Report Finds Widespread Contamination at Nation's Coal Ash Sites (washingtonpost.com)

Nearly all 250 coal-fired plants in operation in the U.S. have leaked chemicals and contaminated the local groundwater supply with toxins [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; you can check the alternative source, and original report (PDF)], according to a report released this week by environmental groups Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. From a report: The report found that 91 percent of the nation's coal-fired power plants reported elevated levels of contaminants such as arsenic, lithium, chromium and other pollutants in nearby groundwater. In many cases, the levels of toxic contaminants that had leaked into groundwater were far higher than the thresholds set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the groups said.

The examples span the country. At a family ranch south of San Antonio, a dozen pollutants have leaked from a nearby coal ash dump, data showed. Groundwater at one Maryland landfill that contains ash from three coal plants was contaminated with eight pollutants. In Pennsylvania, levels of arsenic in the groundwater near a former coal plant were several hundred times the level the EPA considers safe for drinking. The voluminous data became publicly available for the first time last year because of a 2015 regulation that required disclosures by the overwhelming majority of coal plants.

Comments

In before Republicans lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, this is a fact. There is toxic coal ash from coal plants in the groundwater of just about every single state. They claimed this could never happen, we needed to deregulate, now here it is. Prepare for the lies, here they come.

Re:In before Republicans lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2173680-six-pollution-policies-gutted-by-scott-pruitt-and-what-happens-next/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/here-s-a-scorecard-of-the-scott-pruitt-investigations-quicktake
https://earthjustice.org/blog/2018-april/scott-pruitt-doesn-t-play-by-the-rules-and-he-still-can-t-win
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/09/on-climate-change-scott-pruitt-contradicts-the-epas-own-website/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/09/epa-scott-pruitt-abandon-clean-power-plan-obama

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304360

"New EPA leadership has thus far aimed at deconstructing, rather than reconstructing, the agency by comprehensively undermining many of the agency's rules, programs, and policies while also severely undercutting its budget, work capacity, internal operations and morale," concluded the study, titled "The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture."

The study, part of the American Journal of Public Health's special issue on climate change, adds to the mounting scrutiny and criticism of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's policy, personnel and operational decisions, which sometimes weave together.

For instance, the study suggests that the undermining of the EPA's public health mission is enabled in part by Pruitt and his aides making policy decisions with little input from longtime staff and scientists.

Such isolation is cemented by "the extraordinary lengths that Pruitt has [gone to] to preserve secrecy and autonomy from the EPA career staff, such as cordoning his office wing off from career employees, reportedly forbidding note taking at some meetings and employing 24-hour armed guards," the report said. The study was accepted by the peer-reviewed journal in February of this year, before some of the recent scandals around Pruitt had surfaced, including his condo rental from the wife of a lobbyist. He currently faces at least 10 (14!) investigations from his EPA tenure.

Re:In before Republicans lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn your from you're. I'm saying the Democrats pushed for the EPA to do its job of regulating this, and "deregulate it all" assholes (mostly republicans but there are a few dem morons too, Manchin, etc) won out short-term and sold out our country.

Coal barons don't care if you have contaminated water, they're billionaires. They import Evian by the truckload, you Republican pawns in West Virginia get to drink the tar for all they care.

Stop being a (lol, quasi) useful tool of pollution apologists. Stop polluting yourself willfully. There's nothing patriotic about being a sellout or liar, GOP.
   

Re:In before Republicans lie.

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Riiiight. So that means we shouldn't regulate it at all. Makes perfect sense.

Re:In before Republicans lie.

[Solandri]

The report is an analysis of data that power companies were required to publish in March 2018.

EPA in 2015 finalized the first federal regulation for the disposal of coal ash â" often called the âoeCoal Ash Rule.â Among other things, the Coal Ash Rule established groundwater monitoring requirements for coal ash dumps, and it required power companies to make the data available to the public starting in March 2018.

The nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), in collaboration with Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, Prairie Rivers Network, and other organizations, obtained and analyzed all of the groundwater monitoring data that power companies posted on their websites in 2018.

Unless your claim is that the entirety of this contamination happened in just the 13 months from Feb 2017 to Mar 2018, Trump's EPA appointments and policies have nothing to do with this. Coal ash has always been toxic sludge, and containing it safely has always been a problem.

