The only thing worse than coal ash filling up landfills
December 24th, 2008
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Is coal ash filling your living room and yard..
The US needs a lot of energy, but coal one of the primary energy sources in the US has a very poor energy density. Thus in order to get the necessary energy from coal, you need to burn a hell of a lot of it. And when you burn a hell of a lot of dirty filthy coal, you get a lot of even dirtier, filthier ash.
At the TVA’s Kingston Steam Plant, they burn a lot of coal. The plant therefore generates a lot of ash which they had been putting in a holding area behind a dam.
Yesterday the dam burst and in doing so released a muddy wet slurry containing over 1.7 million cubic feet of fly ash. The spill has destroyed at least twelve houses and between two hundred and four hundred acres of land. Bad though this may be, the damage thus far appears to be mercifully low, at least by historic standards. There have been numerous disasters of this type in the past, one of the most famous being the Buffalo Creek Flood in 1972, which killed 165 and left thousands homeless.
In the past the question of what is done with coal ash has come up. The answer is that coal ash is rapidly becoming a huge problem. The sheer volume of ash which is produced by modern power plants just boggles the mind. Remember, big power plants burn well more than the weight of the Titanic in coal per day.
Here’s what the plant looked like before this event:
The problem is made even worse by so-called “clean coal” plants. While these plants do take measures to reduce the amount of filth being belched into the atmosphere, you can’t burn a fuel as filthy as coal and not expect the nasty remnants to go somewhere. The precipitate from the flu gas scrubbers of coal plants increases the volume of highly toxic solid and sludge-like waste produced. With little regulation, this ash is often kept on site in large volumes and is later buried, back filled into coal mines and even dumped at sea. It is not uncommon for the ash to be in the form of a slurry in order to keep dust down and because the ash is sometimes liquefied both by “wet scrubbers” and by the ash removal systems, which use water as a medium to allow the ash to be pumped in a slurry state.
Coal ash can be used for certain purposes such as manufacturing of grouts and special concrete blends, but not all ash is suited to this and that which is often has to be processed and decontaminated to remove harmful toxic materials.
Because the ash concentrates the non-carbon components of coal it can be a very hazardous material. High levels of lead, mercury, arsenic and almost any other naturally occuring heavy metal are present in the ash. This recent disaster has raised concern about the long term safety of local water sources:
The sludge damaged a dozen houses, pushing one off its foundation, and caused the evacuation of 22 residences, the authorities said. It flowed into the Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee River, which provides drinking water to millions of people downstream. Video news reports showed dead fish lining the banks of a nearby waterway.
Exactly how severe the impact on local fisheries and water resources will be is not yet clear. It will depend on how quickly this spill can be cleaned up and how much has already leached into the local watershed. There’s no doubt that the cleanup will be extremely expensive, but complete recovery may take decades or more.
There is already an investigation of what caused this event, however, in my opinion the exact failure which resulted in this particular dam break is only part of the issue. As long as millions and millions of cubic meters of extremely nasty, toxic material is being generated and stored the potential for such events exists. The volume of ash produced is so staggering that there are just not that many safe places to hold it. In this case, initial speculation is that cold temperatures and heavy rains may have caused the breach.
This was not the first nor will it be the last. This was not the largest and certainly not the smallest. This kind of news story rarely makes it to the front page because it’s simply the kind of thing that happens due to the staggering use of coal for energy. Every year, miners die in accidents, coal trains overturn, slurry dams break, sink holes open up, mine fires burn and ash piles leach into local bodies of water and hardly anyone takes notice. Yet if a nuclear power plant has a transformer fire or a leaky valve, well that’s how you get front page coverave.
More information on the plant and the recent event can be found on the website of the TVA.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 3:01 am and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Misc, Nuclear. 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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December 24th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Kingston should have been closed a long time ago and that was the plan back in the 1970’s. The power plant would not have been needed because of construction of Watts Bar nuclear only a short distance from there. Watts Bar was to have two 1200GWe reactors. That plus the Watts Bar Dam for peaking would have allowed the closure of Kingston and possibly the reduction of other power plants.
It was the anti-nuclear groups combined with the BS of the NRC that makes it impossible to open a power plant. They considered it a victory that they stopped Watts Bar. The TVA finally opened Watts Bar 1 but not until 1996 and Watts BAr II is still not complete because of the problems they caused.
