How a powerful company convinced Georgia to let it bury toxic waste in groundwater

Documents reveal Georgia Power went to great lengths to advocate for risky waste storage.

By

 Max Blau

 -

January 19, 2022

SOURCEProPublica

Image Credit: Max Blau/ProPublica

For the past several years, Georgia Power has gone to great lengths to skirt the federal rule requiring coal-fired power plants to safely dispose of massive amounts of toxic waste they produced.

But previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica show that the company’s efforts were more extensive than publicly known. Thousands of pages of internal government correspondence and corporate filings show how Georgia Power made an elaborate argument as to why it should be allowed to store waste produced before 2020 in a way that wouldn’t fully protect surrounding communities’ water supplies from contamination — and that would save the company potentially billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

In a series of closed-door meetings with state environmental regulators, the powerful utility even went so far as to challenge the definition of the word “infiltration” in relation to how groundwater can seep into disposal sites holding underground coal ash, according to documents obtained through multiple open records requests.

Earlier this month, Georgia Power was on its way to getting final approval from the state to leave 48 million tons of coal ash buried in unlined ponds — despite evidence that contaminants were leaking out. Georgia is one of three states that regulate how power companies safely dispose of decades worth of coal ash, rather than leaving such oversight to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself.

But last week, the EPA made clear that arguments like the ones Georgia Power has been making violate the intent of the coal ash rule, setting up a potential showdown among the federal agency, state regulators and the deep-pocketed power company. In a statement last week, the EPA said that waste disposal sites “cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater,” in order to ensure that “communities near these facilities have access to safe water for drinking and recreation.”

The EPA’s action follows a joint investigation by Georgia Health News and ProPublica that found Georgia Power has known for decades that the way it disposed of coal ash could be dangerous to neighboring communities.

“The coal ash rule was clear from the beginning, but industry had tried to inject uncertainty into plain language,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney who specializes in hazardous waste law for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice. “The EPA has made it crystal clear what the plain language of the coal ash rule means.”

Georgia’s environmental regulators said it’s too soon to determine exactly how the EPA’s actions will play out in the state. In a letter dated Jan. 11, the EPA asked the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to review whether coal ash permits it has issued to Georgia Power are “consistent” with the federal agency’s guidance. Georgia Environmental Protection Division spokesperson Kevin Chambers, who declined to answer questions about Georgia Power’s lobbying or make any regulators available for an interview, said that the state agency is “awaiting further clarification” from the EPA on how the announcement will impact future permits for Georgia Power’s ash ponds. The agencies are scheduled to meet about the issue later this month.

John Kraft, a spokesperson for Georgia Power, said in a statement that the company intends to “comply with environmental regulations.” The utility has repeatedly denied that its coal ash ponds have contaminated residents’ drinking water or caused health problems in communities near its plants. He declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the company’s lobbying efforts.

“We are evaluating EPA’s position,” Kraft said. “We will continue to work with them, as well as Georgia EPD, to safely close our ash ponds.”

For those living near coal ash ponds, the EPA’s decision couldn’t come soon enough. Gloria Hammond, a longtime resident of the tiny rural town of Juliette, Georgia, relied for decades on a private drinking well to pump water to her home from an underground aquifer. But two years ago, a sample of her well water taken by an environmental advocacy group revealed unsafe levels of contaminants often found in coal ash. Now, Hammond drives 10 minutes to a Baptist church to access a supply of clean drinking water.

She and others suspect those contaminants leaked into Juliette’s groundwater from a nearby disposal site at Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired plant in the Western Hemisphere. The disposal site, less than a mile from Hammond’s house, holds nearly 16 million tons worth of coal ash in an unlined pond.

“They need to get the coal ash out of the drinking water,” Hammond said.

In early 2019, Chuck Mueller, GEPD’s top waste official, was grappling with a pivotal question that would impact thousands of Georgians for decades to come: How much of Georgia Power’s coal ash could legally remain buried in a pond without a protective liner? The utility had proposed disposing of 48 million tons — roughly half of its existing coal ash — that way. Mueller asked employees of his branch to figure out the answer.

After draining water from the ponds where ash is stored, Georgia Power is required to move the resulting dry ash into a landfill with a liner designed to prevent groundwater contamination — unless it can meet a set of requirements to leave the waste buried in an unlined disposal site.

The federal rule, which was enacted in 2015, allows utilities to bury the waste in an unlined ash pond only if they “control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the buried waste “to the maximum extent feasible.” Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator, says the rule is important because allowing water to mix with coal ash can lead to toxic heavy metals found in the waste migrating beyond the disposal site.

State regulators tasked with answering Mueller’s question read through dense Georgia Power filings and concluded that ash ponds at Plant Scherer, along with those at four other sites — Plants Hammond, McDonough, Wansley and Yates — contained waste that is submerged in groundwater, which some experts and regulators believe violates the federal coal ash rule.

Those findings were sent to one of Mueller’s top aides, William Cook, who oversees the state’s solid waste management program. Cook regularly met in private with Georgia Power representatives to get progress reports on the closure of the company’s ash ponds. That spring, Georgia Power representatives argued that state regulators could narrowly interpret the definition of a single word — “infiltration” — in the federal coal ash rule. The company believed this interpretation would allow millions of tons of waste to be left submerged in groundwater.

Georgia Power hoped to store coal ash in a way that only prevented water — such as rain falling from the sky — from seeping through a cover over the dry ash. They hoped regulators would disregard the presence of any groundwater that would soak the dry ash and potentially carry its heavy metals toward drinking wells.

