The Tennessee Valley Authority's coal ash spill, besides lending more life to the clean-coal wars, will almost certainly move the issue of handling coal combustion products much further up the Environmental Protection Agency's list than it would have been.
Environmentalists and the utility industry have been fighting for a long time over the rules for so-called CCP disposal. Early this year the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group told EPA that environmental groups' call for regulation under the hazardous-waste title of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was unnecessary.
USWAG, one of whose longtime core missions is ''protection of the non-hazardous regulatory status of fossil fuel combustion products,'' operates a CCP Action Plan, under which, it has reported, ''more than 75% of USWAG members’ coal-fired capacity have either committed to implement or are operating in a manner consistent with the Plan; and ... a damage case assessment that shows that most proven damage cases involve older unlined sites unrepresentative of newer CCP disposal units ...''
TVA, a USWAG member, had one of those older, unlined sites at the Kingston plant, where the spill occurred December 22.
The Electric Power Research Institute has a project ongoing to continue assessing combustion wastes and devising more and better ways of making the waste into ''beneficial use'' products -- for roadbed, concrete and other uses. EPA issued a draft risk assessment in 2007 and will be revising it, possibly issuing guidelines for CCP disposal "in the 2008-2010 time frame," EPRI says. The Office of Surface Mining is making a similar determination with regard to disposal of CCPs in coal mines, according to EPRI.
As more and more contaminants are removed from coal under new air quality regulations, they will be present in the ash. ''These actions have the potential to significantly increase CCP disposal costs and decrease alternatives for beneficial use, and they will certainly increase groundwater monitoring and compliance requirements at CCP management facilities,'' EPRI says in describing its project.
In the meantime, TVA has been scrambling to deal with the disaster. A special Kingston City Council meeting Sunday afternoon featured CEO Tom Kilgore, who told between 200 and 300 people that TVA would pay to test wells and air quality. ''This is not a time when TVA holds its head high," Kilgore said, according to an AP story in the Lexington Herald-Leader. "I'm here to say we are going to clean it up and we are going to clean it up right." The federal power agency has taken a beating from local residents and environmentalists at local and national levels. One local blogger called the event the coal-fired power industry's Three Mile Island. Feelings are at fever pitch.
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