IMHO, the real culprit here is the environmental movement. They opposed transitioning from coal to nuclear power in the late 20th century, instead trying to use coal's terrible nature as leverage for switching to renewables. Nuclear provided an alternative to coal, so needed to be vilified to preserve the narrative. In 2016 we burned about 728 million tons of coal per year and generated about 130 million tons of coal ash. (The rest of the mass gets discharged into the air, where lucky you and me get to breathe it.) Coal ash has a density of about 1.6 kg/liter, so this is enough coal ash generated every year to fill roughly 230 oil tankers (at 320,000 m^3).

The nuclear reactors in the U.S. generate about 2200 tons of spent fuel each year, or about 104 cubic meters. Nuclear generates about 20% of our electricity vs about 30% for coal, so replacing coal with nuclear would've generated about 156 cubic meters of spent fuel. That's about enough to fill two tractor trailers (though you don't want to pack it that closely or it would start fissioning again).

230 oil tankers of coal ash vs 2 tractor trailers of spent nuclear fuel per year. That's the choice we had, and the environmental movement made us pick the 230 oil tankers of coal ash by forcing nuclear off the table.

The sum total of nuclear waste the U.S. has produced in 60 years of nuclear power is only about 80,000 tons. About one and a half olympic-sized swimming pools by volume. That's why the nuclear power industry isn't panicking over the lack of a long-term waste storage site. There's so little waste that they're just storing decades worth of it in pools at the plants themselves. And this waste still has most of its energy in it. The U.S. banned reprocessing in the 1970s (one of the byproducts is weapons grade plutonium). As a consequence, our "spent fuel" still has about 97% of uranium's energy still in it. That's why it stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Reprocessing can get that energy utilization from 3% to over 60%, resulting in spent fuel which only stays dangerous for centuries. We just have to figure a way to safely control or dispose of the weapons grade plutonium.

Extra info

[Vanyle]

Here is a link to a website by the company that did this report https://ashtracker.org/ Cool stuff.

Re:Not nearly as comtaminated as Fukishima or Cher

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But Fukushima isn't the water table in 48 states, from which we are now drinking. Coal contamination is a big problem, assuming you don't want a nation of Mercury/Lead contaminated Republican blank-shooting retards exclusively.

A better study

[bobstreo]

would also have checked all the coal plants that have been shutdown. If you add all them in, you could get closer to 100% contaminated.

Re:Blame the green lobby

[Anonymous Coward]

We could have stopped burning coal decades ago if it weren't for them standing in the way of progress.

This is utterly ridiculous. Existing nuclear plants are closing left/right because it's not profitable to keep them open. This has nothing to do with the "green lobby", which has so little power it can't even stop crap like coal ash contamination. Nuclear can't compete with cheap natural gas right now.

The real reason Nuclear didn't take off was economic. The plants are crazy expensive, take decades to build, and nobody wants to fund them. The idea there's some "green lobby" with magical powers that's stopping it all is laughable.

Oh, and you left out the fact that coal plants are ALSO closing left/right because of natural gas and phracking!

You pro-nuclear people think the only power source in the world is either Coal or Nuclear.

Re:Not nearly as comtaminated as Fukishima or Cher

[lgw]

These places literally glow in the dark and will kill life within minutes.

More radioactive material is emitted by coal plants than by nuclear plants worldwide. Does spreading out the health consequences over the nation, rather than having a really bad problem in one area, make it better? Oh, coal also has really bad problems in specific areas: the various "mouth of Hell" sites where a mine caught fire, and the site will keep burning for decades, perhaps centuries.

Re:So environmentalism caused the coal ash disaste

[No Longer an AC]

If you had left out the insults I might have modded you up.

Next time keep it short, simple and non-toxic:

"The green lobby is so fanatically anti-nuclear" - That doesn't have anything to do with coal ash over the last 50 years, which the "green lobby" has fought the entire time.

At least he said "lobby" and didn't accuse all environmentalists. I'm as much of a tree-hugging dirt-worshiper as the next hippy which is why I've always thought we should have more nuclear power. There are too many extremists among us and in many ways they are just as idiotic as the people "rolling coal" in their over-sized pickup trucks.

Some "environmental activists" are just terrorists and those who aren't need to start thinking beyond bumper-sticker slogans and panda bear pictures, especially if they want to be taken seriously.

"NO NUKES" isn't exactly a very persuasive argument. I don't think trying to discredit the source is very persuasive either. Even if Earth Justice is anti-nuclear does that mean there isn't contamination from coal ash sites all over the place?