Georgia Power representatives “believe that EPA would have written it in” if they wanted specific kinds of infiltration removed, Cook scribbled in his legal pad.

When Georgia Power representatives referenced an EPA document key to their understanding of “infiltration,” Cook asked his colleagues to review the document — which is 1,237 pages. They struggled to reconcile the case Georgia Power was making with the text of the regulation itself. John Sayer, head of environmental monitoring for the solid waste program, emailed his wife, an issues manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for advice on the meaning of the word “infiltration,” which he wrote had caused “contention” in this context.

Eventually, Sayer emailed a colleague that he’d found a federal report that noted “groundwater would qualify as infiltration.” But Georgia Power kept pressing GEPD officials to narrow its definition of infiltration to only include rainwater falling from the sky. After months of research by Sayer and other state employees, Mueller was left to make the decision.

Later that summer, Chris Bowers, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, sent Mueller a report that highlighted the flaws in Georgia Power’s plans. As part of the SELC report, a veteran hydrogeologist named Mark Hutson analyzed the plans for ash ponds at the five plants where waste was below the water table. Huston concluded those plans “will not control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the dry ash.

At a subsequent meeting with GEPD, Bowers shared another state’s approach to the meaning of infiltration. Duke Energy Indiana had asked state regulators to let the company bury coal ash in an unlined pond in the southwest part of that state. When state regulators realized Duke Energy Indiana had not described how it would comply with federal guidelines to prevent groundwater from wetting the dry waste, regulators told the company they would only approve the plan if the company could stop infiltration “from any direction.” (Duke Energy Indiana later responded that removing the ash could cause a “very high safety risk” at the site. State regulators ultimately allowed some coal ash to remain buried there, so long as the company took steps to minimize groundwater from soaking the waste.)

Environmental regulators in other states such as North Carolina have forced utilities to scrap plans that didn’t comply with this portion of the coal ash rule. But Georgia Power, as well another power company in Ohio, pushed ahead with their controversial plans. The financial stakes were high. At Plant Scherer alone, installing a liner could cost $1 billion, according to one state official.

“Georgia Power wanted to rewrite the rule to say there’s a limitation it doesn’t have,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with SELC. “It’s a preposterous proposal.”

One of Bowers’ clients, an environmental group called the Altamaha Riverkeeper, was grappling with this very issue in Juliette. The group soon discovered that water in the wells of Hammond and dozens of other Juliette residents contained concerning levels of contaminants found in coal ash. The group was worried that groundwater might be moving from the coal ash pond toward residents’ wells.

After the test results were publicized, Fletcher Sams, head of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, attended a closed-door meeting in February 2020 with several Juliette residents, local officials, state lawmakers and Georgia Power lobbyists. (ProPublica and Georgia Health News described parts of the meeting in a story last year.) The environmental advocate told attendees that his samples had revealed concerning levels of boron, calcium and sulfate — all indicators of coal ash. There was also evidence of a contaminant researchers had linked to cancer, hexavalent chromium, which had previously been discovered in some California drinking wells by environmental advocate Erin Brockovich. Georgia Power has acknowledged the presence of boron, calcium and sulfate but said that the hexavalent chromium is “naturally occurring.”

Sams, along with the Juliette residents, hoped Georgia Power would excavate Plant Scherer’s coal ash and put it in a lined landfill. But Aaron Mitchell, one of the utility’s top environmental lobbyists, insisted the company’s plan complied with environmental standards. However, after being peppered with questions by Sams, Mitchell acknowledged that the coal ash would still be submerged in groundwater if its plan to bury the waste was approved by state regulators.

Hearing that, Sams turned to the lone state regulator in the room, Chuck Mueller. He asked Mueller if Georgia Power’s plans to let water come into contact with dry ash met the state’s environmental standards.

“It’s allowed by the rules,” Mueller replied.

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected president, he chose a new EPA administrator with deep knowledge about the perils of coal ash. Michael Regan was the head of the environmental agency in North Carolina, a state that had seen one of the nation’s worst coal ash disasters in 2014, when a ruptured pipe sent 39,000 tons of coal ash pouring into the Dan River. Six years later, Regan convinced the state’s largest utility to excavate coal ash from its unlined ponds, which was done in order to protect residents from possible groundwater contamination.

Following Regan’s confirmation, environmental advocates urged federal officials to address the language in the coal ash rule that Georgia Power had tried to exploit. GEPD pushed ahead with the narrower definition of infiltration.

In June 2021, three months after Georgia Health News and ProPublica’s investigation into Georgia Power’s coal ash handling practices in Juliette, EPA officials met with GEPD to discuss the issue of infiltration. According to records obtained by ProPublica, state regulators said that Georgia Power could leave waste below the water table because the company had placed monitoring wells around the edge of those ash ponds to detect if heavy metals were migrating toward nearby residents’ homes.

The following month, GEPD began the process of issuing permits for unlined ponds where ash would remain submerged in groundwater. State regulators issued a draft permit for the first of these sites, one of Plant Hammond’s ash ponds, a step that then allowed the public to comment on the closure plan. Chambers, the GEPD spokesperson, said that the agency used “the commonly accepted meaning of ‘infiltration’” — and determined that Georgia Power’s proposal was “allowable under the rule.”

Last week, the EPA rejected the premise that groundwater legally could remain in contact with the dry ash — a statement that will likely impact Georgia Power’s closure plans at Scherer and four other plant sites. In its letter to GEPD, the EPA urged the state regulators to review the reasons why the federal agency intended to deny a plan to bury waste at southeast Ohio’s General James M. Gavin Power Plant, one of the largest power stations in the country. In that proposed decision, the EPA noted that the plant operators had failed to demonstrate how their closure plan would prevent infiltration.

