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This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded.
Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time.
That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.
The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.
> The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it.
More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup.
Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies.
Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022.
I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
> is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be solved? I understand that there are good reasons for regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on.
And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy of regulatory capture.
That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have started phasing out much earlier and faster.
> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated
Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.
Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public.
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people.
And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still build hydroelectric plants.
Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
IIRC, and I forget where I know this from so it might be bullshit, but the energy required to live a lifetime at a western lifestyle creates a grapefruit sized volume of the "highly dangerous don't go near this" type waste.
Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.
Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just different types of radioactive waste being buried together?
Coal ash is not classed as radioactive and it was abundant and cheap as a useless by-product of burning coal. The point is more that things classed as "low level" waste from nuclear are most often completely harmless, just regulated differently due to public understanding of the word "nuclear". As such, its disposal is heavily regulated.
Coal ash is commonly used in cement [1]. I would suspect the nuclear waste is being encased with cement to prevent its leakage with of course the punchline being that the encasement is more radioactive than its contents.
Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.
99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. And uranium operations are pretty small on the scale of mine operations. It also is common enough in modern mining practice to put the nasty stuff at the bottom of the waste dump, as close as possible to the conditions where it came from.
That seems unlikely to be causing any problems, especially without a source to gauge how political the studies are. We're talking populations that live close to the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure. They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as good as more urban populations.
> 99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores.
This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in general.
Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments because it leads to more of the harmful extracted material; it is harmful because ore concentration is often rather low, and the extraction process produces millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful than the ore), which has to be disposed somewhere (and preferably not in groundwater, which is the cheapest place to get rid of it).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are the showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ("harmful ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong dismissal for that argument.
I live in one of the mentioned countries (Kazakhstan) very close to one the major (unenriched) uranium processing plants. It's in the very east of the country close to the border with China, you'll easily find information about it if you're interested.
It most definitely is causing problems, but you will not hear about it because: a) nobody gives a flying fuck about us, especially our own government, and b) very little research is being done because nobody important is interested in doing it.
Most of the money made by destroying our health and environment goes to Switzerland (i.e. Glencore), and they have no incentive to care about us.
I read one study by a grad student who managed to escape from here to a French university, and she used a scanning electron microscope to find very high levels of heavy metal pollution -- including uranium -- in tree leaves all around the plant. That's about it.
And here's a personal anecdote of what the reality is here: when I was in college, I was working for a few months with a group of researchers that were testing novel techniques of reducing particulate pollution from a local coal power plant. While we did see some positive results, the emission values (both before and after) were significantly higher than what is permitted by government emission standards, about 8-10 times as much. So we were "asked" (and complied -- you don't really say no to these things) to reduce numbers to acceptable levels and publish that. This makes for a pretty piss-poor study if you ask me, it's not really science.
edit: and here's this beauty at close range:
You seem to misunderstand how mining pollution actually works.
When things like uranium are trapped in rocks they are typically immobile and not bioavailable. In most ground strata things things can be stabally held for millions of years. When humans mine the area we can cause what would take erosion millions of years in hours. For example blasting and mechanical splitting of rocks then loading them with equipment causes huge amounts of dust. Also in the process of exposing 'fresh' rock we cause sulfate materials to be exposed to water creating acids that mobilize metals.
You can mostly thank greenpeace and the hippie generation's legacy of political advocacy for that.
Nations like France and formerly Germany have or had pretty sensible situations when it came to nuclear power.
How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff?
Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?
UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
More efficient burning means more the waste metals get concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to go somewhere.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/osha-officials-admit...
https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/05/23/jacobs-engineering-s...
These stories should give you the info you need to understand what happened to the Kingston workers. I spent years as an investigative journalist revealing this travesty through dozens of stories.
Oh. The picture at the top of the second article, with the cars for scale, really drives home how huge that storage hill was.
Thank you for sharing those articles.
Thank you for your work on this.
