On Tuesday, December 30, Nashville’s television station WSMV reported “…Coal ash often becomes a radioactive substance; it can have a long-term effect if there is any radiation it, it will stay around for a long time, it will stay in the soil, in the water, in the area for a long time… ”

“…The engineer we talked to is an expert on the coal/sludge issues, he says that short-term there could actually be some impact on people’s health including rashes, kidney disease and neurological problems, and that’s just the short-term, the question is, will people suffer years from now…?”
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In the meantime, the TVA has increased its utility bills by an incredible amount, and this was before the coal/ash spill. Now the TVA is telling us that we may have to pay for the cleanup when they were clearly at fault for their negligence.

Thank you for continuing your reporting of this disaster. We’ve also been warned that other levees could quite possibly collapse with another substantial rainfall.

It’s also a profound human rights issue, since mining operations (and other development) are so often located on indigenous peoples territory. In Canada, for example, industry has created at least 4,464 toxic sites as a result of ‘development’. That’s roughly 1.5 sites for every indigenous reserve. These sites usually contain arsenic, mercury, uranium, lead, and occasionally even “biological warfare agents” (according to the CA governments website). The effect this has had on indigenous people, particularly women and children, is too horrid to get into here, sufficed to say some are calling it “a form of passive ethnic cleansing”.

41. That’s funny. Coal plants generate up to 100 times more radiation then nuclear plants… a portion of that billows into the air, which means people have no choice but to ingest it (eg. it gets on the food at the dinner table), inhale it, bathe in it, and for kids to absorb it into their skin when they’re playing in the back yard. The key thing here is bio-accumulation. The only way to stop the toxic effect from getting worse is to move or to shut down the operation.

Good riddance, Worst-p(R)esident-Ever.

The irony isn’t lost on me that this is the same area that also produced the right-wing terrorist who shot up a Unitarian congregation a few months past.

The fact is, just as many said “you can’t judge that killer based on what he listened to and read,” I’m sure there are already some folks complaining that it was “gummint regalashun” that led to the dam collapse, i.e. that because we don’t allow that crap into the air for EVERYONE to breathe, the dam breached and now an entire region is toxified.

Being a hillbilly myself, I often take a dim view of folks portraying us as idiots. Sometimes, however, I’m convinced we go a long way toward earning it.

What do they do with all that bad stuff they generate ? One hint is why they had so much potentially toxic material confined on the site – One of the most common actions is to contain it onsite (and hope something happens in the next few decades to make the problem all better).

Other alternatives are to ship to a hazardous waste landfill (very expensive) or try some way to encapsulate it (basically make an impermeable burrito with the toxic stuff in the center). In some cases, you can combine the toxic material with some other compound that binds up the toxic material.

The coal isn’t all that different than a lot of toxic waste sites from Mine Tailings. They are quite troublesome because you have so much (in terms of tons of contaminated soil).

B-T-W, for those who don’t know, Southern West Virginia is dotted with sludge seas that make the TVA sludge dam look like a puddle by comparison. One even hangs over an elementary school.

Hasn’t anyone in the media called them on that one yet ?

I realize that Boil orders are standard when conditions may have broken a water line or flushed material in a well – both because of possible bacterial contamination.

But come on now ! Acting like boiling will destroy everything bad ?

We need to get the Clean Coal Carolers in on this, stat!

But seriously, this really is like the Three Mile Island of the coal industry. We’re going to be hearing about spiking disease rates around this area for decades now. And yeah, is having lakes of heavy metal sludge a good way to store the waste? Maybe they should be doing something else with it, like drying it out into some kind of pellets or something, putting it in canisters or whatever. I’m sure that would be horrifically expensive to the coal industry, which means it’d be just about right.

I guess god hates the coal he created….Is coal (teh) gay?

Justice would require that Sen. Alexander owns Tennessee Riverfront property near Chatenooga.

In 2000, Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee in large part because of his Environmentally Concerned position on COAL…thus allowing Bush to steal the election.

This isn’t just a Tennessee issue, peeps. As I blogged over at my place this morning, 50% of electricity in the US comes from burning coal. If you use electricity and are on the grid, chances are you’re burning coal. I urge everyone to contact their representatives and demand that action is taken to ensure the coal ash waste in your part of the country is being disposed over as safely as technology allows, and by all means, let’s put a stop to future coal plant construction (and there are LOTS in the works …) This should be Big Coal’s Three Mile Island …