The EPA’s filing notes that “infiltration” explicitly means “any liquid passing into or through” the coal ash pond “from any direction, including the top, sides, and bottom of the unit.” To Sams, the EPA’s announcement means that Georgia Power and GEPD cannot move forward with an “incorrect interpretation” of the country’s coal ash regulation. The EPA “restated in bold-crayon-block letters what we’ve been saying: You can’t store this waste full of toxic metals in groundwater,” Sams said.

Meiburg, the former EPA deputy administrator, said utilities could still challenge the agency’s clarification on the concept of infiltration because it did not go through the full rule-making process. But if GEPD ultimately approves permits that are less protective than what the federal regulation requires, the EPA has the power to strip Georgia of its ability to issue permits, according to Evans, the Earthjustice attorney.

Gloria Hammond, for her part, sees the EPA’s announcement as an important first step toward someday restoring the quality of Juliette’s groundwater. In the coming months, GEPD is expected to make a decision about Georgia Power’s permit at Plant Scherer. After feeling long ignored by environmental regulators, she hopes that GEPD requires Georgia Power to remove the ash from Juliette’s aquifer for good.

“I’m praying Georgia will take that into consideration,” Hammond said. “I hope they follow the EPA.”

EPA moves to crack down on dangerous coal ash storage ponds
By MATTHEW DALY

In this May 1, 2018, file photo, the Richmond, Va., city skyline is seen in the horizon behind the coal ash ponds along the James River near Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Power Station in Chester, Va. In the first first major action to address toxic wastewater from coal-burning power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency is denying requests by three Midwest power plants to extend operations of leaking or otherwise dangerous coal ash storage ponds.

 (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is taking its first major action to address toxic wastewater from coal-burning power plants, ordering utilities to stop dumping waste into unlined storage ponds and speed up plans to close leaking or otherwise dangerous coal ash sites.

Plants in four states will have to close the coal ash ponds months or years ahead of schedule, the EPA said Tuesday, citing deficiencies with groundwater monitoring, cleanup or other problems.

Coal ash, the substance that remains when coal is burned to generate electricity, contains a toxic mix of mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other heavy metals. It can pollute waterways, poison wildlife and cause respiratory illness among those living near massive ponds where the waste is stored.

The actions mark the first time the EPA has enforced a 2015 rule aimed at reducing groundwater pollution from coal-fired power plants that has contaminated streams, lakes and underground aquifers.

U.S. coal plants produce about 100 million tons (90 million metric tons) annually of ash and other waste.

The Obama administration regulated the storage and disposal of toxic coal ash for the first time, including a requirement to close coal-ash dumping ponds that were unstable or contaminated groundwater. The Trump administration weakened the Obama-era rule in 2020, allowing utilities to use cheaper technologies and take longer to comply with pollution reduction guidelines that are less stringent than what the agency originally adopted.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the actions announced Tuesday will ensure that coal ash ponds meet strong environmental and safety standards and that operators of industrial facilities are held accountable.

“I’ve seen firsthand how coal ash contamination can hurt people and communities,″ said Regan, a former North Carolina environmental regulator who negotiated with Duke Energy what state officials say was the largest cleanup agreement for toxic coal ash.

“For too long, communities already disproportionately impacted by high levels of pollution have been burdened by improper coal ash disposal,″ Regan said. “Today’s actions will help us protect communities and hold facilities accountable. We look forward to working with our state partners to reverse damage that has already occurred.″

In separate letters sent Tuesday, EPA denied requests for extensions of coal ash permits by the Clifty Creek power plant in Madison, Indiana; James M. Gavin plant in Cheshire, Ohio; and the Ottumwa plant in Ottumwa, Iowa.

The Greenidge Generation plant in Dresden, New York, was ruled ineligible for an extension. The former coal plant now uses natural gas.

The H.L. Spurlock plant in Maysville, Kentucky, will be required to fix groundwater monitoring as a condition for continued operation of its coal ash pond, the EPA said.

Lisa Evans, a senior attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said the enforcement action “sends a strong message to industry that (compliance with the EPA rule) is not a paperwork exercise. It requires them to clean up these toxic sites.″

Frank Holleman, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center who has battled Duke Energy and utilities over coal ash disposal, said the enforcement action offers significant protections for clean water nationwide.

“The EPA has sent a clear message that (power plant operators) cannot leave coal ash sitting in primitive, polluting ponds across the country,″ he said.

Utilities in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and other states that are still storing coal ash in leaking, unlined pits sitting in groundwater and next to waterways are among those affected by the decision, Holleman said.

Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, a trade association that represents coal-fired utilities, said the group was reviewing the EPA’s announcement. “On its face it doesn’t make sense to shut down prematurely coal plants that provide the security of on-site fuel storage or serve as an alternative when prices of natural gas and other sources spike” or are not available, she said.

In a related action, EPA sent letters to operators of four current or closed coal-fired power plants, saying they need to make improvements to coal-ash sites to comply with EPA rules. The AES power plant in Puerto Rico and three closed plants — the former Beckjord power station in Ohio, Tecumseh Energy in Kansas and Gallagher Generating Station in Indiana — all received EPA warning letters.

Coal ash storage and disposal goes back decades, but went largely unregulated until a 2008 spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee. A containment dike burst and flooding covered more than 300 acres (121 million hectares), dumped waste into two nearby rivers, destroyed homes and brought national attention to the issue.