AS things are they want to complete II by 2013-2017 but they won’t be able to close Kingston, but maybe (hopefully) reduce the production from it and therefore coal burned. Both plants will be needed to fill the needs. Had things gone off like they should have we’d have shut it down and we’d have it replaced with Watts I and II and we’d be likely talking about adding Watts Bar III today.
My conclusion is that this kind of thing is a direct result of the Green groups. If they had not stood in the way the TVA’s plan to shut this dirty thing down would have happened years ago.
By the way, I’ve heard some stories that when this thing is running at high capacity and the wind blows the right way the emissions from it have been known to set off radiation alarms at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They have several portal monitors and air samplers which are sensitive enough for the coal exhaust to trigger them.
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December 24th, 2008 at 6:41 am
I wonder if many people on the Left oppose nuclear power because they want to protect the jobs of coal miners (in other words, are they Luddites in the true historic sense of the word)?
Coal miners were traditionally the spearhead of the labour movement (because their harsh working conditions caused them to bond with each other, much like soldiers do), which means they presumeably occupy a special place in the hearts of the Left…
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December 24th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Can you imagine what the media response would be if this were a spill of cooling water at a nuclear plant?
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December 24th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Wasn’t even on the national newscast. Terrible shame though for thoe who lost their homes right before Christmas like that.
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December 24th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
But, won’t we get rid of this risk with clean coal burning plants?
Perhaps a comparison of the damage from a spill of coal ash, versus the damage from the spill of spent nuclear fuel. I can imagine it looking something like:
Coal ash spill — several thousand tons
Spend fuel — several grams
People affected:
Coal ash — thousands
spent fuel — less then 10
Water table damaged?
Coal ash — For weeks
Spent fuel — doubtful, too easy to contain.
and so on…
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December 24th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Isn’t the only real danger associated with spent nuclear fuel the possibility that terrorists could steal some and make a dirty bomb with it?
If that was the case though, why did so many people oppose nuclear “because of the waste” even before terrorism became a big issue?
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December 24th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
George Carty said:
The ‘dirty bomb’ idea is a red herring. In the Fifties the Brits ran a bunch of tests in Australia that showed that this was not practical for a weapon to the point where no defense against such a device was needed. The antinukes have resurrected the specter of a radiological weapon as they have run out of other types of FUD, but these are still not a threat. At any rate nuclear waste would make a poor agent for such an attack, compared to some of the more active isotopes used in medicine and industry.
The nuclear waste issue has always been that it would remain dangerous for thousands of years. Leaving aside the fact that they neglect to mention that it will be no more radioactive than when it came out of the ground in the fist place in a much shorter time, let us ask just how long will it take that coal ash to become benign?
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December 24th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
CBMTTek said:
I hope you’re kidding. “Clean Coal” trades one problem for another. Traditional coal blows much of heavy metals, sulfur compounds, nitrous oxides, particulate matter and unburned tar vapors out the stack, which is definitely a huge problem, but “Clean Coal” has to retain these. You can’t just make them go away.
The two basic ways of doing it are to try to remove most of the contamination before burning, by gasifying the coal and removing most of the sulfur and inorganic material. The second way is to try to scrub the exhaust.
Many operations use some kind of combination of the two or attempt to clean the coal before hand by turning it into a slurry and then settling out some of the material before blowing it into the burners as a dust. This is only so/so so they still need scrubbers.
The problem is even if you could reduce the flu gas to just CO2, this does not eliminate your problem, it just turns it from an atmospheric pollution issue to a solid and semi-solid waste one. All plants produce heavy ash and fly ash but those with “clean coal technology” also produce scrubber precipitate and additional fine fly ash dust that would otherwise just go up the stack.
In some ways this stuff is even worse to deal with. Desulfurization scrubbers leave you with some nasty and corrosive stuff behind and the volume of waste can be increased by having to deal with the used gypsum and lime from scrubbers. Plus, many are “wet scrubbers” which keep dust down with water spray but generate huge amounts of contaminated liquid.
This is not to say that old non-clean coal are the answer. If anything the “clean” plants are marginally better because at least it’s not placed directly into the biosphere through the air.
Still, you have to deal with this stuff.
