EPA Releases Data on “High Hazard” Coal Ash Dumps
July 1st, 2009
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Less than a year after a major coal ash pond ruptured causing a very large area to be contaminated with millions of tons of toxic coal ash slurry, the EPA has released its findings on the state of coal ash dumps in the United States.
Via the New York Times:
The Environmental Protection Agency has released a list of 44 “high hazard potential” coal ash waste dumps across the country. The “high hazard” rating applied to sites where a dam failure would most likely result in a loss of human life, the environmental agency advisory said, but did not assess the structural integrity of the dam or its likelihood of failure.
The list, released late on Monday, was compiled as part of the agency’s inventory of coal ash sites after more than a billion gallons of ash broke through a dam at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant west of Knoxville last December. An engineering analysis of the failure, released last week, cited design problems like the height of the ash, among other factors.
Coal ash contains toxic materials like lead, arsenic, selenium and thallium, and such sites have been known to contaminate drinking and surface water.
The list identifies disposal sites in 10 states, including 12 in North Carolina, 9 in Arizona and 7 in Kentucky. There were no Tennessee Valley Authority sites on the list.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, received the list earlier this month and wanted to release it, but the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers objected, citing security concerns.
The agency released the list after reviewing those concerns, a spokeswoman said.
The E.P.A. list was based on responses to a questionnaire that the agency sent to utilities and power plants. Environmentalists said they did not believe the list was complete because it was based on self-assessment.
“T.V.A. ranked its own dams, and it didn’t rank any of its dams ‘high hazard,’ ” said Lisa Evans, a lawyer for Earthjustice. A spokeswoman for the authority, Barbara Martocci, said she did not know who had classified the sites on the list. The classification system was developed by the National Dam Safety Program.
Ms. Evans said dam integrity was not the only or even the central problem with coal ash dump sites. In 2007, an E.P.A. report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps, including three other Tennessee Valley Authority dumps. Experts say coal ash should be stored in lined landfills to prevent contamination, but the agency questionnaire did not ask whether the sites were lined.
David Merryman of the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation in Charlotte, N.C., said two of the sites on the “high hazard potential” list discharge into Mountain Island Lake, the primary source of drinking water for 750,000 people in the Charlotte area. Those sites, which belong to Duke Energy, are unlined ponds.
Jason Walls, a Duke Energy spokesman, said the company’s two newest coal ash ponds were lined.
Ten of the sites on the high hazard list belong to Duke Energy. But Mr. Walls said those sites were sound. For years, the E.P.A. has failed to regulate the disposal of coal ash despite promises to do so. Under the Obama administration, agency officials have pledged to issue regulations by the end of 2009.
Well, this is certainly an important issue and one that gets nowhere near the attention it should. (In general, most enviornmental groups are too busy trying to stop nuke plants from being built to notice the mountains of coal ash.) That being said, I’m not entirely sure that there is an answer to this other than to phase out coal.
Whatever the regulations are, the fact of the matter is that burning billions of tons of coal anually is going to create tens of millions of tons of ash, and there are only so many ways that you can store millions of tons of anything. The sheer volume of ash limits what kind of structure can hold it economically. Silos or other covered and contained methods of storage could never acomidate such enormous amounts of material. Thus what we are left with is just giant heaps stored in a kind of “pond” like structure. And when you store millions of tons of ash in a pond, you can’t ever really get the risk down to zero.
Certainly ash dumps should be lined to prevent direct contact with ground and ground water, but when the pile already contains millions of tons of ash, that makes installing a liner impossible. Simply moving the filth could present a danger in itself.
Even if we somehow manage to burn coal and cram the CO2 into the ground, where (hopefully) it’ll stay for a while, is there really any doubt that this is not a very good way of generating power?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 12:31 am and is filed under Enviornment, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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July 1st, 2009 at 1:06 am
They’re doing the best to turn this liability into a benefit(or at least get rid of the stuff at little cost) by turning coal ash into various filler and construction materials.
There’s a hillariously named conference dedicated to this effort called World Of Coal Ash(it does sound dystopian doesn’t it?).
