Farmers, pecan growers say coal plant kills plants
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VEGETATIVE_WASTELAND?SITE=PALEH&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-12-28-06-48-37
Farmers, pecan growers say coal plant kills plants
By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI
Associated Press
BASTROP, Texas (AP) — Along a stretch of Highway 21, in Texas’ pastoral Hill Country, is a vegetative wasteland. Trees are barren, or covered in gray, dying foliage and peeling bark. Fallen, dead limbs litter the ground where pecan growers and ranchers have watched trees die slow, agonizing deaths.
Visible above the horizon is what many plant specialists, environmentalists and scientists believe to be the culprit: the Fayette Power Project – a coal-fired power plant for nearly 30 years has operated mostly without equipment designed to decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.
The plant’s operator and the state’s environmental regulator deny sulfur dioxide pollution is to blame for the swaths of plant devastation across Central Texas. But evidence collected from the Appalachian Mountains to New Mexico indicates sulfur dioxide pollution kills vegetation, especially pecan trees. Pecan growers in Albany, Ga., have received millions of dollars in an out-of-court settlement with a power plant whose sulfur dioxide emissions harmed their orchards.
Now, extensive tree deaths are being reported elsewhere in Texas, home to 19 coal-fired power plants – more than any other state. Four more are in planning stages. In each area where the phenomenon is reported, a coal-fired power plant operates nearby.
The Fayette Power Project sits on a 10-square-mile site about 60 miles southeast of Austin, near where horticulturalist Jim Berry, who owns a wholsesale nursery in Grand Saline, Texas, describes a 30-mile stretch of Highway 21 as a place where “the plant community was just devastated.”
“There was an environmental catastrophe,” Berry said recently.
“It wasn’t just the pecan groves,” he said after driving through the area. “It was the entire ecosystem that was under duress.”
Pecan grower Harvey Hayek said he has watched his once-prosperous, 3,000-tree orchard in Ellinger, just south of the Fayette plant, dwindle to barely 1,000 trees. Skeletal trunks and swaths of yellowed prairie grass make up what had been a family orchard so thick the sun’s rays barely broke through the thick canopy of leaves.
“Everywhere you look, it’s just dead, dead, dead,” Hayek said.
The grove that had produced 200,000 pounds of pecans annually yielded a mere 8,000 pounds this year. Hayek said as the family’s business decreased, he watched his father-in-law, Leonard Baca, fade. Baca, 73, died after shooting himself in the head.
Retired University of Georgia plant pathologist Floyd Hendrix, who has done extensive research on sulfur dioxide damage to vegetation, said he has reviewed photographs and test results from Hayek’s grove.
“From what I’ve seen so far, there’s not any doubt in my mind that it’s SO2 injury,” Hendrix said.
Sierra Club chemist and botanist, Neil Carman also has visited the ranch. Aside from the decreased nut production, the orchard’s leaves bore telltale brown spotting associated with damage, Carman said.
The Lower Colorado River Authority, which operates the Fayette plant, argues there is no scientific link between its emissions and the dying trees, noting the region also has suffered significant droughts.
But the authority is investing nearly $500 million to install two “scrubbers” designed to decrease pollution. A third, newer boiler has a built-in scrubber. The equipment should be in place by early 2011 and will decrease the plant’s sulfur dioxide emissions by about 90 percent, said authority spokeswoman Clara Tuma.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says air monitors indicate the Fayette plant “is not the likely cause” of the area’s vegetative die-off. The plant operates under a state permitting program that was disapproved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in June. The EPA argues Texas’ permits do not allow for accurate air monitoring and violate the federal Clean Air Act. Texas has challenged the disapproval in court.
The EPA’s criminal investigation branch, meanwhile, has toured properties and interviewed pecan growers near Ellinger. The agency’s civil division has been asked to review the information, according to e-mails obtained by The Associated Press. Other e-mails indicate the U.S. Department of Justice’s environmental wing also investigated the matter, though a spokesman said he could not “confirm or deny” an ongoing probe.
The Fayette plant is far from a lone source of concern. From Franklin – a town about 100 miles north that is surrounded by coal-fired facilities – to Victoria – 80 miles to the south and near the Coleto Creek power plant – Texas ranchers say orchards and trees of all varieties are dying.