The fact that it contains mercury, thallium, and arsenic, cyanide, lead, uranium, thorium, various sulfur compounds and such could probably be delt with through chemical separation if not for the fact that the sheer volume of this waste is so astoundingly enormous that it’s pretty much impossible to actually try to extract the materials in a concentrated enough way that you could either isolate them or even use them as a value added product.
As I’ve mentioned, coal ash has shown potential in grouts and cement mixtures and such, but there are limits to these uses. First, it has to come from coal ash that contains relatively low contamination by the more dangerous metals – this limits it to a few anthracite deposits in most cases. It still needs to be cleaned up and even then it only makes up a nominal portion of the final material.
No matter how you try to cut it in terms of “clean coal” the fact is that coal burning leaves you with 99% garbage and 1% deadly poison – in a more or less homogeneous mixture.
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December 24th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
DV82XL said:
Terrorist weapons are not the same as military weapons. A terrorist dirty bomb could cause panic far outweighing its actual destructiveness.
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December 24th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
George Carty said:
You know I keep hearing this theory chanted like a mantra, yet there is precious little evidence that this would be the case. Unless the media chose to whip up a frenzy with lies, I suspect that such an attack would be a wet firecracker in more ways than one.
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December 24th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
It seems to me that I remember from engineering schools somebody saying that one of the primary sources of sulphuric acid was coal power plants and that they basically paid chemical companies to haul it away.
drbuzz0 said:
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December 24th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
drbuzz0 said:
That’s why I used the turning off my sarcasm following the comment. Coal plants, regardless of how clean they might be are still a mess.
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December 24th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Wow, just noticed.
I had added a /sarcasm in < brackets to indicate that I was being sarcastic, but the comment board must have hidden it thinking it was a legit HTML code.
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December 25th, 2008 at 5:03 am
Steven said:
That’s not entirely surprising. The emissions from coal plants have been known to set off alarms from monitoring equipment and air samplers such as at nuclear plants. I don’t know about how they have it set up at ORNL and I haven’t been there in ages, but I’d imagine they probably have a few general purpose enviornmental monitoring stations and of course a few portal monitors. Depending on how the alarm level is set a gust of wind from a big coal burner could easily set those off. It happens.
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December 25th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
J Carlton said:
Hmmm. That’s interesting. I know that sulfuric acid is commonly made from raw sulfur which it is pretty easy to make from. I don’t know if it comes from coal burning ever. I do know that it does sometimes come from oil production because it has to be extracted from high sulfur crude like heavy sour crude and tar oils. It also comes from mineral deposits. ANyone know about coal as a source? I guess in gasification it would make sense.
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December 25th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Wow. What a horrible shock it must have been to those who suddenly had their home destroyed. What is really sad is looking at the photo and seeing the wreaths up on the house. It was supposed to be a time of celebration and happy family gatherings and then this happened! At least it looks like some of the items from the house can probably be recovered.
I certainly hope the power plant owner is going to pay those displaced so they have a place to stay and compensation for their loss.
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December 25th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Alice, don’t worry, AIG is covered in the TARP now, so it’s coming out of your taxes.
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December 26th, 2008 at 12:31 am
J Carlton said:
I guess that’s possible if they ha a seperate sulfur scrubber and fly ash traps before it so that the scrubbers waste would be mostly the sulfur and not all mixed in together. Any sulfuric acid from that would not be worth much though. It would be diluted and very badly contaminated with god knows what. That’s probably why they have to pay chemical companies.
If they want to sell that as a final product it will need to go through a lot of cleaning up
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December 28th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Two environmental activists were detained by the Tennessee Valley Authority police for photographing the site of last weeks ash spill. While it does not appear that they will be charged with crimes, they were unable to document the ash spill’s effects on the area and its water supply.
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December 28th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
DV82XL said:
Well, I would not encourage people to enter the areas that are restricted as the ash spill area may very well be dangerous, have unstable ground or they may just get in the way of initial efforts to survey and contain the ash. The damage has been pretty well documented from publicly avaliable aerial photos and videos.
Thus far they say that the tests on downstream water have not shown there to be any contamination. While this might seem like good news, it’s really about what I would have expected. The issue is that it will leach out of the ash, even if not imediatly. My biggest concern is what is going to happen in spring when they get melt water and rains raising the rivers and causing minor flooding. That is likely to really dislodge a lot of the ash downstream and badly leach toxic material.
I highly doubt that they’ll have this cleaned up by the time the spring high water season arrives.
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