In 2014, an estimated 39,000 tons of coal ash spewed into the Dan River after a drainage pipe running below a waste dump collapsed at a Duke Energy plant in Eden, North Carolina. The toxic sludge turned the river gray for more than 70 miles (112 kilometers).

The EPA on Tuesday reiterated its “consistently held position that surface impoundments or landfills cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater.″ Limiting contact between coal ash and groundwater after closure is critical to minimizing contaminants released into the environment and will help ensure communities near the sites have access to safe water for drinking and recreation, the EPA said.

Coal ash pollution affecting lakes for longer than anticipated
Staff Writer | October 20, 2022 | 5:05 am Energy USA Coal

Coal ash being released into an ash pond.

 (Reference image by India Water Portal, Flickr.)

Researchers at Duke University and Appalachian State University ran an analysis of sediments from five North Carolina lakes near coal-burning power plants and found that coal ash pollution of surface waters has been more persistent and widespread than was previously thought.


The findings show that large quantities of coal ash have been transferred and deposited in lake sediments since the beginning of coal operations in the state.

“The bottom sediments of a lake represent a complete history of what has fallen into the lake water and settled to the bottom,” Avner Vengosh, one of the scientists involved in the project, said in a media statement. “Using our age-dating methods, we were able to go back in time, in some cases even before the coal plant was built, and reconstruct the history of the lakes.”

Coal ash is the residual material from burning coal to generate electricity, and is known to contain lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, many of which have been tied to human cancers and other health effects.

According to Vengosh, the contaminants are not locked into the lake sediments. A chemical analysis of the pore water within the lake sediments indicated the metals leached out from the buried coal ash and could enter the aquatic food chain.

“These are recreational lakes,” said Zhen Wang, who led the study published in Environmental Science & Technology. “Some of them, like Hyco Lake, were originally built for the coal plant, but over the years, it has become very desirable real estate where people build their dream homes. It looks very pristine and beautiful, but if you dig in, you find piles of toxic coal ash.”

The five lakes in the study, however, were created for nearby coal plants: Hyco Lake and Mayo Lake, north of Durham in Person County; Belews Lake, northwest of Greensboro in Rockingham, Forsyth and Stokes Counties; Mountain Island Lake, northwest of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County; and Lake Sutton, northwest of Wilmington in Brunswick County. For comparison, the researchers also sampled Lake Waccamaw in Columbus County, west of Wilmington, a natural lake that was dammed in 1926 so it wouldn’t dry out during droughts.

Different types of coal ash

By looking at the microscope, the researchers were able to identify the different types of coal ash that were deposited over time in the lakes.

They noticed that at several of the sites, coal ash was initially dumped into the nearby lake. Over time, when the Clean Air Act was enforced and scrubbers were added to the coal plant smokestacks to catch fine particulates, the deposited coal ash changed and included higher proportions of small particles.

The tiny particles, however, contain the highest concentrations of toxic elements, which made contamination worse for the lakes.

The study authors suggest the coal ash could reach lakes by three possible routes: Atmospheric emissions of coal ash, particularly before the installation of the scrubbers, settled in nearby lands and was washed back into the lake by its watershed; climate events like tropical storms and hurricanes flooded and flushed the nearby coal ash impoundments to overflow into the nearby lakes, and ordinary flows of effluents from the coal ash ponds reached the lake as part of their routine operation.

“While previously we thought that lakes and groundwater are being contaminated by leaking or effluents discharge from of coal ash ponds, the new findings indicate that we have underestimated the environmental impact of coal ash,” Vengosh said. “We thought that the majority of the coal ash is restricted to coal ash ponds and landfills. Now we see it’s already in the open environment.”

The scientist and his colleagues warn that this is a much larger problem and with climate change it will only grow worse.

“We did a very detailed examination of five lakes, but there are numerous lakes or open water reservoirs next to coal plants not only in North Carolina but all over the country,” Vengosh said. “The phenomenon that we discovered probably applies to many other sites across the US and all of them are going to be vulnerable to more extreme weather events and flooding that we know is coming from global warming.”

EPA rule would force clean-up of toxic coal ash dumped in landfills, ponds near power plants

By MATTHEW DALY

AP

yesterday

 The Richmond city skyline can be seen on the horizon behind the coal ash ponds along the James River near Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Power Station in Chester, Va., Tuesday, May 1, 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is strengthening a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposal announced Wednesday would for the first time require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in hundreds of older landfills, “legacy” ponds and other inactive sites that currently are unregulated at the federal level.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the plan would hold polluters accountable for controlling and cleaning up coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal in that can pollute waterways, groundwater, drinking water and the air. Coal ash contains contaminants such as mercury, chromium and arsenic associated with cancer and other health problems.

“Ensuring the health and safety of all people is EPA’s top priority, and this proposed rule represents a crucial step toward safeguarding the air, groundwater, streams and drinking water that communities depend on,” Regan said in a statement.

If finalized, the rule would help protect underserved and minority communities already overburdened by pollution, reflecting the Biden administration’s commitment to environmental justice, Regan said.

“Many of these communities have been disproportionately impacted by pollution for far too long,″ he said, noting that power plants, chemical plants and other large industrial sites are commonly located in poor and minority neighborhoods.

The proposed rule follows an EPA proposal last week to impose new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants — the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change.

The agency also has proposed rules to crack down on polluted wastewater from coal-burning power plants and limit emissions of mercury and other harmful pollutants from coal-fired power plants, updating standards imposed more than a decade ago.

The coal ash rule follows a legal settlement between the agency and public interest groups, including the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, Sierra Club and Clean Water Action.

