By now you've hopefully heard of the coal industry's latest assault on humanity--the incomprehensibly massive coal ash spill in central Tennessee. New reports are measuring the spill at 5.3 million cubic yards, or nearly twice as much ashen waste as was created in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th. The sludge has leveled three homes, affected 42 properties, and is contaminating two tributaries of the Tennessee River.
The scale of this disaster must be seen to be believed. Cue the aerial video:
The sludge is a combination of coal fly ash and water, and is a bi-product of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant. Local residents are rightfully concerned that their water is contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals. Dave Cooper, longtime anti-coal activist, arrived quickly on the scene, and his account for the Huffington Post is the best on-the-ground reporting yet.
The Tennessee is a major river system and a drinking water source for millions of people downstream in Chattanooga, plus Alabama, west Tennessee and Kentucky. Coal ash is the waste material captured after the coal is burned for electricity - burning coal generates about half of America's electricity and according to Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Jeff Goodell, there is three times as much coal ash as municipal solid waste generated in America every year. ( "Big Coal," Jeff Goodell page 123). About 130 million tons of coal ash and power plant scrubber sludge are generated annually.Coal ash contains heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead. An article in Scientific American magazine dated Dec 13, 2007 states that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
In response to an urgent request from environmental activists, I brought water testing equipment to members of United Mountain Defense working at the spill site. UMD has set up an emergency crisis management center in Kingston, TN to coordinate the citizen response to the disaster and handle the media onslaught. On Saturday Dec 27, a flotilla of citizen water testers in kayaks, including members of UMD and Waterkeeper Alliance, toured the spill site, navigating among huge chunks of coal ash, which they refer to as "ashbergs." "We named the highest peak Mt. Ash," said Matt Landon, UMD volunteer staff person.
TVA has promised to pay for all water and air quality testing, and to clean up the site. But as Cooper notes, the TVA hasn't proven itself a very credible source. They originally claimed the spill was half the size as what is now being reported. And it seems like they're blowing ashy smoke about the ease of cleaning up this mess.
If a dump truck can hold 20 cubic yards of dirt and ash, it will take 265,000 truck loads to haul away all the ash (they are taking it back to the power plant). If they fill one dump truck trip every 5 minutes and work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it will take about 2.5 years to clean up the spill. TVA has been telling the media it will be cleaned up in about 6 weeks - this is a ludicrous claim.
The Associated Press' Kristin Hall has also been reporting on the disaster daily. The accounts from Kingston do reveal a local community that's fed up. Signs deriding the "clean coal" myth are popping up around the area, and just this afternoon the TVA seems to be buckling to the public outcry with statements about how it needs to fundamentally rethink how it deals with waste from the coal plant. We'll be sure to follow this story and make sure they're not just paying lip service.
Are you in Kingston? What do we need to know? Post your personal accounts--photos, videos, written descriptions and stories--here on Greenlight. This disaster needs to stay in the national spotlight, and we will do everything we can to keep it there.
Resolution for 2009: SPEAK OUT loudly, clearly and often
Dear Friends,
In calling for change in our time, great scientists are speaking about what could somehow be true to wealthy and powerful people who prefer that the "business as usual" status quo be maintained. Industrial/big business powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians want to keep things going along just as they are going now, come what may for the children and coming generations, for life as we know it, for the integrity of Earth and its environs.
Many voices are needed to support "voices in the wilderness" like those of Jim Hansen and John Holdren, exemplary scientists who have been willing to speak truth to those with the power to make the kinds of necessary change that make belief in a good enough future at least a possibility. Assuring a chance of a good future for the children and for life as we know it is an achievable goal that will lead us to overcome the arrogance and avarice of many too many leaders of my "Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation" of elders.
If too many leaders of the family of humanity choose to keep doing precisely the things they are advocating and doing now, and if we in the human community keep getting what we are getting now, then it appears a sustainable world for our children cannot be achieved. By so doing, the limited resources of Earth will be permanently dissipated, its biodiversity massively extirpated, its environment irreversibly degraded and life as we know it recklessly endangered. The current gigantic scale and anticipated growth of per-capita overconsumption of limited resources, global production and distribution capabilities, and absolute human population numbers worldwide are simply, clearly and patently unsustainable, even to the year 2050. Given Earth's limitations as a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet, the projected increases in these currently unbridled consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species could soon lead the human family to come face to face with some sort of colossal ecological wreckage.
Now is the time to speak out loudly, clearly and often about what is true for you. Forget about political correctness and convenience. Let go of economic expediency and greediness. Embrace necessary change rather than waste another day preserving the selfish interests of the small group of rich and powerful people, and their many minions, all of whom are adamantly and relentlessly defending an unsustainable, same old "business as usual" status quo.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Unscrupulous companies are trying to Greenwash fly ash and profit from this hazardous waste.
Calstar Products is trying to sell coal fly ash bricks - the company is claiming that the bricks are safe, but their own results show that they leach toxins like arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, lead, manganese, mercury and nickel.
These crooks are going to poison people - their fly ash bricks are going to be the next asbestos.
See the following links:
http://techpulse360.com/2008/10/23/reader-comments-on-fly-ash-brick-toxi...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/post/here-comes-the-green-bric...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10359630-54.html
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/inside-the-green-brick-house/
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) – an unbiased authority dedicated to protecting the environment has a very useful review of coal fly ash (http://www.nrdc.org/energy/coalwaste/default.asp) and its toxicity.
NRDC categorizes coal fly ash as a Contaminated Coal Waste
NRDC states “toxic material is laced throughout” the fly ash
NRDC states “Coal ash contains many toxic metals, including arsenic, which unchecked, can leak into ground water and be extremely hazardous to breathe”
NRDC states that coal ash “is contaminated by 10 metals classified as toxic by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR): Antimony, Arsenic, Beryllium, Cadmium, Chromium, Cobalt, Lead, Manganese, Mercury, Nickel and Selenium.”
NRDCs states “Coal-fired power plants produced more than 126 million tons of contaminated coal waste”
It also states “the waste produced in a single year contains nearly 100,000 tons of toxic metals”
This is the waste that Calstar wants to make bricks of and sell to unsuspecting consumers.
Bricks that are laced with toxic metals.
Toxic metals that leach out from the bricks – according to Calstar’s own data.
Calstar would like people to believe that the toxicity of fly ash is not an issue.
Calstar would like people to believe that bricks made from a Contaminated Coal Waste laced with toxic metals are not an issue.
Calstar would lke people to believe that it is “beneficially recycling” toxic fly ash and producing a “Green” product.
How is a product that is laced with toxic metals “Beneficial”? Beneficial for lining Calstar’s managements pockets?
How is a product that is laced with toxic metals that leach out “Green”? Is polluting the environment and poisoning people with a contaminated waste the new “Green”? Perhaps the “Green” is the money Calstar is hoping to make from selling the toxic bricks.
Does the management of Calstar have any decency?
Calstar – a company bereft of morals, trying to sell the new Asbestos.