Proposed New EPA Rule Would Regulate Toxic Waste Dumps For Coal Ash From Power Plants
The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed expanding the number of coal waste dumps that would be subject to environmental oversight, a decade after a string of toxic disasters from such landfills flooded valleys and polluted rivers in Southern states. Federal regulators have struggled for decades with how to address coal ash, the waste that remains when coal is burned in power plants and often contains a toxic mix of chemicals associated with cancer. Such waste can pollute waterways, poison wildlife and cause respiratory illness among those living near massive storage pits, and major spills in Tennessee and North Carolina led to research that suggests leaks are common at these sites.
The Environmental Protection Agency now wants to end exemptions that left about a quarter of the roughly 1,000 coal ash dumps nationwide exempt from federal regulation. It would apply similar regulations that now cover only active disposal units to inactive units, which the agency says are more prone to leaks because they often lack protective lining and monitoring systems.
The proposal comes in part to resolve a federal court order and litigation, some of it filed by the environmental firm Earthjustice in two cases where it represented national organizations such as the Sierra Club and regional groups such as Hoosier Environmental Council, the EPA and Earthjustice said. Coal ash contains toxic substances such as mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic, and its pollution often hurts poor and minority communities near dump sites that the EPA says is already “overburdened by pollution.”
EDIT
The state had called it the largest such cleanup in history, prompted by two major incidents in the past decade. In February 2014, a coal ash pond at Duke Energy’s Dan River Steam Station spilled as much as 82,000 tons of waste over roughly 70 miles of the Dan River. Floodwaters in 2018 washed through toxic coal ash alongside Duke Energy’s L.V. Sutton power plant, sending polluted waters pouring into an artificial lake and then into the Cape Fear River. Such toxic mishaps highlighted the looming threat from these dumps, often semisolid impoundments held back by decades-old earthen dams. In 2008 a dike failed at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant, allowing 5.4 million cubic yards of ash to flow into nearby rivers, inundating hundreds of properties, sometimes burying them or pushing them off their foundations. In 2019 a report published jointly by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice found the vast majority of coal waste sites at 250 power plants nationwide have leaked toxic chemicals into nearby groundwater. More than 90 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants reported elevated levels of contaminants such as arsenic, lithium, chromium and other pollutants in nearby groundwater.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/17/coal-ash-landfills-epa-rules/
