Coal's Toxic Sludge (Rolling Stone)

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32742962/coals_toxic_sludge


It's deadly, barely regulated, and everywhere. Can Obama crack down on America's second-biggest river of industrial waste?


Big coal has spent millions of dollars over the past year touting the virtues of what the industry calls "clean coal," but it's no secret that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When you burn it, coal releases monstrous quantities of deadly compounds and gases — and it all has to go somewhere. The worst of the waste — heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium and mercury, all of which are highly toxic — are concentrated in the ash that's left over after coal is burned or in the dirty sludge that's scrubbed from smokestacks. Each year, coal plants in the U.S. churn out nearly 140 million tons of coal ash — more than 900 pounds for every American — generating the country's second-largest stream of industrial waste, surpassed only by mining. If you piled all the coal ash on a single football field, it would create a toxic mountain more than 20 miles high.

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For decades, the industry has gotten away with dumping coal ash pretty much wherever it wants. It poured the stuff into vast lagoons, dumped it into mines, used it to pave roads, spread it on crops as fertilizer, even mixed it into everyday items like concrete, wallboard, vinyl flooring, bowling balls, potting soil and toothpaste. There are no federal regulations to speak of. Many states have minimal restrictions on where and how coal ash can be dumped, but the coal industry has a long history of buying off state regulators with a junket to Vegas and a few rounds of golf. In short, the industry had it made. Nearly 300 billion pounds of coal ash simply vanished from view each year, with less oversight than household garbage.

But all that changed just before 1 a.m. on December 22nd, 2008, when an earthen dam collapsed at a storage pond brimming with coal waste near Kingston, Tennessee.

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There are currently 584 impoundments that store coal ash in 35 states, and the vast majority of the sites are not only unmonitored, they have no systems in place to keep the waste from leaking into groundwater. Studies by the Environmental Protection Agency found that toxic elements in coal ash can leach into drinking water at concentrations that far exceed federal safety standards. In 2007, the EPA estimated that some residents who live near unlined ash ponds run a risk of cancer from arsenic contamination as high as one in 50 — a level 2,000 times greater than the EPA's threshold for acceptable risk.

As it happened, the Senate confirmation hearing of EPA chief Lisa Jackson was held just a few weeks after the Kingston spill. When Obama's environmental watchdog was asked what she would do to protect the public from coal ash, Jackson indicated that it might be time to crack down on the industry's dirty secret. "The EPA currently has, and has in the past, assessed its regulatory options," she said. "I think it is time to re-ask those questions."

Meet Obama's eco-warrior, Lisa Jackson.

A year later, Jackson now appears poised to make good on that pledge. In the coming weeks, the EPA is expected to propose new rules laying out federal standards for how coal ash is stored, monitored and recycled. But the exact shape and substance of those rules remain uncertain — and nailing down the details may prove to be the clearest indication yet of whether the Obama administration is prepared to get tough with an industry it has left largely untouched. The White House Office of Management and Budget is currently reviewing a cost-benefit analysis of the rules — and big electric utilities are waging a furious last-minute lobbying campaign to keep them from being enacted. Sen. Evan Bayh, who accepted $126,000 in campaign contributions from electric utilities last year alone, drafted a letter to the White House — signed by 26 of his fellow senators — urging the EPA to back off. The Western Governors' Association also weighed in, urging the administration to leave coal-ash regulation to the states.

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In their latest lobbying blitz, coal-burning utilities and their allies continue to argue that putting stringent federal regulation on coal ash will cost billions of dollars, jack up electricity prices, destroy the economy, force the shutdown of coal plants and perhaps even cause blackouts. But they downplay the danger that coal ash poses to human health. USWAG insists that the way to determine if coal ash should be regulated as a hazardous waste is to use a test called the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure. Essentially, you put some coal waste in water, shake it up for 18 hours, then measure what leaches out of it. If the toxicity of the remaining junk exceeds allowable levels, the material is listed as hazardous. "By this standard, coal ash is not a hazardous waste," says Jim Roewer, the head of USWAG.

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For the Obama administration, which has been so outspoken about using science to guide sound environmental policy, confronting coal ash should be a no-brainer. After all, the cost of safely disposing of coal waste is tiny compared to the long-term risk to public health: Left unregulated, the sludge will continue to leak toxic chemicals into America's drinking water for decades to come. But environmentalists aren't so sure that the EPA, which is already under fire for failing to stop Big Coal from blowing up mountaintops in Appalachia, is ready to do what it takes to protect the public from coal ash. "I don't want to say that this is a litmus test for the EPA," says Evans, the Earthjustice attorney. "But in some ways it is. Regulating solid waste is something the EPA is very good at. The question is, do they have the political will to do the right thing?"
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I sure hope so

"20 mile high" toxic pile