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Coal Ash
The Deadly Problem of Coal
Ash
BY JOHN DONOVAN
Shortly after
Hurricane Matthew pounded North Carolina in October 2016, swelling the Neuse
River to a level never seen before, Matthew Starr ventured out on the river to
see some of the damage himself. It was almost otherworldly.
"When
the flood water receded, I was out on the boat, doing a patrol on one of the
inactive ash ponds, and it really looked like a winter wonderland," says
Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, a nonprofit that monitors
and protects the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico River basins. "Here was this white,
very fine ash up in the trees, on the water, on the trunks, on the leaves. It
was just everywhere. If you just slightly bumped a tree, it would just rain
down this very fine ash.
"Fast
forward two years later ... not a single shovel of ash has been removed."
The
ash Starr talks about is coal ash, an ecological can that the state — and
the whole country — has been kicking down the road for decades. In 2014, more
than 30,000 tons (27,215 metric tons) of coal ash spilled into the Dan River
near Eden, North Carolina in something the locals came to call "The
Heartbreak on the Dan." Brian Williams, the Virginia program manager for
the Dan River Basin Association — the 214-mile (344-kilometer) river that
crosses the Virginia-North Carolina line eight times — was one of the first on
the scene.
"The
river ran gray for weeks after that," Williams says now. "People
still ask me, 'Is it safe to go wading in the river?' ... I don't know. I can't
say the same thing about it that I used to be able to."
What Is Coal Ash?
Coal ash is just what you'd
figure it to be: what's left over from burning coal.
Though
coal consumption has dropped dramatically in recent years - it peaked in 2007,
and the electric power sector used less coal in 2017 than in any year since
1983, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But
power plants throughout the nation still use a staggering amount of it. About
717 million tons (650 million metric tons) of it were consumed in 2017, most
used to produce electricity.
(About
30 percent of the natons’s energy still comes from coal.) And, of course,
millions and millions of tons of coal ash are left over from when the U.S. was
more coal-dependent.
The
Environment Protection Agency (EPA) says that coal ash is one of the largest
types of industrial waste produced in the United States.
More
than 130 million tons (117 million metric tons) of the stuff was generated in
2014 alone.
Though
there are some uses for the ash - to strengthen things like wallboard and
concrete, mainly — most is discarded into dry landfills or wet ponds near the
power plants where it was produced, as it has been for decades, and where it
just sits.
Until,
that is, something happens. A flooding river or lake nearby. A dam break. And
then catastrophe.
"Almost
every major river in the Southeast has at least one coal ash pond
[nearby]," Rebecca Fry, the director of the
Institute for Environmental Health Solutions at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, said in an email.
Rivers
and streams near coal-burning plants are used to cool machinery and produce
steam. But they also provide a way out for the ash if it's not disposed of
properly.
And
the problem with coal ash getting loose in the environment is that it is, in a
word, toxic.
From Physicians
for Social Responsibility:
"[C]oal ash typically contains heavy metals
including arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium, as well as
aluminum, antimony, barium, beryllium, boron, chlorine, cobalt, manganese,
molybdenum, nickel, thallium, vanadium, and zinc. If eaten, drunk or inhaled,
these toxicants can cause cancer and nervous system impacts such as cognitive
deficits, developmental delays and behavioral problems. They can also cause
heart damage, lung disease, respiratory distress, kidney disease, reproductive
problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in
children."
The
worst coal ash spill ever came in December 2008, when a dike at a storage site
at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant burst,
releasing 5.4 million cubic yards of wet ash into the surrounding land in Roane
County, Tennessee.
The
sludge covered some 300 acres (121 hectares), befouling land and waters and
prompting a years-long cleanup.
More
than 30 workers charged with getting rid of the coal ash already have died,
allegedly from long-term exposure to the toxins. At least 200 more are
sick or dying. Lawsuits are pending.
North
Carolina has had a few spills. After the Dan River disaster, rains from
Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in September 2018, caused coal
ash to spill into other North Carolina rivers.
Though
Duke Energy, the state's largest utility, says the damage from the Hurricane
Florence spill is minimal, a statement released Sept. 28, 2018, by the Upper
Neuse Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance disputes that claim.
An
analysis by Pace Analytical not only found levels of arsenic nearly 18 times
higher than the North Carolina standard for drinking water supply and fish
consumption, but it also found elevated levels of lead and other heavy metals
in the water.
"Are
we going to see, 20 years from now, heavy metals in shellfish? Who knows?
Probably. We just can't say right away," Williams says. "We
can definitely say that concentrated heavy metals are not good in the
environment."
What Can
Be Done?
This is not a problem limited to
the Southeast.
According to the EPA, coal ash disposal (ash is
also known as "coal combustion
residuals," or CCR) "currently
occurs at more than 310 active on-site landfills, averaging more than 120 acres
(48 hectares) in size with an average depth of over 40 feet (12 meters), and at
more than 735 active on-site surface impoundments, averaging more than 50 acres
(20 hectares) in size with an average depth of 20 feet (6 meters)."
Those
are active sites. There are as many as 1, 100 coal ash disposal sites around
the country.
Some
of the ash is stored in pits where it is mixed with water, which helps to keep
the dusty ash settled.
Some
is stored dry. Some of these sites are covered. Some of the pits are lined.
Environmentalists
note that, even when sites aren't flooded or retaining walls aren't
compromised, the minerals in the ash still can seep into water tables to infect
drinking water.
"We
know everything's not OK. Just sweeping this under the rug is not cutting
it," Williams says. "What's going to fix this is good ideas
and admitting, 'Yeah, this is a problem and we've got to figure out a
solution."
Utilities,
fearful of the huge costs associated with cleaning up these sites, favor
sealing off the landfills and the ponds that hold coal ash.
Groups like EcoWatch are leery of that solution. "To stop legacy pollution from these
sites," says the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, "coal ash must be removed from old,
leaking impoundments and moved to dry, lined storage away from rivers and other
waterways."
Starr agrees. "This isn't without a fix. The fix is
to excavate all of the coal ash. Once you remove all the coal ash ... the
threat is removed. Excavating the coal ash, putting it away from our water
resources and putting it into a lined landfill — your kitchen garbage has more
strict restrictions on it — that's what you have to do. The fix is to remove
it."
A
rule dictating stricter federal standards for coal ash disposal, passed in 2015
under the Obama administration, was eased earlier in 2018 by the Trump
administration.
But
a U.S. Court of Appeals decision in August 2018, not only threatens to gut the
Trump rollbacks but calls on the EPA to pass even tougher rules than called for
during the Obama era.
Disposal
of all the coal residue is going to take years and years to pull off, all while
plants across the country continue to produce it. That means coal ash will be a
problem - for everybody - for the foreseeable future.
"It's
not about the coal. It's about the water," says Tiffany Haworth, the executive director of the
Dan River Basin Association. "We
can't do much about coal that was burned 50 years ago. We just have to suck it
up and do the best we can with that. The bottom line is protection of the
waterways that are essential to life."
NOW THAT'S INTERESTING
According
to the U.S. ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION, burning a pound of coal produces
enough energy to light 10 100-watt bulbs ... for about an hour.
John Donovan
CONTRIBUTING
WRITER
John is a
freelance writer based in the suburbs of Atlanta. A longtime sports scribe with
too much time covering college sports, the NFL, the NBA and Major League
Baseball, he now writes on science, health, history, current events and
whatever other weird non-sports stories that he and the editors at
HowStuffWorks dream up. He has a journalism degree from Arizona State, a wife,
a son, a dog that sheds too much and a bad case of eyestrain.
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