The proposal – to use coal ash to bolster Mississippi River levees – started with a May 4 proposal by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to regulate coal ash, which has never in the history of the nation faced oversight, even though coal-fired power generation was once the primary source of electricity in the U.S., and still accounts for more than half the nation’s supply.
Jackson sees regulating coal ash under the hazardous waste provisions of the U.S. Resource Recovery and Conservation Act as a way to protect Americans from its toxins, which include arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, thallium and vanadium.
Of course, Jackson also suggested regulating coal ash under the non-hazardous waste section of the Act, using weaker guidelines that aim to prevent negligence by providing for citizen suits, and again demonstrating the EPA’s persistent and continuing ambiguity about who is responsible for protecting the nation’s environment, in spite of what the agency’s name clearly mandates.
Jackson’s other announcement – that the EPA was creating a special waste classification that would remove the onus of the word “hazardous” – was equally ambiguous and unpopular, and rather like the fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes (which hopes to conceal the emperor’s nakedness by obfuscation).
The May meeting was all part of a plan to mitigate the concern generated by the 2008 coal ash spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) Kingston Plant – a fiasco ranked as America’s biggest environmental disaster until the Gulf BP spill took first place.
Unfortunately, part of that May plan proposes using coal ash (in a slurry of water and lime) to strengthen weak areas in levees along the Mississippi River, many of which were built in the early part of the last century (1928-1954) under the Flood Control Act of 1928.
Designed to regulate and drain the Mississippi River watershed, the third largest in the world, the levees and flood control gates are aimed at preventing major floods like those that occurred in 1882, 1912, 1913 and 1927, the last taking out 26,000 square miles of cities, towns, homes and cropland at a cost of about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars.
The 130 million tons of coal ash generated each year in the nation’s coal-fired power plants have already found use in products ranging from cement to the grit on roofing shingles, as well as structural fills (i.e., the gravel substitute on roadways, or fill for embankments), and as a supplementary material to reduce the content of Portland cement in concrete - notably on the new I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, the Ronald Reagan EPA building in Washington, and the Freedom Tower in Manhattan.
This, even though Scientific American recently released a report showing that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
In the eyes of the Sierra Club and other environmentalists who showed up to give two thumbs down to the idea, the prospect would lead not only to poisoning of America’s longest and broadest watershed – serving fully 41 percent of the contiguous 48 states – but to continued and increased use of coal as an electricity generation source.
According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, coal-fired generation in the US is the cause of 27 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, including 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. This is projected to increase to 36 percent, or 2.7 billion tons of CO2, by 2025.
According to the Corps, the fly ash levee solution is the “cheapest, longest-lasting fix” of several considered. However, Corps Project Manager Gary Lowe was quick to point out that other alternatives would be “fully evaluated”.
For those unfamiliar with governmental doublespeak, this means that coal ash slurry reinforcement will be implemented when no one is looking, and when it fails, the Corps (and the government) will absolve one another of any blame for “cheap fixes”. Nothing will be said of the very expensive TARP fix that government officials say they were blackmailed into taking.
At the moment, the Corps is arguing that the levees are failing because the clay used to build them during the 1950s wasn’t strong enough. This, during an era when concrete was both readily available and eminently affordable.
In fact, the Corps has been using coal ash on levees near Memphis, Tennessee since 1995, though typically it has performed no tests to see if leaching has released any of the toxic, heavy metals into the river or adjacent watersheds.
The May 4 proposal would also allow coal ash to be used in sheetrock and other building materials, which seems an ill-considered way to get rid of a toxic legacy, and eerily reminiscent of toxic Chinese drywall.
There are about 50 coal ash piles across the U.S., all rated High Hazard Potential (by the EPA), and all belonging to power plant owners (like AEP, Duke and the TVA) who are less than careful about both their emissions and their castoffs.
Giving them an easy way to dispose of their leftovers seems unnecessarily generous, especially since it is – again – the American people who will pay in the long run.
Check out more on Celsias:
It Takes a School to Save Louisiana Wetlands
A Warming World Means More Destructive Storms
Image: Looking south along the Mississippi River levee, Louisian, via flickr courtesy Littoraria