The groups said in a lawsuit that a 2015 EPA rule on coal ash failed to regulate a large portion of coal ash pollution in the United States.

Earthjustice, an environmental group that represented the coalition that sued EPA, called the new proposal a major win for communities near coal-fired power plants. The revised rule extends federal coal ash regulations to most coal ash disposed at power plants and extends federal monitoring, closure and cleanup requirements to hundreds of older landfills, ponds and dump sites that previously were excluded, the group said.

“This is a really big deal, said Lisa Evans, senior counsel for Earthjustice. “The Biden administration is standing up for people near hazardous coal waste sites around the country. For far too long, a large portion of toxic coal ash around the U.S. was left leaching into drinking water supplies without any requirement that it be cleaned up.″

The EPA proposal tightens a loophole that allowed many power-plant owners to avoid “cleaning up the toxic mess they created,″ Evans said. “Power plants will finally lose their hall pass to leave coal ash wherever they dumped it.″

Based on analysis of industry data provided to the EPA, Earthjustice identified 566 landfills and ponds at 242 coal plants in 40 states that were excluded from the 2015 federal regulations, Evans said.

EPA estimates it would cost utilities more than $300 million a year to comply with the new rule, which is expected to become final next year.

The power industry has complained about an “onslaught” of EPA rules aimed at the power sector. The agency’s actions are “designed specifically to cause the premature closure of coal power plants,″ said Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, a lobbying group for industries involved in producing electricity from coal.

She urged EPA to modify its proposals “to avoid premature coal retirements, rather than speed up retirements and jeopardize grid reliability.”

 A drain pipe sticks out of a coal ash retention pond at the Dominion Power's Possum Point Power Station in Dumfries, Va., June 26, 2015. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Coal ash swirls on the surface of the Dan River following one of the worst coal-ash spills in U.S. history into the river in Danville, Va., Feb. 5, 2014. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to strengthen a rule aimed at controlling and cleaning up toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. A proposed rule announced Wednesday, May 17, 2023, would require safe management of so-called coal ash dumped in areas that currently are unregulated at the federal level. 

(AP Photo/Gerry Broome, File)

Coal ash storage and disposal goes back decades, but went largely unregulated until a 2008 spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee. A containment dike burst and flooding covered more than 300 acres (121 hectares), dumped waste into two nearby rivers, destroyed homes and brought national attention to the issue.

In 2014, an estimated 39,000 tons of coal ash spewed into the Dan River after a drainage pipe running below a waste dump collapsed at a Duke Energy plant in Eden, North Carolina. The toxic sludge turned the river gray for more than 70 miles (112 kilometers).

ICYMI

The Problems with Coal Ash Start Smaller Than Anyone Thought

How well toxic elements leach out of coal ash depends on the ash's nanoscale composition

June 8, 2023

Leftover sludge from the 2008 coal ash spill at the Kingston TVA power plant. New research indicates that the nanoscale structure of the coal ash plays a large part in whether or not toxic chemicals can leach into the environment from such events.

Everyone knows that burning coal causes air pollution that is harmful to the climate and human health. But the ash left over can often be harmful as well.

For example, Duke Energy long stored a liquified form of coal ash in 36 large ponds across the Carolinas. That all changed in 2014, when a spill at its Dan River site released 27 million gallons of ash pond water into the local environment. The incident raised concerns about the dangers associated with even trace amounts of toxic elements like arsenic and selenium in the ash. Little was known, however, about just how much of these hazardous materials were present in the ash water or how easily they could contaminate the surrounding environment.

Fears of future spills and seepage caused Duke Energy to agree to pay $1.1 billion to decommission most of its coal ash ponds over the coming years. Meanwhile, researchers are working on better ways of putting the ash to use, such as recycling it to recover valuable rare earth elements or incorporating it into building materials such as concrete. But to put any potential solution into action, researchers still must know which sources of coal ash pose a hazardous risk due to its chemical makeup — a question that scientists still struggle to answer.

In a new paper published June 6 in the journal Environmental Science: Nano, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these answers may remain elusive because nobody is thinking small enough. Using one of the newest, most advanced synchrotron light sources in the world — the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory — the authors show that, at least for selenium and arsenic, the amount of toxic elements able to escape from coal ash depends largely on their nanoscale structures.

enlarge

A nanoscale view of two different sources of coal ash shows major differences

 in how arsenic is part of its makeup. On the left, arsenic atoms (red) coat the 

surface of a coal ash particle made mainly of iron (green). 

On the right, the arsenic is encapsulated within the iron particle, making it 

more difficult for the arsenic to escape.

“These results show just how complex coal ash is as a material,” said Helen Hsu-Kim, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University. “For example, we saw arsenic and selenium either attached to the surface of fine grain particles or encapsulated within them, which explains why these elements leach out of some coal ash sources more readily than others.”

It’s long been known that factors in the surrounding environment such as pH affect how well toxic elements can move from source to surroundings. In previous research, Hsu-Kim showed that the amount of oxygen in a toxin’s surroundings can greatly affect its chemistry, and that different sources of coal ash produce vastly different levels of byproducts.

“Brookhaven’s capabilities were able to provide the researchers a nanoscale map of each particle along with the distribution of elements in each particle.”

Roxboro Power Station situated on the shore of Hyco Lake. The coal ash ponds are somewhere behind the tree line. 

But just because one source of coal ash is high in arsenic doesn’t necessarily mean that high amounts of arsenic will leach out of it. Similarly, various sources of ash respond differently to the same environmental conditions. The problem is complex, to say the least. To take a different approach, Hsu-Kim decided to take an even closer look at the source itself.

