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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.
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.
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.
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
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
Editors and publishers have learned the hard way that you don't fuck with the energy companies unless you have a battalion of lawyers at your disposal. You especially don't fuck with Big Coal in the middle of coal country.
As far as the Bush Madministration, the link is trivially easy to make. Shrub reduced inspections, regulations, reporting, safety rules and liability levels for the entire range of extractive industries. Obama's only blame is not restoring them.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
What are you talking about? It was a government operated power plant, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
There are many stories that are "gotten" but never actually make it to mass media. I agree with the sentiment that a motivated reporter will usually be able to get a story, but that doesn't mean it gets printed or played on air. Most media outlets have giant corporations as their parent, and often those corporations are heavily influenced by lobbyists and others who are actively working to keep negative news from the press.
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'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).,
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
I think a lot of Gulf folks in the seafood industry would have something to say about "how easily the environment dealt with it".
They're still digging oil out of the beaches in Alaska and the Exxon-Valdez incident was a long time ago now.
They're going in a bin labeled "pointless rhetoric that doesn't actually begin to address real-world problems." Both major parties are really good at sucking votes out of that bin, and the remaining sludge in it is made of people who think cynical non-participation makes them somehow morally superior.
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.
I heard about it from the main stream media and remember being offended by how the industry was restricting coverage.
The media needs to stop "being offended" and start being journalists.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
Mercury is a naturally occurring substance - are you really trying to argue that dumping 100,000,000 cubic yards of mercury into the Gulf would have no negative environmental effect?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
Kingston Fossil Plant coal slurry spill
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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.
Yes, but the difference is that isn't not all in a highly soluble form with a high surface area. This is why mine tailings are such a huge source of acid and metal contamination. What would take millions of years to expose to streams and waters via natural erosion is ground up and dumped straight into waterways by industry. The resulting contamination is much higher than you would find by running water over the top of the material before processing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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").