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July 1st, 2009 at 1:22 am
Soylent said:
Yeah, there are some uses for it, but the thing is we have do damn much of it. Coal ash has been used for some time in grouts and cement. One of the problems they’ve encountered is that the ash is not uniform in composition, depending on the source of the coal and thus the level of different materials in it. Some coal ash is just too high in things like mercury and thallium to be considered “safe” for use in grout or other building products. Some of it, however, is low enough that it can be used for that.
Still…. I mean… there’s a HUGE amount of this crap and it would take a LOT of uses for it as filler or use in cement or grout or masonry or whatever to get rid of all of it.
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July 1st, 2009 at 1:39 am
I have driven by some ash dumps before. The amount they actually have there is staggering. It is not an overstatement to say that it is a small mountain. Of course this takes years to build up, so it would be a real feat to empty them and also there’s the simple issue of how many damn uses can we find for this stuff? You’d need a LOT of filler to use up the volume of coal ash.
It depends on the kind of ash too, what it can be used for. Anthracite ash is the kind of stuff you generally think of as ash, like a grey powdery kind of material, but some of the low grade coals have with is basically dirt mixed in with them, so what comes out can be described as a mix of ash and burned mud.
Imagine if they gave this stuff half the scrutiny of depleted uranium? Imagine if they gave depleted uranium the same scrutiny as this stuff? If they did, there would be no depleted uranium left in the surplus piles and it would all be on the backs of forklifts or as keel ballast on ships
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July 1st, 2009 at 3:18 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
We can turn that around and say it would be great if all the DU critics got their shorts knotted up over these ash dumps instead. The same with the electrosensitive whiners and the antinuclear crowd in general. I wish to God these people would latch on to something really hazardous to bitch about.
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July 1st, 2009 at 9:32 am
Soylent said:
Indeed. Of all the worlds I’d want to live in, a World Of Coal Ash is not one. Too bad some people ended up in a World Of Coal Ash when the pond of coal ash broke lose and flooded their homes with coal ash.
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July 1st, 2009 at 10:18 am
drbuzz0 said:
Well, they’re certainly trying. The bulk uses I can see that they want to expand for ash is fly ash as a soil ammendment for crops(does this sound iffy to anyone?), use as a flowable fill for things like abandoned pipelines and utility vaults, embankments for roads, road subbase and a raw material/filler for concrete.
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July 1st, 2009 at 11:51 am
soylent said:
Well they do use coal ash to backfill coal mines, which is certainly something that we should see more of, because the state of coal mining remediation is not as good as it should be. It is still expensive to move the stuff back to the mines, when you consider that it accumulates over decades and would take many years of continuous digging just to get it back to the mines it came from.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Coal is so dirty it is amazing we still use it. Why not just switch to gas?
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July 2nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Soapy said:
We already use gas heavily and expansion of more gas is going to pinch the limited supply as it is. There is not enough gas to go around if it replaced coal for the whole world.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
This is why I’m so upset that they are actually talking building more coal plants since W-M passed. I wrote up a comparison on the pollution from a coal power plant versus nuclear:
http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/06/straining-at-gnats.html
If you look at the EIA statistics we produce 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year from coal plants.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1207a.html
From the numbers I’ve seen, it is cheaper to build a nuclear plant than a coal plant with CCS and that does nothing about the ash and sludge.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Here’s some more grist for the mill. (bad pun intended)
Poverty Near “High Hazard” Coal Ash Sites
Bruce Nilles, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, puts a list of 44 coal ash storage sites into Google Maps
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July 2nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Here’s some more grist for the mill (bad pun intended)
Poverty Near “High Hazard” Coal Ash Sites
Bruce Nilles, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign lists the 44 coal ash sites deemed “high hazard” onto Google Maps
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July 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Joel Upchurch said:
This doesn’t even take into account the fact that CCS is a fantasy.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
How much would it cost to glass the coal ash and then put it back in the coal mine?
I surmise that coal is cheaper to use than gas, even if the coal burners have to compensate the state for air pollution.
