Urban Ecoist

I have covered this topic again and again, and sadly the consequences of coal mining and coal-fired electric generation plants have come home to roost…actually 15 destroying homes in the roosting process.

Thankfully, no one was killed or seriously injured in the accident. However, the toxic effects of the coal fly ash spill are still being debated by those responsible, of course.

Here’s a great quote from a New York Times article that rehashes the debate over coal ash and its dangers.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has issued no warnings about the potential chemical dangers of the spill, saying there was as yet no evidence of toxic substances. “Most of that material is inert,” said Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the authority. “It does have some heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.”

Oh, that “it’s not toxic or anything” is really reassuring, isn’t it? And what’s with that “most of the material”? What else is there besides the supposedly inert, non-toxic material?

Fly ash is a by-product of burning coal to produce electricity. And the same icky stuff that is found in coal is concentrated in the coal ash, so if you are worried about the heavy metals in coal, you should really be concerned about the heavy metals in coal ash.

And those heavy metals are…

and don’t forget the good ol’ radioactive substances in coal and fly ash like uranium, thorium, radium, and radon.

The biggest threat that most of the aforementioned substances pose is when they are inhaled or ingested. Almost of those substances are carcinogenic or carry other threats of developmental damage to animals and humans. Once that sludge dries, it will become air-borne dust. And obviously, it has already been introduced into the water supply.

Inert, maybe. Not toxic, hardly.

And when you add most of those heavy metals to water, it is a dangerous situation, indeed, whether you boil that water or not.

Fly ash is called fly ash because it used to be the by-product that flew off into the sky from coal-fired plants. The Clean Air Act put a stop to that, and the fly ash had to be captured by the plants. Unfortunately, there is that old law of matter not being created nor destroyed, and the fly ash had to go somewhere. Coal-fired plants simply built some earthen dams and made their own landfills. However, that was hardly the solution as whenever it rained, fly ash leached into groundwater supplies.

Another 2007 E.P.A. report said that over about a decade, 67 towns in 26 states had their groundwater contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps.

For instance, in Anne Arundel County, Md., between Baltimore and Annapolis, residential wells were polluted by heavy metals, including thallium, cadmium and arsenic, leaching from a sand-and-gravel pit where ash from a local power plant had been dumped since the mid-1990s by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Maryland fined the company $1 million in 2007. — NY Times

I hate to keep pilfering from the NY Times, but here is a really good graphic to give you an overview of how fly ash is produced and a map of the Kingston fly ash spill. Click on the image for a bigger view and better detail.

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