Sunday, July 5, 2009

Coal Ash

In December of 2008, TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) a power utility company in the Tennassee area, had a coal ash spill that flooded 300 acres in Kingston, Tenn with coal ash sludge. Houses were even submerged. It wasn't a spill. It was a catastrophic failure. In response, the EPA surveyed all coal ash impoundments (or containers) in the U.S. and on June 29, 2009 released a list of 44 impoundments identified as "high hazard potential," meaning that if they were to fail (break, malfuction,misoperation, etc.) they could result in the loss of human life. Other designations are low hazard potential, which means malfunction would likely result in no loss of human life and just damage to the owner's property, or significant hazard potential, which means failure or malfunction would not result in loss of human life but could cause economic loss or disrupt human lifelines.

According to a letter from Senator Pat Roberts (Kansas- a coal state), 13.7 million tons of coal ash per year is beneficially reused. I need to find out out of how much coal ash is produced. Twenty states signed a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on June 26, 2009 noting that regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste would result in "regulatory overkill." My take on the regulatory overkill is that ash, which EPA used to characterize as nonhazardous because states had the facilities to properly contain the waste, would now be regulated. There is not enough landfill space, according to Senator Pat Roberts' letter to the EPA, to contain all the ash if all of it were considered hazardous. If classified as hazardous, ash can no longer be recycled, and EPA needs to find storage space for the ash which had been previously recycled.

The environmental conflict in this case is that EPA wants to ensure the protection of all its ash landfills so that no TVA spill is repeated. In the process of doing so, it could dismember the coal ash recycling program which would not be environmentally friendly.