THE HAZARDS OF COAL ....... Not in my backyard. Coal-combustion ash, the waste product left over after coal is burned in power plants or other industrial applications, actually ends up in everybody’s backyard—the Earth’s air and water—not just the backyards of people unfortunate enough to live next door to an ash dump. Coal-combustion waste typically contains arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and various other pollutants, but its disposal is unregulated under federal law, having been exempted by Congress in 1980 from hazardous waste rules. State rules governing coal-combustion-waste disposal are inconsistent; some states have minimal or no regulations in place. The waste can be dumped in unlined landfills and ponds, above ground in great heaps, or in active and abandoned mines. Rain and groundwater leaching through this waste has caused significant groundwater contamination at ash dumps around the country, and at least two federal Superfund sites are associated with coal-combustion waste. Ironically, as federal clean air legislation has prompted better capture of pollutants at the smokestack, the federally unregulated solid waste stream from power plant scrubbers and boilers has grown increasingly toxic. A risk assessment report commissioned by the federal EPA concluded that “current management of coal combustion waste in landfills and surface impoundments results in significant risk to human health and the environment.” A powerful source of pollution. Coal-burning power plants are the major industrial source of air pollution, which causes needless suffering among hundreds of thousands of Americans with asthma, respiratory diseases, and heart conditions. Fine-particle pollution from power plants is estimated to cause twenty-two thousand premature, avoidable deaths among U.S. citizens every year and tens of thousands of nonfatal heart attacks. Coal-burning power plants are also the single largest factor in America’s contribution to global warming. According to government data, they annually emit more carbon dioxide (the key greenhouse gas linked to global climate change), than the entire U.S. transportation sector. Big coal cooks up a toxic soup. After the coal is washed, a slurry of impurities, coal dust, and chemical agents used in the process remains. This liquid waste, called “coal sludge” or “slurry,” is often injected into abandoned underground mines, a practice that can lead to groundwater contamination. In one case affecting the citizens of Pike County, Kentucky, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that coal slurry being dumped into a former deep mine by the Eastern Coal Corporation contained contaminants “which were likely to enter a public water supply…and may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health.” In public hearings, many coalfield residents have attributed their health problems to water wells polluted after the coal mining industry “disposes” its liquid waste by injecting coal slurry underground. The primary disposal practice for coal slurry is to store it in vast unlined lagoons or surface impoundments created near mountaintop-removal mines. Hundreds of these slurry impoundments are scattered across the Appalachian coalfields. Individual impoundments have been permitted to store billions of gallons of waste. Occasionally the dams fail, and the result is a tragic loss of life and environmental catastrophe (see Lakes of Waste, p. 105). In 2000 a slurry impoundment operated by the Martin County Coal Company in Kentucky broke through into abandoned mineworks, out old mine portals, and into tributary streams of the Big Sandy River. More than 300 million gallons of coal slurry fouled the waterway for a hundred miles downriver. The massive spill prompted Congress to commission a National Academy of Sciences report on coal-waste impoundments. The coal flows forth like a river of black gold......While coal has conferred vast wealth on a small number of coal barons, bankers, regional landholding companies, and electric utilities, extreme poverty remains rampant in Appalachia. County by county data show a remarkable correlation between the coalfield areas most affected by surface mining and high poverty rates.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:32:27 +0000
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