“Researchers in the field typically use x-ray microscopy with a resolution of one or two micrometers, which is about the same size as the fly ash particles themselves,” Hsu-Kim said. “So if a single particle is a single pixel, you’re not seeing how the elements are distributed across it.”

To shrink these pictures’ pixels to the nanoscale, Hsu-Kim turned to Catherine Peters, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, and her colleagues to acquire time on the National Synchrotron Light Source II. The futuristic machine creates light beams 10 billion times brighter than the sun to reveal the chemical and atomic structure of materials using light beams ranging from infrared to hard X-rays.

Brookhaven’s capabilities were able to provide the researchers a nanoscale map of each particle along with the distribution of elements in each particle. The incredible resolution revealed that coal ash is a compilation of particles of all kinds and sizes.

“It was almost like we saw something different in every sample we looked at,” Hsu-Kim said. “The wide array of differences really highlights why the main characteristic that we care about — how much of these elements leach out of the ash — varies so much between different samples.”

While nobody can say for sure what causes the coal ash to develop its unique composition, Hsu-Kim guesses that it is likely mostly related to how the coal was originally formed millions of years ago. But it might also have something to do with the power plants that burn the coal. Some plants inject activated carbon or lime into the flue gas, which captures mercury and sulfur emissions, respectively. At 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, toxins such as arsenic and selenium in the flue are gaseous, and the physics that dictate how the particles will cool and recombine to form ash is uncontrollable.

But regardless of the how, researchers now know that they should be paying closer attention to the fine details encapsulated within the end results.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-FE0031748) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (5U2C-ES030851). This research utilized U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility resources at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource facility operated by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (DE-AC02-76SF0051) and at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) Beamline at 3-ID of the National Synchrotron Light Source II facility operated by Brookhaven National Laboratory (DE-SC0012704).

CITATION: “Nanoscale Heterogeneity of Arsenic and Selenium Species in Coal Fly Ash Particles: Analysis using enhanced spectroscopic imaging and speciation techniques,” Nelson A. Rivera, Jr, Florence T. Ling, Ajith Pattammattel, Hanfei Yan, Yong S. Chu, Catherine Peters, Heileen Hsu-Kim. Environmental Science: Nano, June 6, 2023. DOI: 10.1039/D2EN01056A

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook. 

SC Supreme Court ruling keeps Duke Energy from charging customers $180M in coal-ash costs


Coal ash became a front-burner issue in North Carolina after a February 2014 spill of more than 39,000 tons of coal ash from Duke Energy's shuttered Dan River coal plant.

Duke Energy Corp. (NYSE: DUK) will take a pre-tax charge of up to $200 million against third-quarter earnings after the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed its utilities could not charge customers in that state about $180 million in coal-ash cleanup costs.

The S.C. Public Service Commission issued rate case orders in 2019 that rejected about $115 million in Duke Energy Carolinas coal-ash costs and $65 million for Duke Energy Progress. The commission contended those costs were incurred because the N.C. Coal Ash Management Act (CAMA) has stricter environmental requirements than either South Carolina or federal law.

All routine costs for power production on the combined Carolinas system for both utilities are usually divided between the two states on a pro-rata formula based on the number of customers each utility has in each state. The commission held in 2019 that because the additional costs were imposed by North Carolina legislators, they could not be levied against South Carolina.

An opinion written by Acting Chief Justice John Kittredge in which there was a single partial dissent on the five-person court affirmed the commission on all its decisions in the two rate cases.

Finding that CAMA was a rule made to ensure the environmental safety of North Carolina residents and that it only applied to North Carolina coal plants, Kittredge held that the decision of the commission was proper as a matter of law and neither arbitrary nor capricious.

“North Carolina customers benefit — and were intended to benefit — from CAMA's requirements, whereas South Carolina customers do not enjoy a similar, direct benefit,” Kittredge writes in his opinion on Oct. 27. “It is clear from the level of detail set forth in the PSC's orders that it thoroughly and thoughtfully weighed the testimony and evidence prior to reaching its decisions.”

Kittredge also upheld a decision to disallow about $1 million in coal-ash litigation fees and the commission’s ruling disallowing carrying costs for deferred charges involving coal ash.

Duke spokesman Ryan Mosier says the company is still reviewing the order and the accompanying partial dissent by Justice George Few Jr., which contends that Duke should collect the basic coal-ash costs. But he said Duke is disappointed with the ruling.

“We disagreed with the Public Service Commission of South Carolina in these rate cases because we believe the costs in question were appropriate expenses incurred related to the generation of electricity which has served South Carolina customers for decades,” he says. "Our argument before the court and the evidence in the case made that clear.”

It is not clear if there is any route of appeal for Duke, as there would have to be a federal issue involved to bring the case to the federal courts.

The Office of Regulatory Staff, charged with balancing the rights of customers and utilities in the state, welcomed the ruling. ORS director Nanette Edwards says it “represents a victory for Duke Energy’s South Carolina customers.”

“We argued that Duke Energy’s South Carolina ratepayers should not pay for hundreds of millions of dollars in increased environmental clean-up costs attributed to legislation from another state,” she says.

The impact of coal-ash pollution had been a simmering battle for years in the Carolinas. It came to a head in North Carolina in 2014 when a rusted stormwater pipe under a coal-ash pond at Duke Carolina’s shuttered Dan River Steam Station collapsed and spilled up to 39,000 tons of coal ash into the river in Rockingham County.

