My wife is on a mission. The objective: get in shape. She and a friend are working out five days a week doing a mix of classes and running. I’m tagging along, though not working out nearly as hard. The point of this is that when I’m doing my cardio, I like to read. And now we’ve arrived at the problem. I try not to waste my time reading mindless entertainment or sports rags. There’s so much to know and learn that reading something worthwhile is the only way to go. Occasionally this backfires. One of those occasions was today.
When it comes to periodicals, on a regular basis I read Sierra, The Atlantic and Utne Reader. There are others I read off and on as well but not on any sort of schedule. In fact, I just reduced my subscription to the printed St. Louis Post-Dispatch from seven days down to one (Sunday) so that I can catch up on my magazines in the morning instead of reading news that I can easily find online. On today’s menu was the November / December 2009 issue of Sierra. About tw0-thirds of the way through I came across this small but potent piece:
Coal Ash: Close the Poison Pits
If the nuclear industry were allowed to just shovel its radioactive waste into open pits, nuclear power would look like a bargain. One reason coal appears to be America’s cheapest energy source is that the feds don’t regulate coal ash and other waste products left behind when coal is burned in power plants. So the industry does shovel its waste into open pits, abandoned mines, and huge slurry ponds like the one that burst its banks last December in Kingston, Tennessee, sending a billion gallons of toxic goo into and across the Emory River, covering 300 acres six feet deep.
Burning coal to produce half of the nation’s electricity and a third of its global-warming gases leaves behind some 131 million tons of ash per year. Ash piles up in the 584 dumps throughout the nation, poisoning streams, groundwater, wildlife, and humans. How poisonous is it? Back in 1980, Congress told the EPA to find out. It took the agency until 2002 to come up with a “risk screening”–which it would not make public. Freedom of Information Act requests by the Sierra Club forced the agency to divulge some material, although key sections were blacked out. The full report was not released until this March. It revealed that if you drink well water contaminated by arsenic from coal ash, you have a 1 in 50 chance of contracting cancer–worse odds than if you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.
And speaking of shoveling radioactive waste into open pits–that’s exactly what coal-fired power plants do. Because of the trace amounts of uranium and thorium in coal, reports Scientific American, fly ash “carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.”
WHAT YOU CAN DO
The EPA should regulate coal ash as hazardous waste. It will probably need to be stored in monitored, covered landfills with liners to prevent leaching into groundwater. Write to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson at action.sierraclub.org/bigpicture_ash.
DID YOU KNOW?
You might want to find out what’s stored in that ugly pond up the hill. Of the 584 coal ash dumps scattered across the country, the EPA judges 49 to be “high hazard,” at risk for catastrophic failure. Another Freedom of Information Act request by the Sierra Club led the EPA to reveal their locations. (The agency had initially refused, because of unspecified “national security concerns.”) These dangerous sites are found in 12 states, with the greatest numbers in North Carolina (12) and Arizona (9). Utility giant American Electric Power is responsible for 11 of the impoundments, followed closely by Duke Energy and Arizona Electric Power.
Thirty of the “high hazard” dumps are in impoverished areas. In Louisa, Kentucky, home to the Big Sandy coal ash site, nearly 33 percent of nearby residents live below the poverty level ($22,000 a year for a family of four).
Wow. As you probably noticed, I underlined a few lines in the article that stood out to me. Missouri is a coal whore. St. Louis itself is home to a few of the world’s largest coal companies, including Peabody, the largest. Peabody even has a massive brainwashing campaign underway at St. Louis Blues hockey games that blatantly misrepresents the facts about using coal for energy. In related news, the local utility, AmerenUE, is reporting it will be installing solar energy systems on two of its facilities to test the technology for future use in larger scale power generation. Hopefully this will piss off the coal companies.
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