are comparable in size and toxicity to the breached, 80-acre pond at TVA’s Kingston coal-powered electric plant. An analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project in Washington found that some hold far larger amounts of inventoried toxic metals, and some had documented leaks of toxins to water sources.
The Kingston plant was shown to be one of six TVA power plants that had made it on the worst-50 list of plants for toxic metals in their ash dumps. In fact, it had been on the worst-50 list for toxic metals from 2000-to-2006. These metals may include arsenic, lead, mercury, chromium, nickel, selenium and thallium, all of which have toxic effects on human health.
The Environmental Integrity Project’s study identified some 2,000 coal-combustion waste dumps in the United States, 600 operating landfills and surface impoundments, 750 closed dump sites, and 400-to-500 mine-fills. Most are lightly regulated, if at all.
Amazingly, the federal government has never established pollution control rules for such hazardous waste, and the patchwork of haphazard regulation by state governments rarely calls for inspections or competent regulation of the storage ponds and their toxic contaminants.
This vast regulatory gap must be closed. EPA officials have promised to review the issue of unregulated coal combustion wastes and to propose regulatory reform. Several members of Congress have expressed their interest in regulation, and at least one bill to monitor and regulate open and unlined retention ponds has been introduced.
That’s not adequate movement on the problem. Indeed, given the press of other national priorities, it is easy to imagine that momentum for reform may slide off the agenda. Expressions of public interest to our senators and representatives could help spur reform.
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