At Grist, we dont believe in paywalls. In Tennessee, TDECs commissioners order currently goes beyond the scope of what the federal coal ash rule requires, according to a press release about the order. Prolonged occupational exposure to uranium is strongly linked to chronic kidney disease, which Wilkinson suffers from. Estimates of the time required to clean up the spill ranged from weeks to years. TVA was forced to institute HAZWOPER training in the summer of 2009 because of a new EPA order that governed the site. Scientists suggest ways to deal with coal ash at Claxton's playground More than 5 million cubic yards of ash a mass roughly equivalent to the amount of concrete in the Hoover Dam overflowed into the adjacent waterway. Yes, Thacker replied. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, sickened from radiation-induced illnesses, or resettled to uncontaminated land. After it leaves the river, the ultra-fine material encounters Kingstons long assembly line: First, its dredged by operators like Thacker. He said that his own supervisors didnt take any precautions to keep workers from being exposed to radiation. This type of low-level exposure over a long period of time has not been studied enough to know exactly what the total impact could be. Dredging this sediment, mixing it in with the recovered coal ash, and categorizing the concoction of Kingstons coal ash and old nuclear waste as newly-generated hazardous waste could have been catastrophic for TVA the nuclear sediments would have touched almost every part of the cleanup operation. Regardless, workers werent informed that encountering such material was even a possibility. Whats going on? ), All energy utilities are having a problem admitting that theyve been using material for the last 50 years that should be kept away from the environment, and weak regulations allow them to do that, said Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University. Of course that powder flew everywhere, so [TVA and Jacobs supervisors] came out and tried to tell us it was dried-out diesel fuel, Brewer told me. Its best known as the predominant source of radiation in the fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); A nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. The fly ash disposal site is part of TDEC's investigation of the coal ash at all of TVA's plants, which could require TVA to remove the coal ash at Bull Run, but there has not been a decision yet. When Angie Thacker worked in a hair salon in town, she recalls old men coming in and telling her that they dumped barrels of nuclear material into the Clinch River. OSHA has decided not to conduct an inspection in response to this report, an agency official wrote to TVA. In the same document, Steven Alexander, head of contaminants at the U.S. Documents obtained by Grist and the Daily Yonder prove that TVA knew that dredging could unearth hazardous material. Massive dams sprang up seemingly overnight. Farmers are struggling with climate change, but yields continue to rise. Coal ash is a broad term for coal waste, and there are multiple subcategories. This forms in specific types of furnaces. Four years later, lawmakers approved an amendment that essentially excluded mining waste from being deemed hazardous, even though much mining activity involves materials considered hazardous under RCRA law. In an anonymous complaint to TVAs Office of Inspector General the following month, another worker claimed that he and others were experiencing bronchial infections, sinus infections, and low testosterone. Because nearly all of the plaintiffs have conceded that they cannot make this threshold showing, Jacobs believes that the silica act bars their claims.". The 5.4 million cubic yards of sludge that broke through a 57-foot earthen dike at Kingston was the largest industrial spill in the nation's historynearly ten times the size of the Deepwater. According to reports filed with the EPA by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the 2008 TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill resulted in a discharge of 140,000 pounds of arsenic into the Emory River -- more than twice the reported amount of arsenic discharged into U.S. waterways from all U.S. coal plants in 2007. (Satterfield also reported that radium levels had been lowered between the initial TDEC report Nichols downloaded and the updated one; the department attributed this to a data entry error.) In an email response to Grist and the Daily Yonder, a TDEC spokesperson elaborated that the sampling lab, which was neither staffed nor supervised by TDEC, discovered there were interferences in the analysis of soil and ash samples for uranium and subsequently changed the method of analysis from one EPA-approved protocol to another. So different elements have different behaviors, and some of them will dissolve easily into water, for example, because of their chemical form, and other environmental