Click here for a generalization.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 1:39 am
I’m not sure right now if coal is always cheaper than natural gas, since the spot prices for natural gas have fallen so far. The spot price for NG is around $3.30 per million btu and coal is around $2.20, but a combined cycle gas plant usually has higher efficiencies than a steam turbine coal plant. Plus the coal price is mostly about how far you have to haul it. It’s possible that Natural Gas in Georgia might be cheaper than Wyoming coal.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 3:44 am
Joel Upchurch said:
I could see how the price of gas might drop below that of coal from time to time, but one must remember that gas is prone to fluxuate and can go up dramatically whereas coal is pretty stable and the supply is not in doubt. Some power plants have dedicated coal mines that feed them as well.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Gas can be refined from decaying organic matter (which is how fossil gas was created in the first place).
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July 3rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Michael Ejercito said:
It requires a breathtakingly huge amount of organic matter of the correct type for it to be a major source of energy.
I can’t tell because of all the market distortions, but it seems to make some sense on a small scale(e.g. anaerobic digesters for major slaughterhouses or cattle farms).
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July 3rd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
“Biogas” as in methane produced by anaerobic digestion of waste can be extracted from land fills or sewage treatment plant settling tanks. It occurs there naturally due to the actions of bacteria.
The advantage is that the gas is basically “free” in that these circumstances it would otherwise be vented or flared. It does have the disadvantage of needing some processing as it is full of CO2 and water vapor and such. But the biggest issue is the general scale of it. The largest landfill gas power plants are less than 25 megawatts and use some of the largest landfills.
It’s possible that there could be enhanced gas production by using digesters to create more decay than you’d get from just letting the waste decay in its normal state. Digesters have agitators and are designed for maximum microbial action.
Still, it’s not enough to make a huge difference.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Biogas is an other example of greenwashing natural gas which is used to make up the shortfall in several of these plants.
If your going to make electricity from garbage, just burn the stuff directly and make steam
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July 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Purified methane is a beautiful chemical feedstock; it’s really a shame to just burn it.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
DV82XL said:
Well I don’t know about that. I agree that in many cases “biogas” plants are run primarily on natural gas and the “biogas” is just for show. It’s like saying my car runs on renewable energy because gasoline that I use contains 10% ethanol.
I’m not a fan of burning garbage though. It’s a dirty process and a landfill does work fairly well as a carbon sink because after the initial decay over the first few years to a couple decades things get compressed and sit there for a while. Still fresh landfills do emit methane and methane is a byproduct of sewage treatment – anytime you have sewage sitting in a tank, it will emit methane.
I’m all for capturing and using this methane when it is economical, but I’m not about to believe it will ever be more than a relatively small source of energy.
There is a landfill about an hour from me which is quite large and was only capped a few years ago. For many years it had just vents for the outgassing of the waste. They have since installed a biogas system that produces a nominally small amount of electricity from a couple of gas powered generators. I don’t know what the setup is as far as how the electricity is used. I believe at least some of it is used at the facility for lighting and compactors and stuff (there is another zone of the landfill that is still in use).
They may sell some back to the grid. I’m not a fan of small net-metered generators, but at least this is not an intermittent source.
The other example I can think of is that the sewage treatment plant in Boston pulls enough methane out of the system to provide for more than half of the power of the sewage treatment plant systems.
I’m all for that kind of biogas recovery. It has a pretty good ROI and it beats venting or flaring it. It’s just not a huge energy source and it’s not going to make a *huge* difference in the grand scheme of things.
It is possible to make methane in large volumes from biomass using some relatively simple processes – pyrolysis followed by gas separation and steam reforming to produce syngas (H2 and Carbon Monoxide) this can be converted to methane using some catalytic reactions – it can also be converted to various alcohols or other end products. Of course it can also be converted to heavier hydrocarbons using the Fischer–Tropsch or other related hydrocarbon production processes.
Of course, this is all fairly well established and conventional chemistry that has been done on an industrial scale for some time. Methane being the simplest hydrocarbon is not all that difficult to produce.
But it comes down to the same thing in all cases: A need for large amounts of thermal energy to run the process.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 10:10 pm
I was more thinking about plasma technology that is being used to heat the trash to about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and thus create a very hot, pressurized gas, spinning a turbine to generate electricity. It also creates steam, that is also being used to this. Metals condense at the bottom and them are sent to smelters for recovery.