Duke was charged with felony violations of the federal Clean Water Act in connection with that spill, and eventually agreed to plead to misdemeanor charges in the case. It also paid significant fines imposed by North Carolina environmental regulators for ash storage and groundwater violations at all of its 12 current and former coal plants in the state.

The N.C. General Assembly passed CAMA as a direct response to Duke’s coal-ash issues, which eventually required the company to either excavate and rebury all the ash at the plants in lined landfills or find some “beneficial reuse” for the ash that prevented future pollution.


Duke has agreed to pay $1 billion of the roughly $8.5 billion it expects it will ultimately cost to make its Carolinas coal-ash sites conform to new federal and state regulations.

Duke made a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today that states “as a result of the Court’s opinion, DEC and DEP expect to recognize total estimated pre-tax charges of approximately $100 million to $200 million in the third quarter of 2021 principally related to coal ash remediation at retired coal sites.”

It also says any future earnings impacts from the ruling “are not considered material” to the company’s overall finances.

The court ruling notes that the South Carolina Public Service Commission allowed Duke utilities to collect about $707 million in coal-ash cleanup costs from customers in that state. That was only about half of what the two utilities requested. But most of the costs were disallowed for reasons unrelated to the difference between N.C. regulatory requirements in CAMA and the S.C. and federal environmental requirements.

It is possible the ruling could mean that Duke would be barred from recovering some future costs for cleaning up the coal-ash sites in South Carolina. The court notes that the Edwards’ regulatory staff had successfully argued that regulators had in the past required Duke to allocate special costs to the state that caused those costs to be charged just to customers in the state that imposed the costs. Thus, South Carolina customers have been spared paying costs incurred by North Carolinas’ Clean Smokestacks Act in 2002 and N.C. Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard in 2007. North Carolina customers are not charged costs imposed on Duke by the S.C. Distributed Energy Resources Act, passed in 2014.

With that established, the issue of increased coal-ash costs because of CAMA could come up in future rate cases. Edwards says the new ruling will be cited in future rate cases in South Carolina. But she notes it is possible that Duke would not be barred from recovering future costs if federal coal regulations or South Carolina's own statutes change in ways that bring those costs up to the charges imposed by CAMA.

Duke did not lose on all counts in the rate case or Supreme Court ruling. The S.C. commission allowed Duke to collect $125 million spent on preliminary work on the never-built Lee Nuclear Station. That was the calculation of South Carolina’s share of the $558 million total Duke Carolinas had spent on the project before deciding against construction.

The South Carolina Energy Users Committee had argued in the case before the Supreme Court that Duke should have been barred from collecting that money. But the court affirmed the commission’s decision to allow that recovery.

APPALACHAN VOICES


By John Downey – Senior Staff Writer, Charlotte Business Journal
a day ago

'I’m melting, melting' — environmentally hazardous coal waste diminished by harmless citric acid

Sandia innovation frees rare-earth metals from coal ash for smartphones, computers

Business Announcement

DOE/SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES

 

IMAGE: A COMPARISON OF SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES METHOD FOR EXTRACTING RARE-EARTH METALS TO EXISTING METHODS SHOWS HOW USING CITRIC ACID IS MORE EFFICIENT. view more 

CREDIT: (IMAGES COURTESY OF GUANGPING XU

In one of nature’s unexpected bounties, a harmless food-grade solvent has been used to extract highly sought rare-earth metals from coal ash, reducing the amount of ash without damaging the environment and at the same time increasing an important national resource.

Coal ash is the unwanted but widely present residue of coal-fired power. Rare-earth metals are used for a variety of high-tech equipment from smartphones to submarines.

The separation method, which uses carbon dioxide, water and food-grade citric acid, is the subject of a Sandia National Laboratories patent application.

“This technique not only recovers rare-earth metals in an environmentally harmless manner but would actually improve environments by reducing the toxicity of coal waste dotting America,” said Guangping Xu, lead Sandia researcher on the project.

“Harmless extraction of rare-earth metals from coal ash not only provides a national source of materials essential for computer chips, smart phones and other high-tech products — including fighter jets and submarines — but also makes the coal ash cleaner and less toxic, enabling its direct reuse as concrete filler or agricultural topsoil,” he said.

The method, if widely adopted, could make coal ash, currently an environmental pariah, into a commercially viable product, Xu said.

Environmentally friendly method for mining rare-earth metals

The most common acids used as chemical separators in mining — nitric, sulfuric or phosphoric acids — also are able to extract rare-earth metals from coal ash but produce large amounts of acid waste, leaving the environment in worse shape than before, Xu said. “Environmentally harmful acids would raise clean-up costs beyond economic feasibility in the United States.”

The Sandia process, which uses citric acid as a carrier for rare-earth metals, so they separate from coal ash, the host material, was implemented by Xu. The extraction process is facilitated by using supercritical carbon dioxide solvent. Xu’s Sandia colleague Yongliang Xiong suggested citric acid, a commonly used and environmentally friendly chemical for holding metals in solution.

Xu found that in less than a day, at 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius) and 1,100 pounds per square inch pressure (about 70 times ordinary atmospheric pressure), the method extracted 42% of rare-earth metals present in coal waste samples.

Chinese mines, where 95% of the world’s resources of rare-earth metals are located, achieve less efficient separation while using environmentally damaging methods.

“Theoretically, an American company could use this technique to mine coal and coal byproducts for rare-earth metals and compete with Chinese mining,” said Xu. Furthermore, for U.S. national security purposes “it is probably reasonable to have alternate sources of rare-earth metals to avoid being at the mercy of a foreign supply.”

