At Plant in Coal Ash Spill, Toxic Deposits by the Ton

Source: New York Times

In a single year, a coal-fired electric plant deposited more than 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials in a holding pond that failed last week, flooding 300 acres in East Tennessee, according to a 2007 inventory filed with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The inventory, disclosed by the Tennessee Valley Authority on Monday at the request of The New York Times, showed that in just one year, the plant’s byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems.

And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a T.V.A. plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades’ worth of these deposits.

For days, authority officials have maintained that the sludge released in the spill is not toxic, though coal ash has long been known to contain dangerous concentrations of heavy metals. On Monday, a week after the spill, the authority issued a joint statement with the E.P.A. and other agencies recommending that direct contact with the ash be avoided and that pets and children should be kept away from affected areas.

Residents complained that the authority had been slow to issue information about the contents of the ash and the water, soil and sediment samples taken in and around the spill....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/us/30sludge.html

Don't believe a word the authorities say.
Every agency, their reps - including health departments lie through their teeth when environmental disasters happen. It is all about liability - not health.
People need to take care of themselves now because NO ONE is going to make this right and they have to live with their "health" for the rest of their lives.
They are on their own.

a drink of this cool safe water. I'd love to see that at a presser.

Pb - $.40/lb - 49,000lbs = $19,600
Manganese - $.71/lb - 140,000 = $99,400
Chromium - $1.85/lb - 91,000 = $168,350
Barium - depends on form, assume Barium Sulfate - $1.25/lb - 1.4M lbs = $1,750,000

Total value* of recycled byproducts from one year = $2,037,350.

Seems like they could maybe break even (probably costs them $2M a year to process the stuff into usable form) by recycling.

I couldn't find an "accurate" price for Arsenic, I'm assuming that there likely isn't one that makes recovering it feasible.

Base metals like Pb and Zinc and Iron (and associated metals like Chromium) have zoomed up in value over the last few years. Perhaps they never calculated the current cost of storage (with no disposal?) versus the cost of recycling.

And why keep it as a slurry in a pond? Why not dry it out and store it in some sort of containment... maybe even to be reburied back in the coal mines where it came from? I suppose that has it's own set of challenges.

Of course, the cost of the clean up and the increased cancer rate for the residents is going to be astronomical.

I'm guessing that someone is contacting Erin Brockovich already.