Tennessee Coal Ash Spill Proves that there is No Such Thing as ‘Clean Coal’
Many people are probably aware of the horrendous coal ash spill on Dec. 22 at the Kingston Tennessee Valley Authority facility in Roane County, Tennessee. Even the aerial photos cannot adequately convey the immense scale of the disaster which spread more than a billion gallons of toxic material across the landscape—an amount 48 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
A coal ash pond ruptured on Dec. 22 and sent more than a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of eastern Tennessee after a holding pond break at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Coal Plant in Harriman, Tennessee.
What people may not know is that this same type of toxic coal ash is accumulating at more than 1,300 dump sites throughout Ohio and 31 other states. In 2005, 721 coal-fired power plants across the U.S. generated an astonishing 95.8 million tons of coal ash, according to the Associated Press. Twenty million tons of the annual total ended up in surface ponds—the most risky form of storage.
Coal ash contains heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium that can cause cancer, neurological disorder, liver damage and birth defects in humans and wildlife. Due to the metallic nature of these substances, they do not easily degrade and continue to bio-accumulate in the food chain for long periods of time. According to the Associated Press, these toxic substances can also “decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps” and create “fish with severe spinal deformities.”
The threat presented here in Ohio is all too real, as our state ranks number two in the U.S. in terms of volume of ash being held in pond storage—more than two million tons in 10 locations.
While the disaster in Tennessee is a tragedy, it must also be seen as an opportunity to shine a national spotlight and bring deserved pressure on a powerful industry that for decades has been inflicting devastation on communities across the country. From start to finish, everything about this energy source is destructive and dirty. Complete mountaintops with their lush forests are blown up and bulldozed into moon-like landscapes. Water has been rendered barren and lifeless for thousands of miles within formerly pristine streams. Small isolated communities in Appalachia have become “sacrifice zones.”
However, the destruction caused by coal-fired power plants goes well beyond Appalachia. The gases from the plants waft into the atmosphere and threaten cataclysmic disruption of the earth’s climate. An Arctic melting faster than anyone anticipated carries the planet ever closer to a tipping point which could escalate beyond the realm of human control. Drought, severe food shortages, wars over dwindling resources and dislocation of millions are possible scenarios for the future of our world.
Our massive and stunningly unregulated addiction to coal has become a classic “Faustian bargain with the devil” propelling us toward a self-created “Hell” of climate catastrophe. We have sold our souls to a filthy energy source in order to facilitate a society which squanders a huge portion of the electricity it produces.
The time has come to fully confront the “sacred cow” of coal. A new administration is offering hope of a paradigm shift away from the Faustian bargain and toward a vision of clean and green energy. We must offer all the encouragement we can and help these new policy makers see past the lies of “clean coal” and recognize that coal is a rampaging dinosaur destined for extinction.
For more information, contact Gary “Spruce” Houser, a longtime environmental advocate, working to “green” the energy supply of the city of Athens and create an ecovillage as a support base for empowered activism, at mountainmist8@yahoo.com.