Slashdot Mirror
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."
We had the huge recession, and the media was more interested in Obama's victory.
More importantly, the coal industry spent a lot of money and legal effort to prevent the media from getting photos.
I heard about it from the main stream media and remember being offended by how the industry was restricting coverage.
If you didn't, then perhaps you should accept responsibility for watching crappy media instead of blaming the media for being crappy.
That is, not all media is as incompetent as the ones you watch.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
indeed, and even if we confined ourselves to worst coal slurry accidents in 1972 there were 125 killed, over 1000 injured and 4000 left homeless in the so-called Buffalo Creek Flood in Logan County, West Virginia
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".
Ash = ash.
Coal ash is different from volcanic ash.
I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina. The rest of the elemental analysis are trace elements, which can be made to sound super-scary when you scale up the quantities to thousands of tons. OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles. You could probably strip-mine the top 5 feet of the same area in a city and find higher concentrations.
The biggest problem is not all the toxic waste, it's all the bloody inert sludge that's everywhere.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
No, this statement was provocative hyperbole that equates controlled use of energy resources to industrial accidents. It's like calling every infamous head of state "Hitler" and is a distraction from setting our priorities to real problems. AC was wise to post AC, because he/she has no real conviction.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.