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It Was the Worst Industrial Disaster In US History, and We Learned Nothing
superboj writes "Forget Deepwater Horizon or Three Mile Island: The biggest industrial disaster in American history actually happened in 2008, when more than a billion gallons of coal sludge ran through the small town of Kingston, Tennessee. This story details how, five years later, nothing has been done to stop it happening again, thanks to energy industry lobbying, federal inaction, and secrecy imposed on Congress. 'It estimated that 140,000 pounds of arsenic had spilled into the Emory River, as well as huge quantities of mercury, aluminum and selenium. In fact, the single spill in Kingston released more chromium, lead, manganese, and nickel into the environment than the entire U.S. power industry spilled in 2007. ... Kingston, though, is by far the worst coal ash disaster that the industry has ever seen: 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash, containing at least 10 known toxins, were spilled. In fact, the event ... was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico."
The worst industrial disaster in US history is an ongoing event and involves the release of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.
Nothin indeed.
Is that the media decided not to cover it because it was not on either coast and they didn't have a clear way to blame it on the Bush administration.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
doesn't act to protect the middle and lower classes because they can't pay the same bribes as people like the Kochs. And to actually regulate the banks or any large industry is to cut off major sources of funds. Fortunately, people are getting wise to this despicable relationship ... but they remain fearful because as individuals they are very susceptable to retaliation in many ways. Also, any approach that has any chance of effectively returning our "system" to the peoples control is now illegal for one reason or another. Even so, someone has put forth a viable plan to address this issue, Google "A plan to establish democracy in the United States" if you are interested.
Oh yeah .. this year .. huge coal-ash spill at a retired Duke Energy coal plant
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Don't forget the Great Molasses Disaster(s) which release tons of toxic sulfur into the rivers. These are an on-going problem over the years and we have learned "Nothin".
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What about Bhopal? Thousands of people dead from an accident at a Union Carbide plant?
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
WE LEARNED NOTHIN!
Oh, we've learned something. We've learned that this is something the government doesn't want to deal with. How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Its a good reflection of Finance sector dealings and the "controversy" about global warming trumpeted by the media (it was a large component of the media's product-output at the time, needlessly fuelling a pattern of denial and argument for its own sake).
Their recent coal ash spill coated 70 MILES of the Dan River, but thanks to them buying off the legislature and a Governor who happened to have worked for Duke Energy, they may escape any liability for the cleanup, leaving it up to the taxpayers to foot the bill.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
TVA knew the earthen embankments were leaking. They'd known about it for years. TVA is a federally owned corporation created by Congress.
you mean the liquid found in thermometer that is poisonous? wow.
America should not just be pushing Alternative Energy, but should also push for Nukes and Coal to be converted to Methane( sell that overseas).
All of this should be via a TOTAL ENERGY POLICY.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
how when these "accidents" occur in the southern US, nothing really is ever done. If they happen in the NE or NW, it's do or die to render aid and cleanup. As someone who, unfortunately, lives in the south, I notice this. No one gave a hoot in hell about Katrina, no one really batted an eye with the BP oil spill and nothing is ever really done about the various other hurricanes, tornados.
When I get my financial situation more or less right, it's the NE for me again.
The worst industrial disaster in US history occurred in 1947 when a series of explosions killed 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The initial blast was also one of the largest non-nuclear explosion in US history.
I like how the headline claims that the spill is still a problem, but then the article itself states that the only concern is above-regulation aluminum levels that are also found upstream of the spill.
As for the Slashdot story? Clicked the link, and regretted it. Horrible layout, bad artistic choices, I can't even read it to decide whether I should take the headline seriously. At first it looked like it was designed to work on a touch screen, but the 'front page' styling was repeated for every flippin' paragraph!
In fact, the event that woke Sarah McCoin that nightâ"the deluge that moved houses and ripped trees from the groundâ"was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it. And it genuinely makes sense to imagine that sub-surface events are exposing oil to the ocean on a regular basis, but we don't know about it because it's all very normal.
No, a better comparison would be to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... which spews ash everywhere on a somewhat regular basis. Ash = ash.
Unless of course you're trying to make less of an environmental argument and more of an anti-fossil fuels one. The latter is the only thing Deepwater and these coal ash events have in common.
What are you talking about? It was a government operated power plant, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Nobody died you fool.
Someone you trust is one of us.
What about Johnstown, when a dam built by a railroad company collapsed, killing well over 2000 people. Yes, at the time the dam belonged to a club run by industrialists as a hunting and fishing preserve, but it was still an industrial accident.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I have seen articles that the net energy output of nuclear power is negative. That is, by the time you add in all the costs of mining, refining, transporting, storing the fuel, you have spent more energy than you got from the fuel.
The only good thing I have to say about the formatting on medium.com is that it isn't the popular yet horrible "85/85", where the body text is set to 85% size / 85% gray. Many sites I have to zoom the text at least one step to be readable, but this site I have to zoom down at least three steps.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
er whoops I mean nationalized
You know, the opposite of what I wrote.
