hopefully this can help put an end to any notions of "clean coal"

Oh cool man, thanks for clearing that up, I was really unsure what Tennessee sludge was but now you're made it so easy to understand.

Tennessee sludge was long and lean
The color of the sun and his eyes were green

this happened like 5 minutes from mom and dad's. we drove by when i was in for christmas and all i can say is it truly is a disaster area. it looks like a volcano erupted or something. they were really fortunate this didn't happen any other time of year, there are usually several small boats in that area in better weather. the small tsunami that was triggered destroyed boathouses and docks all along the shoreline. there was a boat in one person's back yard probably 50-60 ft from the shoreline. dad and i are always talking about canoeing/fishing in that area, i'm glad we weren't out that day.

what really bugs me is that tva keeps preaching about how the drinking water is safe, but they are keeping hush about the environmental disaster that lies ahead.

WTF are you talking about?

Spoiler: show

Not everyone on the board lives in Tenesee.

I'm back from traveling in the future, and along the way I acquired amazing tools known as a "search engine" and the mystical "copy and paste" feature.

Tennessee sludge spill estimate grows to 1 billion gallons

* Story Highlights
* Cleanup crew works to keep sludge from coal plant out of river
* EPA estimates spill is three times worse than thought
* 15 homes damaged, three called uninhabitable
* Environmental groups say sludge contains mercury, arsenic

(CNN) -- Estimates for the amount of thick sludge that gushed from a Tennessee coal plant this week have tripled to more than a billion gallons, as cleanup crews try to remove the goop from homes and railroads and halt its oozing into an adjacent river.
TVA officials originally said the cleanup would take four to six weeks. Now they say they aren't sure.

TVA officials originally said the cleanup would take four to six weeks. Now they say they aren't sure.

The sludge, a byproduct of the ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville. The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, according to the TVA.

TVA's initial estimate for the spill was 1.8 million cubic yards or more than 360 million gallons of sludge. By Friday, the estimate reached 5.4 million cubic yards or more than 1 billion gallons -- enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Environmental advocates say the ash contains concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.

The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River. At least 300 acres of land has been coated by the sludge -- a bigger area than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

A spokesman for TVA -- a federal corporation and the nation's largest public power company -- said the agency has never experienced a spill of this magnitude.

"There's a lot of ash there," spokesman John Moulton said Friday. "We are taking this very seriously. It is a big cleanup project, and we're focused on it 24 hours a day.


Initial TVA estimates put the cleanup timeline at four to six weeks, but Moulton said the agency will no longer say how long it expects the effort to take. Environmentalists say it could take months or even years to clean up the mess.

Video footage showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area. An estimated 78,000 cubic yards, or 15.7 million gallons, of sludge covered local railroad tracks and Swan Pond Road.

Chris Copeland's backyard is covered with the sludge, though it didn't damage his house.

"We have a terrible mess in our backyard," he told CNN's "Newsroom." "I can't begin to imagine how much of an effort it is going to take to clean this mess up. It is incredible how much ash, dirt, earth, trees and debris is behind our house and then covering this neighborhood."

Bulldozers and heavy machinery have been on the scene of the spill since Monday, scooping up the thick gray goop that downed power lines, trees and broke a water main, forcing a temporary boil order on residents.

Footage from the Clinch River, a popular fishing site, reveals piles of dead fish on its banks. TVA said that has nothing to do with the toxicity of the sludge.

"What happened -- when you have a surge of ash, that created a wave to push the fish up and onto land," Moulton said. "When the water receded, there were dead fish. They weren't killed by any toxic chemicals, they were stranded by the wave."

He noted that water quality tests from the nearby water treatment facility have shown that the water from the river intake meets federal and state guidelines for potable water.

But critics of the coal operation remain concerned about the long-term effects of the spill.

"The early results are showing that it is not in the drinking water yet, but it is a fluid situation and the stuff is still not properly contained and concentrations can change over time," said Stephen Smith of CleanEnergy.org. He said people can still be exposed as the sludge dries and goes airborne in dust.

He said the spill underscores the need for the federal Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the containment of coal ash and accused TVA of underplaying the Tennessee spill.

"You have acute problems we are dealing with today, but we'll have chronic problems for a long time," Smith said. "This whole area has been devastated environmentally."

Appalachian environmentalists compare the mess to another spill eight years ago in eastern Kentucky, where the bottom of a coal sludge impoundment owned by Massey Energy broke into an abandoned underground mine, oozing more than 300 million gallons of coal waste into tributaries.

The water supply for more than 25,000 residents was contaminated, and aquatic life in the area perished. It took months to clean up the spill.

"If the estimates are correct, this spill is 1½ times bigger," said Dave Cooper, an environmental advocate with the Mountaintop Removal Road Show, a traveling program that explains the impact of an extreme form of mining.

Sometimes I feel like, now that we've made most of the earth inhabitable, we're subconsciously working to make parts of it uninhabitable again.



Drill baby drill, eh? So are we going to take alternate energy seriously now?

wow

this was really doomed from the start

Oh shit that's fucked up

But it costs money to develop good wind farms and solar cells.

This campaign was launched on December 10th.

Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Regulation

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: January 6, 2009

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.” In 2007, according to a coal industry estimate, 50 tons of fly ash even went to agricultural uses, like improving soil’s ability to hold water, despite a 1999 E.P.A. warning about high levels of arsenic. The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Numerous studies have shown that the ash can leach toxic substances that can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

As the E.P.A. has studied whether to regulate coal ash waste, the cases of drinking wells and surface water contaminated by leaching from the dumps or the use of the ash has swelled. 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. Environmental advocacy groups have submitted at least 17 additional cases that they say should be added to that list.

Just last week, a judge approved a $54 million class-action settlement against Constellation Power Generation after it had dumped coal ash for more than a decade in a sand and gravel pit near Gambrills, Md., about 20 miles south of Baltimore, contaminating wells. And Town of Pines, Ind., a hamlet about 40 miles east of Chicago, was declared a Superfund site after wells there were found to be contaminated by ash dumped in a landfill and used to make roads starting in 1983.

Contamination can be swift. In Chesapeake, Va., high levels of lead, arsenic and other contaminants were found last year in the groundwater beneath a golf course sculptured with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, the same type of coal ash involved in the Tennessee spill. The golf course opened in 2007.

State requirements for the handling of coal ash vary widely. Some states, like Alabama, do not regulate it at all, except by means of federally required water discharge permits. In Texas, the vast majority of coal ash is not considered a solid waste, according to a review of state regulations by environmental groups. There are no groundwater monitoring or engineering requirements for utilities that dump the ash on site, as most utilities do, the analysis says.

The lack of uniform regulation stems from the E.P.A.’s inaction on the issue, which it has been studying for 28 years. In 2000, the agency came close to designating coal ash a hazardous waste, but backpedaled in the face of an industry campaign that argued that tighter controls would cost it $5 billion a year. (In 2007, the Department of Energy estimated that it would cost $11 billion a year.) At the time, the E.P.A. said it would issue national regulations governing the disposal of coal ash as a nonhazardous waste, but it has not done so.

“We’re still working on coming up with those standards,” said Matthew Hale, director of the office of solid waste at the E.P.A. “We don’t have a schedule at this point.”

Last year, the agency invited public comment on new data on coal combustion wastes, including a finding that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

If such regulations were issued, the agency could require that utilities dispose of dry ash in lined landfills, considered the most environmentally sound method of disposal, but also the most expensive. A 2006 federal report found that at least 45 percent of relatively new disposal sites did not use composite liners, the only kind that the E.P.A. says diminishes the leaching of cancer-causing metals to acceptable risk levels. The vast majority of older disposal sites are unlined.

Most coal ash is stored wet in ponds, like the one in Tennessee, almost always located on waterways because they need to take in and release water. But scientists say that the key to the safe disposal of coal ash is to keep it away from water, by putting dry ash into landfills with caps, linings and collection systems for contaminated water.

Environmentalists, scientists and other experts say that regulations could have prevented the Tennessee spill. Andrew Wittner, an economist who was working in the E.P.A.’s office of solid waste in 2000 when the issue of whether to designate coal ash as hazardous was being debated, said the agency came close to prohibiting ash ponds like the one at Kingston. “We were going to suggest that these materials not be wet-handled, and that existing surface impoundments should be drained,” Mr. Wittner said.

If storing coal ash were more expensive, environmental advocates say, utilities might be pushed to find more ways to recycle it safely. Experts say that some “beneficial uses” of coal ash can be just that, like substituting ash for cement in concrete, which binds the heavy metals and prevents them from leaching, or as a base for roads, where the ash is covered by an impermeable material. But using the ash as backfill or to level abandoned mines requires intensive study and monitoring, which environmentalists say is rarely done right.

The industry takes the position that states can regulate the disposal of coal ash on their own, and it has come up with a voluntary plan to close some gaps, like in the monitoring of older disposal sites.

“There probably isn’t a need for a comprehensive regulatory approach to coal ash in light of what the states have and our action plan,” said Jim Roewer, the executive director of the Utility Solid Wastes Activity Group.

Mr. Roewer said there was a trend toward dry ash disposal in lined landfills, though that trend was not identified in the 2006 federal report on disposal methods.

Environmentalists are skeptical of the industry’s voluntary self-policing plan and the states’ ability to tighten controls.

“The states have proven that they can’t regulate this waste adequately, and that’s seen in the damage that is occurring all over the United States,” said Lisa Evans, a former E.P.A. lawyer who now works on hazardous-waste issues for the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice. “If the states could regulate the industry appropriately, they would have done so by now.”

Utility companies are often aware of problems with their disposal system, Ms. Evans said, but they put off improvements because of the cost.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns the Kingston Fossil Plant, where the Tennessee spill occurred, tried for decades to fix leaks at its ash pond. In 2003, it considered switching to dry disposal, but balked at the estimated cost of $25 million, according to a report in The Knoxville News Sentinel. That is less than the cost of cleaning up an ash spill in Pennsylvania in 2005 that was a 10th of the size of the one in Tennessee.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07 ... ss&emc=rss

I still claimed the first video from that group.

I saw that last ad at least 3 times on TV last night. It was on Comedy Central, and I think MSNBC. Nice to see something like that make it on to broadcast, and into the homes and minds of people who aren't looking to hear the message.

I thought this was gonna be the title of the new Eyehategod album

metal reference