Saturday, December 27, 2008

Capture and Sequestration: Seeking Justice in Kingston Coal Ash Disaster

TVA's Kingston power plant It’s been almost a week since about 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic coal fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, gushed from the site of a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant and yet no one from the federal power administration has been arrested.

TVA initially estimated the amount of coal sludge released at 1.7 million cubic yards. But after completing an aerial survey of the inundated area, it revised its estimate upward to 5.4 million cubic yards. Experts say it could take years to clean up the sludge.

You’d think the people responsible for contaminating hundreds of acres in eastern Tennessee near the Kingston power plant would be in serious legal trouble. This is a major environmental catastrophe. But there’s still no word on whether state or federal law enforcement officials plan to file criminal charges against TVA.

The sludge was contained at a retention site at the TVA coal-fired power plant, about 40 miles east of Knoxville. The retention wall breached early Monday, Dec. 22, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, according to TVA.

The plant is located on the Emory River, which feeds into the Clinch River and then the Tennessee River downstream. Piles of dead fish have been found on the banks of the Clinch River, but TVA officials claim the fish kill has nothing to do with the toxicity of the sludge.

“What happened—when you have a surge of ash, that created a wave to push the fish up and onto land,” TVA spokesman John Moulton told CNN. “When the water receded, there were dead fish. They weren’t killed by any toxic chemicals, they were stranded by the wave.”

Studies have shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems. A draft report issued in 2007 by the Environmental Protection Agency found that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

“In 2000, the EPA proposed more stringent federal controls of coal ash but backed away in the face of fierce opposition from utilities, the coal industry and Clinton administration officials,” the New York Times reports. “At the time, the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of power utilities, estimated the industry would have to spend up to $5 billion in additional cleanup costs if the substance were declared hazardous.”

Despite the disaster, the 1,700-MW Kingston power plant continues to operate, although not at full capacity. The plant burns about 14,000 tons of coal each day. The plant, built in the early- to mid-1950s, currently uses coal out of eastern Kentucky, Tennessee and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. The coal is transported to the power plant by railroad. TVA said Dec. 25 that seven of the nine units at the plant remain offline as the utility tries to conserve the plant’s coal supply.

Greenpeace is calling for a criminal investigation into the failure of TVA to prevent the spill. “Every facility like this is supposed to have a spill contingency plan to prevent this kind of disaster,” Rick Hind, Greenpeace Legislative Director, said in a press release. “The authorities need to get to the bottom of what went wrong and hold the responsible parties accountable.” Similar spills have resulted in felony charges, Hind added.

Like the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, the TVA spill could take years to clean up, and some of the damage to the ecosystem could be irreparable, Greenpeace said.

Hind said EPA officials, instead of TVA, should be conducting independent tests to determine whether contamination is taking place. “Having TVA do all the testing is kind of like having the criminal suspects on ‘CSI’ do the fingerprinting for themselves,” Hind said, referring to the television crime show.

Coal plants around the country, most near rivers that supply the water they need to operate, store coal ash in unlined embankments and ponds, and in some areas coal ash is recycled as fill material. Earthjustice Attorney Lisa Evans testified earlier this year before a congressional committee about the looming threat from coal combustion waste. She warned that the federal government’s broken pledge to regulate disposal of the potentially dangerous material threatened the health and safety of communities across the country.

Sue Sturgis, writing in the Institute for Southern Studies’ Facing South webzine, explains that in recent years, the technology for capturing the pollutants from stacks of coal-fired power plants has become more sophisticated, which means coal combustion waste contains even higher concentrations of toxins. But neither power companies’ methods of disposing of this dangerous waste nor government regulations governing the disposal methods have advanced much.

“With regulators’ blessing, TVA was simply putting ash from its massive Kingston plant—where nine burners consume 14,000 tons of coal a day—into a nearby lagoon where it was mixed with water, allowed to settle and then pumped into what’s known as a dredge cell,” Sturgis writes. “The collapse of the earthen wall holding back the coal sludge came following days of heavy rain. But this was no natural disaster: The company and regulators already knew the structure was prone to failure, with official inspection reports showing at least two other breaches of the same ash lagoon in the past six years.”

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