Charlie Faupel said his Victoria pecan trees are native plants that have grown along a creek bed for seven generations, supplementing a family income that also relied on cattle, real estate and publishing. When Faupel was a teenager, he would collect and sack the pecans, using the extra money to buy a car or go out.
Now, the few pecans that grow are bitter or thin.
On Dec. 9, Faupel filed a formal air pollution complaint against the Coleto Creek plant and demanded the state environmental commission investigate the emissions.
“I have noticed for over 20 years how the Coleto Creek power plant’s sulfur dioxide has been damaging hundreds of the trees on our property – live oaks, white oaks and pecans,” Faupel wrote. “Most of the white oak trees are already dead. The surviving trees don’t have as much foliage and they’re becoming more diseased, I believe, from the plant’s sulfur dioxide weakening the trees over time.”
The Coleto Creek Power Plant did not respond to repeated requests for comment. .
Faupel said some tree canopies recently appeared to be thickening and believes it’s because Coleto Creek put a “bagging system” on its boilers, decreasing emissions. But the plant plans to add a second boiler that is expected to add some 1,700 tons of sulfur dioxide pollution to the air annually.
“I’m not one of these fanatic environmentalists,” Faupel said. “But when you are a seventh generation rancher, you are taught to be a good steward of the land . and you want the things on it, the cattle and the vegetation, to be healthy. And they’re not.”
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A debate over fly ash disposal
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10350/1109210-114.stm
A debate over fly ash disposal
Thursday, December 16, 2010
By David Templeton and Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Piles of fly ash sit atop a hill at the Matt Canestrale Contracting Inc. disposal site in La Belle, Fayette County.
Before Penn Power created Little Blue Lake in 1975, the company circulated fliers advertising a picturesque recreation area where people could boat and ski on blue waters.
So 35 years later, where are all the boats and skiers?
And, for that matter, where’s the lake?
The so-called “lake” in Beaver County’s Greene Township, near the boroughs of Georgetown and Hookstown, was created as a disposal pit for calcium sulfate and fly ash generated at the 2,390-megawatt Bruce Mansfield Power Plant in nearby Shippingport.
Today it looks like moonscape.
Coal waste, 400 feet deep and even deeper, extends across the state line into West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle and covers about 1,000 acres on a site that is 2 square miles. The 100 million tons of waste includes 60 million tons of calcium sulfate — generated by the scrubbing process to remove sulfur dioxide from smokestack emissions — and 40 million tons of fly ash, which is a byproduct of the coal-burning process to produce electricity.
The only sign of life on a late-summer day was a flock of Canada geese walking — not swimming — across the weird surface.
As one of the nation’s largest coal-waste disposal sites, Little Blue is a centerpiece of a nationwide debate about the safety of such impoundments and whether fly ash should be designated as hazardous waste.
Heavy metals in fly ash, including arsenic, lead, mercury, cobalt and thallium, should be designated as hazardous, environmental groups say.
But the power industry says such a designation will hinder beneficial uses for fly ash, including in concrete. Calcium sulfate is used in wallboard, but its dust can irritate eyes, skin, mucous membranes and the upper respiratory tract. Dust periodically has been a concern at the site.
Critics question whether the millions of tons can remain sealed on site or if their heavy metals leach into groundwater and damage the environment and public health.
The more immediate debate centers on whether leaching already has begun.
Site owner FirstEnergy Corp., based in Akron, Ohio, says its “first of its kind” disposal site is safe. Up to 3.2 million gallons of sludge are sent daily to the site through seven miles of overland pipes.
“It’s been operating for 34 or 35 years safely with all the structural integrity it is designed to have,” said Ellen Raines, spokeswoman for FirstEnergy, which always has owned Little Blue but previously under the name Penn Power.
The state Department of Environmental Protection supports that conclusion.
“Coal-ash facilities in the region have to manage the waste, so they figure out how much waste they have and how long they can use the site and how to plan for continued disposal,” said Diane McDaniel, DEP facilities chief for waste management. “It’s nothing unusual.”
But the Environmental Integrity Project, working on behalf of concerned Greene Township residents, says Little Blue already is posing risks to the environment and residents’ health.
Lisa Graves Marcucci, an Integrity Project official who’s been studying Little Blue for years, points to problems she says the company and DEP have refused to remedy them.