More coffee please
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's smaller. What's more annoying(as a local...ish) is that the state department of environmental regulation has been gutted by a governor who actually owns a lot of stock in Duke Energy. And even after the big news about this, it turns out that Duke actually still has pumps designed to pump coal ash directly from their pools into the cape fear river "for maintenance", in direct violation of the clean water act.
They excused it by saying "we didn't get any recommendation against it by the state environmental agency".
You just hate freedom. You want to take away my right to pollute the atmosphere so badly that it causes massive socio-political upheaval s around the world completely re-ordering the geopolitical landscape , uniting our enemies and making new ones under a unified belief that THIS is what America did to us, unleashing waves of suicide terrorism both abroad and domestically, all fueled by the deaths of hundreds of millions of innocent people, and unified by the theme that "this (desertification, devastating ocean rise unsurvivable heat waves, crop failures and finally, the death of large ocean life as the acidification takes out the lowest levels of the oceanic food pyramid, causing all above to collapse - THIS is what America did to us".
You just hate America and you're against freedom. That's all.
The DOE's cleanup job is a joke here. I refuse to support any new nuclear power plant in the U.S. until it can be proven that the mess that results can be cleaned up.
What an obnoxious article layout. I can't even be bothered to read it.
Is the biggest event really important, or is it more important to look at entire industries? Has coal in Appalachia been better or worse than gold mining in California? The gold mining contaminated many bodies of water with mercury, and fish are still unsafe because of it. How many streams and lakes in Tennessee have warnings like, "pregnant women should eat no more than one of these fish per month"?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And just like Global Warming, if you ignore it, there are no consequences!
Hooray for human greed and hubris.
Stick Men
Never worry. Market forces will fix this problem... somehow...
How about we lock all you green nuts up in pods and use you to generate energy?
We could make you a virtual paradise full of idiots and call it ... on the tip of my tongue... oh yeah.. California.
Kingston Fossil Plant coal slurry spill
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
you are all doomed, DOOOOOOMED!
It is a shame that we are falling behind in IP related to safe thorium reactors that can never go critical, produce only commercially viable byproducts used in industry, and can be made small enough that every house could have a sealed thorium reactor powering them. The outdated thorium laws are also causing the US to cede rare earth metal production to china, when a change in laws would allow us to use plenty of rare earth metals mined in the US. Search for the documentary "The Thorium Problem". The US made a prototype thorium reactor in the early 50's that was slated to be used to keep our nuke bomber force in the air 24/7, it was test run for 50k plus hours before shutting down. Also thorium in its natural state is so mildly radioactive it sits in piles all around the US outside of rare earth metal mines. You can walk next to it sit on them. Thorium reactors do not need to be pressurized to run, they have to be artificially heated to over 800c to become fissile, so in the event it runs away a wax plug can be put in the bottom of the reactor that will melt and the thorium will drain out into a room temperature container and become non fissile. Also because of the temperatures required to keep them running they can be used to power chemical reactions in chemical plants directly without the need to turn steam into electricity. Another words we could harness the heat directly.
Don't Care. Find someone else.
One billion gallons is about 10 billion pounds.
There was 140,000 pounds arsenic in 10 billion pounds of sludge.
Concentration of arsenic in sludge is 1.4 * 10e5 / 1e10 = 1.4 * 10e-5
Or about 1 part in 100,000.
This is why they got away with it. Coal ash sludge is nasty, but not quite nasty enough to be a hazardous substance per se. Hell, one of the best ways to get rid of it is to add it to concrete, which is then poured where people live.
The figure you should worry about is the change in the arsenic level in the river after the spill. I didn't see that figure in the article.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The DOE's cleanup job is a joke here. I refuse to support any new nuclear power plant in the U.S. until it can be proven that the mess that results can be cleaned up.
Now, that's a bit too far. Hanford was contaminated long before we had any good understanding of how to properly contain radioactive waste, had any solid idea of what kind of harm it could do, and had any kind of national environmental regulation that established standards for proper handling. Oh, and it was a military site which meant that it would have likely been handled incredibly irresponsibly due to the lack of accountability that secrecy provides them.
You should consider whether or not in the current framework with a civilian project forced to obey modern standards whether or not such a mess is likely to occur again and whether it's likely to occur in a manner that creates such a nightmare in the first place. It may still be reasonable to conclude, "No," but you really should hold up Hanford as the measuring stick for what can be done over 50 years (and an entire environmental movement) later.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Now there's plenty of CO2 for plants to breathe you dummy. Do you hate trees?
I am the Lorax, speaker for the trees
so expect them to just keep dumping more and more of this stuff in streams. If the latest proposals pass here in NC, the state is going to start paying Duke Power (err, they whine like children when you call them that, but they sell power but the idiot Republicans that own them aren't smart enough to understand that so they demand you to lie and call them Energy) to increase pollution because in the mind of a conservatives, companies are dumping enough pollution in rivers yet. Those people are disgusting.
Carbon based life forms have no use for coal?
We ARE coal.
On a serious note, you can use coal to whiten your teeth.
I hate to ask, as a foreigner, but...
What are you going to do about it?
