Tennessee Valley Authority spills over 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge into river.
The Clinch River sustained coal sludge contamination, the size of 1,660 Olympic pools. The nation's largest government-run utility ignored two small leaks, flooding an entire neighbourhood of Tennessee with toxic sludge on Dec 22, 2008.
More than a dozen power plants in Illinois alone store such toxic coal ash in sludge ponds similar to the one at Tennessee. Most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.
Most of the water-soaked ash, the by-product of burning coal to generate electricity, is stored close to bodies of water, including Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, the Mississippi River and the Illinois River. The sludge dumps are regulated far more loosely than household garbage landfills, despite years of studies documenting how arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals in the coal ash threaten water supplies and human health.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate the utility ponds because it doesn't consider the coal ash hazardous material, although it can contain trace amounts of heavy metals. Two federal agencies that oversee mining keep an eye on similar waste at coal mines but don't regulate coal-burning power plants.
In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.” In 2007, according to a coal industry estimate, 50 tons of fly ash even went to agricultural uses, like improving soil’s ability to hold water, despite the warnings about the high levels of arsenic. The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.
Numerous studies have shown that the ash, containing toxic substances, can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns the Kingston Fossil Plant, where the Tennessee spill occurred, tried for decades to fix leaks at its ash pond. In 2003, it considered switching to dry disposal, but balked at the estimated cost of USD25 million, according to a report in The Knoxville News Sentinel. That is less than the cost of cleaning up an ash spill in Pennsylvania in 2005 that was a 10th of the size of the one in Tennessee.