“[FirstEnergy has] 10 of 69 monitoring wells on site showing elevated spikes for arsenic — and that’s as recent as the first and second quarters of this year,” she said. “The monitoring wells are the sentinels that say there’s a problem at the site, and if not addressed, will leave the site.”
A report issued by the Integrity Project, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice in September says 39 coal-ash dump sites in 21 states, including Little Blue, “are contaminating drinking water or surface water with arsenic and other heavy metals.”
The report also says state governments aren’t adequately monitoring the sites and encourages the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations designating fly ash as a hazardous waste to protect the public.
Every coal-ash site equipped with groundwater monitoring wells, it says, has concentrations of heavy metals — arsenic and lead included — that exceed federal drinking-water standards.
But Jeff Smith, a DEP geologist and expert on Little Blue Run and the disposal site, said quarterly data from monitoring wells at and surrounding the impoundment reveal no excess levels of primary contaminants. “That has been proven with the data and in all the residential samples I’ve collected,” he said.
Sporadic elevations in arsenic levels in 2009 and 2010 were traced to fertilizer FirstEnergy was using to plant grass over areas of the impoundment. Arsenic levels declined once the company changed fertilizers, Mr. Smith said.
In the 1970s, Penn Power built its earthen dam across Little Blue Run near the point where it enters the Ohio River, just north of Chester, W.Va., and across the river from East Liverpool, Ohio.
Initially, the company thought coal waste would sink to the lake bottom and harden into low-grade concrete, leaving the surface pristine and available for recreation. But it soon became apparent that the lake never could be open to the public, Ms. Raines said.
The entire disposal site now is encircled by a chain-link fence.
Unregulated waste
The American Coal Ash Association, which promotes beneficial uses for coal-combustion products, said the United States in 2007 produced 131 million tons of such materials, of which 75 million tons not used in concrete and other products had to be disposed of in 1,300 fly-ash dumps nationwide.
Most are not monitored or regulated.
Recent collapses of waste-impoundments display potential for health and environmental consequences when such systems fail.
The wall of a large impoundment of red sludge at the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Co. collapsed Oct. 4 and sent the sludge flowing through a Hungarian town. Nine people died.
Fly-ash disposal became a domestic concern on Dec. 22, 2008, when a disposal cell at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee collapsed and released 5.4 million cubic yards of ash slurry (ash mixed with water) onto 300 acres, polluting nearby Emory and Clinch rivers in the process.
A neighborhood had to be evacuated due to heavy-metal contamination and three homes were destroyed by the wave of water and ash.
Although soil samples contained arsenic, cobalt, iron and thallium levels that exceeded “residential Superfund soil-screening values,” the EPA ultimately ruled that the waste was not hazardous.
But the collapses have spawned fresh concern about Little Blue.
The dam, standing 400 feet high, looms over the Ohio River and represents that largest earthen dam in the eastern United States. In 2009 the EPA designated that the dam has “High Hazard Potential,” which means failure would lead to loss of life.
Ms. Raines of FirstEnergy said the dam’s height alone was reason for EPA’s hazard rating. She said the dam is safe: “It is inspected by our contractors twice a year and by DEP once a year.”
The dam, built with 9 million cubic yards of rock, has a base 1,300-feet thick and a top that’s 2,200 feet across, or about two-fifths of a mile. No one lives in the area between the dam and the Ohio River, Ms. Raines said.
Monitors are built into the dam to detect any movement. “This is not something taken lightly,” she said. “Safety has been the emphasis from the beginning.”
But Ms. Graves Marcucci said water seeps through the dam from the impoundment. But seepage is an expected consequence of the dam’s design, FirstEnergy said, noting that it collects the water and pumps it back into the impoundment.
Because the lake is full, the company has been filling sausage-shaped “geotubes” with dry waste since 2006 and stacking them atop the lake. FirstEnergy anticipates using Little Blue for five to eight more years. In time, it will be covered with mulch to promote vegetation growth. Only time will tell if the 1,300-acre impoundment can ever be used for anything other than a disposal pit.
“Keep in mind that this is a cement-like substance that hardens to a low-grade concrete” due to the presence of calcium sulfate, Ms. Raines said. “It dries up and sets. The situation in Tennessee was wet fly ash. That’s not the situation in Little Blue.”
DEP’s Mr. Smith said Little Blue’s white semi-solid surface is like putty; it’s not low-grade concrete but more substantial than a gel. The putty-like substance would help prevent heavy metals from leaching, he said.