It is not "coal sludge." It's coal ash slurry.
Did the OP even read the article? Even TFA refers to the flood as consisting of coal ash slurry.
There is no such thing as "coal sludge," but there is "coal slurry" which is something entirely different from coal ash slurry that allows transport of coal through pipelines in a very expensive process.
Kriston
It's smaller. What's more annoying(as a local...ish) is that the state department of environmental regulation has been gutted by a governor who actually owns a lot of stock in Duke Energy. And even after the big news about this, it turns out that Duke actually still has pumps designed to pump coal ash directly from their pools into the cape fear river "for maintenance", in direct violation of the clean water act.
They excused it by saying "we didn't get any recommendation against it by the state environmental agency".
Well the state environmental agency did not recommend against me bashing his head in with a bat either.
Submit to soylentnews.org Bring the better commenters with you.
medium.com is like the windows 8 of websites. It looks like they tried so hard they made it bad.
"It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard, 5 yards and a half make a perch, and 40 perches in length and 4 in breadth make an acre."
Remarkable that some people still use imperial measures.
I'm not at all in favor of nuclear power, I think it's an inefficient, obsolete technology that we haven't got the organizational and ethical capacity to run safely.
But hell, yeah! It's a shitload better than coal! And the costs of fracking are increasing even as the yields are falling.
Even greenies like me can see that fossil fuels are poisoning us.
But I'd rather skip fission and move on to something less than 30 years out of date, technologically. Nuclear fission isn't really sustainable either.
How is this the worse industrial disaster in US history, compared with the Texas City Disaster that killed 581 people, injured more than 5,000 people, and destroyed 500 homes, 1100 vehicles, and 362 rail cars due to an explosion of 2.9 kilotons TNT equivalent energy?
Cost?
Then the inflated values of today will win.
Deaths?
Long term medical effects?
Gigatons of waste produced?
"Worst" is a worthlessly subjective word without context.
-Styopa
The downstream areas are owned mostly by the local elite; There are multimillion-dollar homes on Watts bar lake. :) Several of my bosses live there. :D
I live just above the spill area, on the Emory river.
All this spill did was cover the vast amounts of radioactive sludge that was dumped for the last 50 years from the Oak Ridge Reservation, just upstream.
We have All the radioactives here; there's even a lake with radiation signs around it. (White Oak Lake, WO Creek drains the ORNL area.)
This was a drop in the bucket, as far as pollution is concerned. :)
If the quality of life of the local people has been effected then financial compensation is in order. Can kids play in the creeks or eat fish caught locally? Are people worried about health issues fro the spill? Each and every one effected should be paid for the negatives put upon the area. I should have said paid large!
Did the government actually run it or was it subcontracted out to private industry?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It was owned and operated by Tennessee Valley Authority, http://www.tva.gov/
Until the early 1960s, there was plenty of private coal activity in the area. The problem happened after the government tried to do something other than govern. (Government does the best job of governing, running courts, etc. Their track record in industry isn't good.)
You Americans gotta get your shit together with your Imperial system. Gallons? Pounds? Cubic yards? WTF?!
I'm kinda surprised that you use a decimal base for counting! Every time I read a number "10" in such a text as above, I have to mentally calm myself down and assure myself that it's not in base 17 so something.
Perhaps Church Rock would be a better example? Shame they didn't do hardly any follow up studies on the effects on the people, being poor native Americans why bother.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
this is an unmitigated disaster.all those poisons released into environment. people are falling dead all around me.i feel faint er,ach,choke, good bye.
I'm never buying RAM from them again!
Perhaps Church Rock would be a better example? Shame they didn't do hardly any follow up studies on the effects on the people, being poor native Americans why bother.
That was more of a mining disaster than a nuclear power disaster and would have had similar cleanup issues if the heavy metal contamination was non-radioactive.
Mining disasters are frequently rife with issues of irresponsibility and expenses dumped on taxpayers, poor government oversight due to local corruption, and issues of environmental justice (i.e. the fact that polluting industries tend to seek out poor communities to avoid NIMBYism and to get locals to look the other way when a "job creator" is coming to town). The potential issues of racism and state & federal governments taking any opportunity to shaft Native Americans are just a cherry on top in this case -- but largely irrelevant to the question of the safety of nuclear power.
While he whitewashes the morality of the issue, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" has a pretty good introduction to all the horrors the mining industry creates and why.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
we learned that if we don't live in mining states, we can close our eyes, or at most go "tsk tsk" and turn the page, and nothing will happen to us.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Nuclear power is so expensive because of the anti-nuke people. If the construction of a new nuke plant were not opposed with lawsuits that cost millions to overcome, and every other rediculous tactic used to prevent them being constructed or even stopped once they have begun construction the cost of nuke based power would be a fraction of that of coal.
What nukes need is a PR campaign to counteract the misinformation and confusion that the anti-nukers spread. Of course developing a new design that is not based on WWII weapons breeding tech would go a long way to helping as well. Modern designs breed less weapons grade material, burn more and produce vastly less "waste".
Watch the movie; it's good. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani