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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.
Just remember, every vote against nuclear is a vote FOR coal.
It's not a matter of "how much" it's a matter of "Who lives down river"
I'm going to hazard a guess that in this case it was poor people.
I've read a number of different estimates for deaths related to coal pollution, 10-15K annually in the US, 150-300K globally. Even if those estimates are 10 time actual, it is hard to beat coal pollution as the top killer for industrial activity. Disasters like collapses of mines, dams, coal ash pond get a lot more attention.
Turning off every coal plant today would be a much bigger disaster -- people freezing, starving, diseases, etc. would be far worse, but hey, I am all for replacing coal with safer nukes, etc. All major systems will results in accidents and deaths, it is kind of the way it is. Even today, $/kwh from coal is generally cheaper than the viable alternatives. Arguably, a new generation of nuclear power could be cheaper than coal (fuel costs on the order of 15-25% of coal), but this is certainly not guaranteed.
You still need transportation fuels (hard to replace jet planes with battery operated or nuclear).,
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.