factors like pH and redox potential which is basically related (to) how much oxygen there is, Deonarine said. After dredges piped the coal ash back onshore, Wilkinson used heavy equipment to scoop, flip, and dry the wet ash along the Ball Field. If hazardous elements that werent typically found in coal ash were discovered above safe limits, the whole soup of ash and sediment would have to be considered newly-generated hazardous waste and managed as such, Stewart wrote. March 18, 2015 - Letter from Carol Eimers, TVA to Craig Zeller, U.S. EPA -Subject: April 22, 2015 -Letter from Carol Eimers, TVA to Craig Zeller, U.S. EPA -Subject. To keep this extremely fine and feather-light material from becoming airborne dust, TVA mixed it with water and stored the resulting sludge in makeshift ponds. Understanding the EPA order requires jumping down a legal rabbit hole. Vegetation appears green, and bare ground and urbanized areas appear pinkish-brown. Don't underestimate in any way potential harm when it comes to communities. Whether or not the coal ash alone was responsible for the deluge of illnesses and whether or not TVA was aware of exposure to additional hazards that it did not disclose to workers remains an open question. The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities. Three days earlier, a retention pond for fly ash (a waste product from burning coal) burst in Kingston, Tenn., spilling an estimated 1 billion gallons of sludge containing years' worth of waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority 's adjacent coal-burning power plant over an area of 300 acres, Griffith explains. I met App Thacker at the Hones Point Campground in Pendleton, Kentucky, under the clear sky of early evening last spring. EPA asked to rein in toxic coal ash nationwide : NPR Water supplies tested after Tennessee spill. Hydroelectricity illuminated the surviving towns for the first time in their history. High levels of uranium had been measured in the urine of a former cleanup worker named Craig Wilkinson. But the workers have at least one major defense: its not the silica in the ash that they are claiming caused their injuries, its the heavy metals, elements that emit radiation, and the tiny dust size particles known as particulate matter. Ill take up their slack. (Pursiful died earlier this month, at the age of 61.) Flight Center. The mining industry, fearful that increased regulation of its waste materials would run up costs, lobbied Congress for a loophole. Jan 5, 2009 Jan 7, 2009 References & Resources At plant in coal ash spill, toxic deposits by the ton. Photograph: Morgan Hornsby/The Guardian Hundreds of workers fell ill. EPA Response to Kingston TVA Coal Ash Spill | US EPA Coal ash is the . Instagram, Follow us on Certainly, if the Tennessee Supreme Court decides that this statute applies to coal ash, it's going to affect the willingness of plaintiff's lawyers to take coal ash cases in Tennessee, said Christopher Robinette, a torts law expert and law professor at the Southwestern Law School. Picture an industrialized fleet modeled after Huck Finns raft: Nicknamed Adelyn, Kylee, and Shirley, the blue, flat-bottomed boats used mechanical arms called cutterheads to dig up riverbeds and siphon the excavated sediment into shoreline canals. Brewer, the truck driver, had his levels plummet by 75 percent. It was often dumped into unlined, and sometimes unmarked, pits that continue to leak into waterways. Here are a few types of coal ash, according to the Environmental Protection Agency: While coal ash is still being studied to measure potential risks, some of the health effects from properties such as the size of its particles or the elements in it are known. The exact chemical makeup and properties of coal ash varies at multiple levels and across the world. The workers also claimed that they asked for dust masks, Tyvek suits, and clean water but were never given any. "The silica act requires that the plaintiffs demonstrate through objective medical evidence from a competent medical authority that they had a substantial exposure to coal ash that could have caused their claimed illnesses. The Emory River widens as it passes. Roughly a month after the spill, Nichols read a Duke University press release stating that ash samples collected at Kingston by a team led by Vengosh, the geochemist, showed radium levels well above those typically found in coal ash. Thackers supervisors gave him a cream for the skin lesions, and he began wearing long black cow-birthing gloves while he unclogged pumps. For about four years, Thacker spent every afternoon driving 35 miles from his home to arrive in time for his 5 p.m. shift, just as the makeshift overhead lights illuminating the canals of ash flicked on. Representatives of the Tennessee Valley Authority cited heavy rains and freezing temperatures in the days leading up to the breach as factors in the incident. Meanwhile, OSHA did little to