Ms. Raines said FirstEnergy has tested well water on residential properties 70 times without discovering problems that can be traced to the impoundment.
But Ms. Graves Marcucci said the 100 million tons of sludge is pressing down on aquifers, creating pressure that potentially could cause heavy metals to leach into groundwater. Greene Township residents have no access to public water and rely on wells.
A University of Pittsburgh study, led by Conrad Dan Volz from Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, is studying water quality in Greene Township but results are not yet available.
Neighbors’ concerns
West Virginians living near the impoundment face their own set of problems. Water has begun seeping from hillsides surrounding the impoundment, raising fears that water from Little Blue could be moving off site.
One woman’s sloping lawn is rolling up like carpeting due to hillside seepage.
Two other people have thyroid and respiratory illnesses they link to exposure to the impoundment over the hill from their home. They say a FirstEnergy official advised them against eating vegetables from their backyard garden, but company officials said no such advisory was ever issued.
At the home of John Reed Jr. within 1,000 yards of Little Blue, FirstEnergy’s water-well testing showed arsenic levels above safe drinking water limits. The company and DEP confirmed the high levels in one reading, but attributed it to a bad well casing that allowed the natural arsenic from soil to infiltrate the well.
DEP officials said seeps from the hillsides around the impoundment are under investigation.
Mark Durbin, a FirstEnergy spokesman, said the seep issue is “something we’re aware of and have discussed with residents. “We are hoping to move soon to take care of it,” he said.
Another concern is FirstEnergy’s proposal to build a new dry-waste disposal site with a double clay liner in Greene Township. FirstEnergy already owns 23 percent of the township, and supervisors said they don’t want another waste dump.
Health link?
Ultimately, the issue focuses on whether health impacts can be linked to Little Blue. Residents have done informal health surveys that have scared them.
“We seem to have a high rate of cancer,” said Sandra Wright, Greene Township secretary-treasurer. “On any road you have two or three people living with cancer daily.”
The township wants air monitors to determine the extent of air pollution from local and downwind sources. It also is awaiting results from the Pitt study before deciding on a next step.
The Post-Gazette’s ecological study of mortality rates for heart and respiratory disease and lung cancer shows elevated rates for the combined area of Greene Township, Hookstown and Georgetown.
Heart disease deaths there were 46 percent higher than the national rate. The total of 88 deaths from all three diseases is 42 percent higher than the predicted number of 62 deaths, based on national rates.
Scientific studies say these diseases can be linked to air pollution, but there are no studies suggesting a direct link to heavy-metal or fly-ash exposure.
David Templeton: dtempleton@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578. Don Hopey: dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983.
First published on December 16, 2010 at 12:00 am
Waste material OK’d for Hazleton mineland
http://www.timesleader.com/news/Waste_material_OK_rsquo_d_for_Hazleton_mineland_12-13-2010.html
Waste material OK’d for Hazleton mineland
A company spokesman sees job creation, but a critic fears a hazardous waste dump.
STEVE MOCARSKY smocarsky@timesleader.com
HAZLETON – The state on Monday approved the use of waste material from coal-fired electric generation plants as fill for some abandoned mineland in southern Luzerne County.
Edwardsville-based Hazleton Creek Properties began the controversial reclamation project five years ago at the 277-acre site bounded by state routes 93, 309 and 924.
Some have opposed using certain types of fill at the site, believing they could harm local water supplies.
Hazleton Creek Properties spokesman Frank Keel said the privately funded reclamation project is arguably the most vetted of its kind in the state. He is sure the application was thoroughly examined and reviewed by the state Department of Environmental Protection and looks forward to the project moving ahead.
“Not only will the HCP project provide much-needed jobs for Hazleton area residents, it will also safely reclaim one of the most dangerous abandoned mines in Pennsylvania and turn it into developable land that will spur the local economy and create still more local jobs,” Keel said.
Todd Wallace, acting director of DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management, said the work will improve public safety and the environment by eliminating about 1.2 miles of dangerous highwalls and reducing acid mine drainage.
Under the terms of the permit, Hazleton Creek Properties will use up to 550,000 cubic yards annually of a mixture of dry flue gas desulfurization waste and coal ash to reclaim 53 acres of the site.
Dry flue gas waste is produced when a lime powder spray mixes with sulfur dioxide emissions in the air pollution control systems of coal-fired power plants.
“This permit will allow Hazleton Creek Properties to begin reclaiming a portion of the site and return it to productive use,” Wallace said.
The project does have detractors.
Bill Lockwood, president of local environmental group Save Us From Future Environmental Risk (SUFFER), said he was not surprised by DEP’s approval, given the agency’s past approval of other site permits despite opposition from environmentalists and some elected officials such as state Rep. Todd Eachus, D-Butler Township.
“It looks like instead of being the future site of an amphitheater, it’s going to be nothing but a hazardous waste dump,” Lockwood said.
A spokesman for Eachus, who has vehemently and vociferously opposed the use of dredged and other materials as fill from the project’s inception, did not return a call seeking comment.
This is the fourth permit regulating fill that DEP has issued. Since 2006, Hazleton Creek Properties has been using regulated fill material such as concrete, bricks, blocks and dredged material to build rail sidings and access roads, and to cap two old landfills at the site.
Two other permits issued this year authorize Hazleton Creek Properties to accept dredged materials, coal ash, and cement and lime furnace dust, as well as crushed construction and demolition material for use as fill.
Hazleton Creek Properties applied for the flue gas desulfurization permit in June. DEP held an informational meeting Aug. 31 and accepted public comment through the end of September.
EPA Gets an Earful at Coal Ash Disposal Hearings
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2010/2010-09-09-092.html
EPA Gets an Earful at Coal Ash Disposal Hearings
DALLAS, Texas, September 9, 2010 (ENS) – Concerned about the health and environmental dangers of coal ash dumps, hundreds of residents from four states packed a U.S. EPA hearing in Dallas Wednesday, urging the agency to adopt the stronger of two plans to regulate the waste from coal-fired power plants.
The agency’s proposed regulation is the first national effort to ensure the safe disposal and management of ash from coal-fired power plants, which generate some 136 million tons of coal ash every year.
Texas burns more coal than any other state and also produces more coal ash. Power companies can bury it in landfills or store it in impoundment ponds, or they sell it as a component of building materials, roads or pavement.
“EPA must protect the public health by regulating this waste.” said Travis Brown of the Neighbors for Neighbors group in Texas. “Because coal ash is being dumped into unlined mining pits in our community, we are concerned that the groundwater we depend on may become contaminated.”
“Without federal oversight,” he said, “the state of Texas will continue to put profits before people and allow companies to escape cleaning up their own messes.”
“Doctors and scientists are just beginning to learn how the hazardous substances found in coal ash detrimentally affect human health,” said Dr. J.P. Bell, an emergency room physician from Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Coal ash is composed primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium.
“I learned that radioactive coal ash dumps are like sleeper cells, causing chaos down the road,” said Dr. Bell. “The health of citizens not affected until they become patients 20 years later.”
“In my personal experiences with citizens in Arkansas and Oklahoma battling against these huge waste pits, I have seen the negative consequences firsthand. Common sense dictates that the EPA should protect citizens when industry and the states refuse to.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said, “It’s been an inspiring day, seeing so many people from the region taking action to protect their air, their water, their health.”
The public hearing is one of seven the EPA is holding across the nation through the end of September on its plan to regulate coal ash. EPA will hold one additional public hearing in Knoxville, Tennessee during the week of October 25, 2010, the exact date to be announced.
The need for national management criteria and regulation was highlighted by the December 2008 spill of coal ash from a surface impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee. TVA, a public utility owned and operated by the federal government, local, state and federal agencies continue to work on recovery and cleanup of the millions of tons of ash that buried a valley and spilled into the Clinch and Emory rivers.
EPA has proposed two main coal ash management approaches. The stronger one treats coal ash as a hazardous waste. It would phase out surface impoundments and move all coal ash to landfills. Each state would have to individually adopt this version of the rule, which would be enforced by state and federal governments.
Protective controls, such as liners and ground water monitoring, would be required at new landfills to protect groundwater and human health, under the stronger proposal. Existing landfills would have no liner requirements, but groundwater monitoring would be required.
The weaker proposal would continue to allow coal ash to be disposed in surface impoundments, but with stricter safety criteria. New impoundments would have to be built with liners.
Existing surface impoundments would also be required to install liners and companies would be provided with incentives to close these impoundments and transition to safer landfills which store coal ash in dry form. Existing impoundments would have to remove solids and retrofit with a liner or close the dump within five years of the rule’s effective date.
This weaker proposal would apply across the country six months after final rule takes effect, but there would be no state or federal enforcement. Citizens or states would have to enforce this version of the rule through the courts.
The coal industry prefers the weaker proposal, which treats the ash as as a non-hazardous product.
Thomas Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, told the EPA hearing in Denver last week that by labeling it as a toxic, the EPA would jeopardize a successful recycling industry for coal ash products such as bricks and concrete that uses nearly half the coal ash produced.
In advance of the public hearings, the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice and Sierra Club issued an extensive report on the nationwide scope of the coal ash disposal problem.
The report, “In Harm’s Way” pinpoints 39 previously unreported sites in 21 states where coal waste has contaminated groundwater or surface water with toxic metals and other pollutants.
Their analysis is based on monitoring data and other information available in state agency files and builds on a report released in February of 2010, which documented similar damage at 31 coal combustion waste dumpsites in 14 states.
When added to the 67 damage cases that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already acknowledged, the total number of sites polluted by coal ash or scrubber sludge comes to at least 137 damaged sites in 34 states.
“At every one of the 35 sites with ground water monitoring wells, on-site test results show that concentrations of heavy metals like arsenic or lead exceed federal health-based standards for drinking water,” the report states.
“For years nobody, including the Environmental Protection Agency, has had a full picture of how much of this toxic waste is out there, where it is, or if it is safely contained. It has been dumped with no federal oversight, and utterly inadequate state policies,” said Dr. Neil Carman, Clean Air Program director with the Lonestar Chapter of Sierra Club. “Now that we’re aware, we are finding contamination everywhere we look.”
EPA to Hold Public Hearing in Pittsburgh on Proposed Coal Ash Regulations
EPA News Release (Region 3): EPA to Hold Public Hearing in Pittsburgh on Proposed Coal Ash Regulations
Contact: Donna Heron 215-814-5113 / heron.donna@epa.gov
EPA to Hold Public Hearing in Pittsburgh on Proposed Coal Ash Regulations
When: Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010 – 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: Omni Hotel, 530 William Penn Place, Pittsburgh, Pa.
What: This is one of eight public hearings on the agency’s proposal to regulate the disposal and management of coal ash from coal-fired power plants. EPA’s proposal is the first-ever national effort to ensure the safe disposal and management of coal ash from coal-fired power plants.
Each hearing will begin at 10 a.m. and continue until 9 p.m. with a break at noon and 5 p.m. The hearing will continue past 9 p.m. if necessary. Walk-in requests to speak will be accommodated as time permits. Written comments will be accepted at the hearing. The agency will consider the public’s comments in its final decision.
The need for national management criteria and regulation was emphasized by the December 2008 spill of coal ash from a surface impoundment near Kingston, Tenn. The proposal will ensure for the first time that protective controls, such as liners and ground water monitoring, are in place at new landfills to protect groundwater and human health. Existing surface impoundments will also require liners, with strong incentives to close these impoundments and transition to safer landfills which store coal ash in dry form. The proposed regulations will ensure stronger oversight of the structural integrity of impoundments and promote environmentally safe and desirable forms of recycling coal ash, known as beneficial uses.
EPA has proposed two main management approaches, one of which phases out surface impoundments and moves all coal ash to landfills; the other allows coal ash to be disposed in surface impoundments, but with stricter safety criteria.
More information about the proposed regulation: http://www.epa.gov/coalashrule
To view the chart comparing the two approaches: http://www.epa.gov/coalashrule/ccr-table.htm
COAL’S DIRTY SECRET
COAL’S DIRTY SECRET
Coal ash is one of the country’s biggest waste streams and is full of toxic substances, yet it remains virtually unregulated. Can Washington overcome the fierce opposition of energy interests to protect communities and the environment?
A special Facing South investigation by Sue Sturgis
ISS – COAL’S DIRTY SECRET
ISS – COAL’S DIRTY SECRET.
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Coal ash is one of the country’s biggest waste streams and is full of toxic substances, yet it remains virtually unregulated. Can Washington overcome the fierce opposition of energy interests to protect communities and the environment?
A special Facing South investigation by Sue Sturgis