Unlike incinerators, which use combustion to break down garbage, there is no burning, or oxidation, in this process. The heat from plasma converters causes pyrolysis, a process in which organic matter breaks down and decomposes. Plasma torches can operate in airtight vessels. Combustion requires oxidization; pyrolysis does not.
The price of the electricity used this way is comparable to that of the electricity generated. The difference is , you’re getting rid of a problem reduce landfill volume and the release of methane gas.
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July 4th, 2009 at 3:45 am
I agree that we should phase out coal, but the question is how? There is much credible evidence that the coal industry fought the growth of nuclear energy in the 1970’s and continues to do so by proxy with many unwitting Greens as their allies. The coal industry scored another point by getting the “nextgen” project revived by the Obama Admin., and no one but the politicians are fooled that “clean” coal will work.
Might it be better to lure coal away from the electricity business with a carrot instead? Coal can be converted to gasoline and other liquid fuels but as I understand it, currently these processes produce a lot of pollution. To the extent that nuclear process heat could make these processes cleaner or how by how much, I don’t know, but if it could be done to a satisfactory degree then perhaps they could get more money per ton of coal because they’d now produce a value added product. Could this 19th century fuel source find a better use in the 21st century besides just burning it?
China makes DME from coal, but if that production process is just as dirty as burning it then obviously there’s nothing gained no matter how cleanly DME burns. I wish I knew more about the industrial possibilities to have a better opinion on the matter, but it seems that a straight up plan of decommissioning coal plants for nuclear plants will not work politically.
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July 7th, 2009 at 3:41 am
I don’t remember where I heard it but there is a quote that sticks with me that goes something like “A coal fired power plant is an ecological disaster even when it is functioning properly”
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July 7th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
It should be noted that fossil fuel wastes are exempted from hazardous waste regulation:
http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/industrial/special/fossil/Fossil fuel combustion (FFC) wastes are the wastes produced from the burning of fossil fuels (i.e., coal, oil, natural gas). This includes all ash, slag, and particulates removed from flue gas. FFC wastes are categorized by EPA as a “special waste” and have been exempted from federal hazardous waste regulations under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). I
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July 7th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
The link got corrupted:
http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/industrial/special/fossil/
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July 8th, 2009 at 12:08 am
ondrejch said:
That’s right and I think this has come up here before. I don’t know how things work outside the US, but in the US it is exempt because if the same material was subject to the same regulations as general purpose industrial waste it would never be allowed to be stored in such massive quantities out in the open in “ponds.”
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July 8th, 2009 at 12:39 am
They did the cap and trade for Sulfur Dioxide in the Clean Air Act of 1990. I checked and 75% of coal plants still don’t have scrubbers. They use low sulfur coal from Wyoming instead, which is 2% sulfur instead of 5%. I’m reading “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” by Gwyneth Cravens and she has a whole chapter on coal. She says that coal plant emissions still cause 24,000 premature deaths a year in the United States.
I wrote an article on the pollution generated by 1GW of coal versus 1GW of nuclear:
http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/06/straining-at-gnats.html
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July 8th, 2009 at 2:38 am
It can be hard to quantify the number of deaths because it is such a large and chaotic system, but the fact that coal burning causes at least thousands of deaths per year to occure prematurely – along with many more respitory and other health issues is beyond any reasonable dispute.
Sulfur is only one of the problematic components of coal. Cutting down sulfur dioxide is certainly a good thing, but it’s a token achievement compared to the lead, mercury, arsenic, volitile organics and tars, cadmium, thallium, particulate matter and other crap that gets blown up and out of the stacks.
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July 8th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I think the precipitators are good for the particulates, so most of that stuff goes into the ash pile or the sludge pile and becomes water pollution instead of air pollution. The scrubbers are mostly for SO2 and NO.
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July 8th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
What gets me is all the suffering and trouble we had in Yorkshire since the 1980s, after Thatcher decided to close the deep-mined coal industry, and now we have to realise that it could never have gone on. Some time in the 1990s, we’d have had to shut it all down even if we’d won, because it’s just too filthy.
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