ensure its training was implemented. For punitive damages, plaintiffs in Tennessee can receive up to $500,000 or twice the compensatory damages, which includes economic or noneconomic damages, whichever is higher. And so I can see courts looking at that and thinking that's just too much, Robinette said. Tennessee's silica act created a system for handling claims of silica and mixed duexposure in the early 2000s. There must have had a latency period of 10 years for claimants' diseases to manifest. For years hed been trying to solve a mystery that no one else seemed to be aware of: why Kingston regulators deleted and then altered a state-sanctioned report showing extremely high levels of radiation at the cleanup site. Fly ash particles are the smallest of all coal ash waste, are difficult to control when handling and often have to be watered down to keep the dust from spreading through the air. Fly ash specifically can contain about 40% to 60% silica, according to a brief to the court by the defense. YouTube, Follow us on On April 26, 1986, the worlds worst nuclear power accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the Ukrainian-Belarus border. I dont know what was in them barrels, but we were told to move from that area., One worker who ran dredges told Brewer that hed hit unexpected radioactive material in the river, but Brewer says company officials and supervisors never announced this finding. Claxton playground: State declares Claxton playground safe from coal ash as long as Anderson County maintains protections. An 18 month investigation of the environmental impacts of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee combined with leaching experiments on the spilled TVA coal ash have revealed that leachable coal ash contaminants (LCACs), particularly arsenic, selenium, boron, strontium, and barium, have different effects on the quality of impacted environments. (Though the supervisor could not be reached for comment, he confirmed that hed heard about the dredging of radioactive material from other workers in a 2018 deposition. Kingston opened eyes to coal ash health risks. Alexander, Duncan challenge TVA as hearing looms. EPA to expand coal ash rule to regulate exempted landfills and ponds The Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston coal ash spill in December 2008 deposited approximately 4.1 million m(3) of fly ash and bottom ash into the Emory and Clinch River system (Harriman, Tennessee, U.S.A.). Human Presence. Dewan, S. (2008, December 29). The only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice. Accessed January 2, 2009. Workers like Thacker now wonder what they were really exposed to during the cleanup. In these false-color images, water appears blue, and sediment-laden water appears light blue. News Historic Disaster: 10 years after the ash spill On Dec. 22, 2008, the largest coal ash spill in U.S. history was unleashed from the TVA plant in Roane County. Not necessarily. Jeff Brewer, a truck driver, described such a powder in an interview with me this spring. Its pretty unusual for a federal court to certify a question like this to a state supreme court, Long said. 2023 www.knoxnews.com. When Davis dismissed Thackers complaint back in 2013, he based his decision on reading a 2-year-old report on the Kingston dredging operation. According to court records, however, early versions of this plan did not list all the constituents in coal ash, including radioactive material. In July 2009, two months after the CERCLA order, TVA officials gave a confidential internal presentation in which they said that one of the most severe risks to their bottom line would be stopping or altering the cleanup plan theyd already put into place. The composition varies depending on where the coal was mined and how it was processed, burned and disposed of. (Bledsoe died of brain cancer in August.) Massive machines like dump trucks and trackhoes disperse it onto a plateau that TVA called the Ball Field. Dispatch Hundreds of Workers Who Cleaned Up the Country's Worst Coal Ash Spill Are Now Sick and Dying Ten years after the disaster at a Tennessee power plant, the cleanup crew is seeking. Brewer told me he was hauling ash and dirt from a newly dug ditch at the Kingston spill site when an operator in a trackhoe ripped a barrel of white powder out of the ground. On December 22, 2008, at approximately 1:00 a.m., a failure of the northwest side of a dike used to contain coal ash occurred at the dewatering area of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant, located at 714 Swan Pond Road in Harriman, Roane County, Tennessee. At plant in coal ash spill, toxic deposits by the ton. 6th U.S. The wall of. Some heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic have been studied individually for health impacts, said Neha Pathak, a founding member of the Georgia Clinicians for Climate Action.
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