Another TVA Coal Waste Spill: Spreading the Toxins to Alabama
This is one of those news stories you hear, and you just shake your head in disgust.
Maybe if the Coal Industry had spent all those clean coal advertising dollars on building better containment areas for the enormous amounts of toxic waste that clean coal is producing, these spills would not keep happening.
It was reported this morning that yet another TVA coal-fired plant has suffered a spill of its coal by-product. And this spill happened in a holding pond that was seriously just inspected and as of December 31st, was deemed safe.
The Tennessee Valley Authority that runs the Widow’s Creek Fossil Plant near Stevenson, Alabama has claimed that the spill is smaller than the Kingston spill in Tennessee last month. And this spill’s waste is mostly gypsum, which is a naturally occurring benign substance used in the manufacture of dry wall and cement. It can also be used to promote coagulation in tofu, adding calcium. Just in case you didn’t know that, tofu-nuts.
However, by early afternoon, the “spill” was renamed a “leak.” The TVA now says that it was a pipe that was leaking and they did not know how long it had been leaking. Hmm, shouldn’t that have been discovered during the recent inspection?
The TVA also claims that the gypsum leak did not significantly leak out into Widow’s Creek (appropriately named for its close proximity to a coal plant, if you ask me), but instead remains in the holding pond. Normally, the gypsum is held in that pond and then dried out and sold to companies that make cement.
On the same day that the leak at Widow’s Creek was discovered, another story came out that the Kingston Fossil Plant had two previous leaks that were not adequately repaired before the major coal ash spill a few days before Christmas.
That TVA sure is doing good work…More coal-fired plants, please. [super sarcasm]
coal, ash, spill, leak, gypsum, Alabama, TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, Widows Creek, Kingston, Tennessee
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