Don’t tell residents of East Tennessee that coal ash is just trash.
If it’s just trash — something that can just be tucked into a regular garbage landfill, why did we ratepayers have to help the Tennessee Valley Authority pay $1.1 billion for the continuing cleanup of the Kingston ash spill that happened six years ago today?
If it’s just trash, why has Congress and EPA theoretically been studying the hazards of coal ash since 1980?
If it’s just trash, why — after 50 years of toxic-laden sludge obliterated a finger of the Emory River, oozed over nearly 400 acres of rural residential acreage in Harriman, Tenn., destroyed three houses, made about 300 other homes unlivable and resulted in the utility paying to settle claims with about 800 property owners — is TVA still cleaning up and still legally bound to monitor the spill site, nearby streams, wildlife and health for decades to come?
Why? Because coal ash is and should be treated like the hazardous waste it really is. Yet that’s not the new rule made Friday when — under a court-ordered deadline — the Obama Administration’s EPA took the path of least resistance and caved in to moneyed coal interests.
The Kingston Ash Spill, an industrial accident that was 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, focused national attention on the largely hidden problem of coal ash. In the aftermath of the early morning of Dec. 22, 2008, the EPA documented more than 132 cases of coal ash waste sites nationwide tainting rivers, streams and lakes with heavy metals and other toxic contaminants. EPA also found another 123 cases where coal ash has damaged underground water sources.
Apart from the mind-boggling images of Tennessee houses surrounded by ash-bergs, one should have needed little more proof of the dangers of coal ash than what TVA had to do to protect people from both water and air hazards: Because the drying ash contains microscopic pieces of silica that pose short-term and long-term breathing threats, EPA instituted “water-down” requirements making TVA spray the enormous cleanup site with a combination of water, grass seed and a crusting agent — over and over again for more than five years as earth movers scooped ash and moved it around before it was loaded in hazardous waste rail cars bound for an Alabama landfill or returned to the rebuilt landfill behind the Kingston Fossil Plant.
EPA’s new rules also borrow from what EPA required during TVA’s seemingly endless cleanup — controlling blowing dust, requiring companies to make test results public, and monitoring landfills and ponds for leaks. The new rules also set standards for closing waste sites, requiring those that are structurally deficient or tainting waterways to close. But the regulations do not cover sites at shuttered power plants, and in some cases, they would allow existing landfills that do not meet the new standards to continue to operate. Go figure.
About half of the nation’s power plants burn coal, and those plants produce about 130 million tons of coal waste each year — most of it stored in decades-old, unlined pits or man-made mounds much like the one that fell apart in Harriman one frigid morning.
The ash, laden with the arsenic, mercury, selenium and scores of other dangerous compounds, has been piling up in ponds and landfills at power plants for years, an unintended consequence of the EPA’s push to scrub air pollutants from smokestacks. Now, in volume, this ash trash ranks only behind household trash in quantity, and it is expected to grow as the EPA controls pollutants like heat-trapping carbon dioxide and mercury and other toxic air pollutants from the nation’s coal fleet.
The coal industry and companies that recycle coal ash lead the fight against a hazardous designation, citing costs and a dampening effect on the recycling market. About 40 percent of coal ash is recycled nationally. Within TVA, about a third is recycled.
But that recycling argument is especially bogus. If coal ash can be safely recycled in concrete, for instance, then that concrete containment in itself is protective, and a rule making ash hazardous and therefore more expensive to handle would give producers incentive to recycle more.
Alas, that’s not to be the case. Giving coal a hazardous classification would have put the federal government in charge of enforcement. Classifying coal ash as trash instead leaves it up to states to ensure standards are met.
Tennessee has already seen how state oversight plays out.
The Obama Administration’s decision to kick this can down the road is a shameful cop-out.
What it did was present each of us with a Christmas lump of coal.