No Coal is Clean Coal

Until now, ash waste from coal fire power plants has been a sleeper issue I only hear about occasionally in meetings of environmental advocates. That changed when the TVA spilled more than a billion gallons of coal ash sludge over 300 acres and into a major river.



(AP photo)


The TVA admits:

that in just one year, the plant’s byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems.

And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a T.V.A. plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades’ worth of these deposits.

I wasn't going to blog about this because it's a national story until I saw the SJ-R's article about the coal industry response to the Reality Coalition ad campaign. Doing a story about clean coal without mentioning that a catastrophic spill of toxic coal ash happened less than a week ago is...strange. Currently proposed clean coal projects still produce solid waste.

Coal industry executives say that carbon capture technology won't be ready for broad commercial use for at least another 10-20 years. That assumes it can be done economically on wide scale, which is questionable. The UN Panel on Climate Change warns that the future of our planet will be determined by what we do in the next four years. Clearly, if we're serious about addressing global warming we can't wait for coal industry experiments.