Wikipedia article with more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
I am guessing this is coming up now due to the recent changes in regulations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357447
"Prioritizing coal ash program to expedite state permit reviews and update coal ash regulations (CCR Rule)"
This article has some great writing overall, but ends with this
> How could this happen? Ansol wondered.
I wish it had dug into this. These sort of things don't just happen. There must be accountability, and journalists are who are supposed to start that process. This was clearly an environmental travesty of monumental proportions. How do we grapple with the fact this sort of thing is apparently just allowed to continue happening?
It's an extract from a book - which I would hope digs into it.
Terrifying that this could happen as recently as 2008 and, I'm sure, with better understanding of potential consequences.
In 1966, something similar (although with a mining waste dump, instead of ash) happened in Aberfan, Wales (in the UK) with a more tragic outcome[1].
The question should be whether this occurred due to ignorance or ignoring the lessons of history, which rhymes if not repeats.
This was featured in an episode of The Crown [0]. I had never heard of it and didn't know what the episode was going to be about. I think they did a good job conveying the magnitude of the tragedy.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/17/televis...
If you want me to read your article, don't cover it with a stupid popup in the middle of the screen. I closed the page as soon as I saw that.
I've heard of a few of these in the US, but have not heard of any in the UK, where we also burned a lot of coal. Did we manage the ash differently? I have a vague idea that we have a different kind of coal, which produces less ash.
I couldn't find anything conclusive, but found this from 2015:
> Storage, whether in lagoons, silos or landfills, rather than re-use, is the default solution for coal ash management in most countries. The UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that, of the eight million tonnes of coal ash produced in the country each year, half is re-used, while over 300 million tonnes have been stored in lagoons or silos since the 1950s. [...] The American Coal Ash Association (ACAA) reports on US coal ash production and use each year. In 2013, 53 million tonnes of coal ash were generated, of which 23 million tonnes were re-used. Of the unused portion, the EPA says 36 per cent was stored in landfills, and 21 per cent in wet storage facilities. [...] Some countries are doing better, though: for example, the Netherlands recycles 100 per cent of its coal ash because landfill is not allowed in the country. In Germany, where around 10 million tonnes of coal ash are produced per year, around 97 per cent is re-used, with the rest stored only on a temporary basis. According to the European Coal Combustion Products Association (Ecoba), of the 48 million tonnes of coal ash produced in 15 EU countries in 2010 (the latest available figures), 13.8 million tonnes were re-used.
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/coal-fired/managing-coal...
The "re-use" is by processing it into materials which can be used for various construction and materials manufacturing processes. There's lots of other fascinating details about coal ash in there. Wikipedia is pretty good too:
The UK had the Aberfan disaster that led to better awareness and enforcement of above-ground tip management be it mine or combusted slag or ash.
Related I lived through a large coal slurry spill in 2000 in Eastern KY.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_sp...
You were lucky. We in the UK had this back in 1966.
Oh, I remember that one.
At the time, the construction of new coal-fired power plants was a controversial topic in many locations in Germany. (Around 30 new coal power plants were planned at times. Some were stopped, but 10 of them were actually build, which is bad enough.) I also tried to raise awareness about this incident in Tennessee, trying to have a look at the environmental issues of coal on a more international level. But it didn't generate much interest.
We had a high-PH red mud slurry disaster in Hungary 15 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident
Feels like disasters like this aren't just random accidents - they're symptoms of slowly ignoring the cracks until everything breaks open. Makes you wonder what else we're overlooking right now that's quietly falling apart around us.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Blue_Run_Lake
> Another lawsuit was filed in Federal Court by 15 Beaver County, Pennsylvania residents and 36 West Virginia residents who accused FirstEnergy of contaminating groundwater and leaking hazardous waste, including arsenic, sulfates, sodium, calcium, magnesium and chloride[2] into local waterways and groundwater systems.
Man that still feels like it was ten years ago. 17, really?
Without spoilers...what a disappointing article. This feels like it should have been a long read, and yet, the article ends just as it started, with no explanation, investigation, or conclusion.
It's a long form, unclassified advertisement for a book mentioned at the end. Decently written if a little too reliant on cliffhangers.