Detoxifying coal ash for reuse alone should be worth the effort, Xu said. There’s no shortage of coal ash as a raw material. According to a paper published in 2016 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, “Approximately 115 million metric tons of coal combustion products are generated annually, and this sum includes 45 million tons of fly ash,” the lightest kind of coal ash.

These numbers remain of interest today, said Xu.

“If we don’t detoxify and reuse the coal ash, then it will be abandoned in ponds and landfills and cost billions of dollars to clean up over the long term,” he said. To help make that outcome less likely, “We expect tests of our extraction techniques at larger volumes and on a variety of coal-based sources in the near future.”  

 

CAPTION

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Guangping Xu adds coal ash into a citric acid mixture. This solution will be fed into a reactor — operating at about 70 times atmospheric pressure — where supercritical carbon dioxide aids citric acid in extracting rare-earth metals.

CREDIT

Rebecca Lynne Gustaf

Carbon sequestration also a possibility

This technology also could open a new avenue for carbon-dioxide reutilization and sequestration, said Xu’s Sandia colleague Mark Rigali, who with Xu is exploring the use of citric acid and supercritical carbon dioxide to mine metals from oil and gas shales that are often rich in metals.

“Using existing oil and gas fracking wells, the citric acid and supercritical carbon dioxide can be used cost-effectively to mine metals while disposing of carbon dioxide below ground,” Rigali said.

Subsurface storage of the carbon dioxide should keep it from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change, Rigali said.

The work is supported by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

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Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.

 

New tests can detect tiny but toxic particles of coal ash in soil

Test finds ash at concentrations so low and sizes so small that other tests would likely miss it

DUKE UNIVERSITY

Research News

DURHAM, N.C. - Scientists at Duke University have developed a suite of four new tests that can be used to detect coal ash contamination in soil with unprecedented sensitivity.

The tests are specifically designed to analyze soil for the presence of fly ash particles so small other tests might miss them.

Fly ash is part of coal combustion residuals (CCRs) that are generated when a power plant burns pulverized coal. The tiny fly ash particles, which are often microscopic in size, contain high concentrations of arsenic, selenium and other toxic elements, many of which have been enriched through the combustion process.

While the majority of fly ash is captured by traps in the power plant and disposed to coal ash impoundments and landfills, some escapes and is emitted into the environment. Over time, these particles can accumulate in soil downwind from the plant, potentially posing risks to environment and human health.

"Because of the size of these particles, it's been challenging to detect them and measure how much fly ash has accumulated," said Avner Vengosh, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Quality at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "Our new methods give us the ability to do that - with high level of certainty."

Coal combustion residuals are the largest industrial solid wastes produced in the United States. When soil contaminated with fly ash is disturbed or dug up, dust containing the ash can be transported through the air into nearby homes and other indoor environments. Inhaling dust that contains fly ash particles with high levels of toxic metals has been linked to lung and heart disease, cancer, nervous system disorders and other ill effects.

"Being able to trace the contamination back to its source location is essential for protecting public health and identifying where remediation efforts should be focused," said Zhen Wang, a doctoral student in Vengosh's lab at Duke, who led the study. "These new methods complement tests we've already developed for tracing coal ash in the environment and expand our range of investigation."

The new tests are designed to be used together to provide independent corroborations of whether fly ash particles are present in a soil sample and if so, at what proportion to the total soil.

"First, we measure the abundance of certain metals, such as arsenic, selenium and antimony, that we know are more enriched in coal ash than in normal soil," Wang said. "If these metals are present at higher-than-normal levels, we test the sample using two other geochemical indicators, radium nuclides and lead stable isotopes, which are more sensitive than trace metals and can be used to detect low occurrence of fly ash in soils. We also examine the soil under a microscope to test if we can physically identify fly ash particles and estimate what proportion of the soil they comprise."

Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, and if used solely could lead to overestimates or underestimates the occurrence of fly in soil, Vengosh said. "By using all four together, we are able to verify the forensic investigation of fly ash presence in soils."

To assess the reliability of the new tests, the researchers analyzed surface soil from 21 sites downwind of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Bull Run Fossil Plant in Claxton, Tenn., and 20 sites downwind of Duke Energy's Marshall Steam Station on Lake Norman, N.C. The North Carolina samples came from Mooresville, a town located across the lake from the Marshall plant. Control samples were also collected at sites upwind of each plant.

The tests consistently showed that most of the samples collected downwind of both plants contained fly ash contamination, but because the proportion of the fly ash was low, the concentrations of toxic elements did not exceed human health guidelines for metals occurrence in soil.

The tests also showed that soil samples near Bull Run Fossil Plant in Tennessee generally contained significantly higher levels of fly ash than those from North Carolina, and that the highest concentration was in soil from the Claxton Community Park, a playground and recreational site located outside the Bull Run plant.

What does this all tell us?

"First, it confirms that our new tools perform consistently and, when used together, provide a reliable method for detecting contamination that other tests might miss," Vengosh said.

"Second, it underscores the need to regularly monitor sites in close downwind proximity to a coal-fired power plant, even if levels of contamination are below current safety thresholds. Fly ash accumulates over time, and risks can grow with repeat exposures to playground dust or home dust," Vengosh said.

"Low concentrations of toxic metals in soil does not equal to no risk," Vengosh said. "We need to understand how the presence of fly ash in soils near coal plants could affect the health of people who live there. Even if coal plants in the United States are shutting down or replaced by natural gas, the environmental legacy of coal ash in these areas will remain for decades to come."

The peer-reviewed study was published in July 20 in Environmental Science & Technology.

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The study was co-authored by Ellen Cowan of Appalachian State University, and by Rachel Coyte, Heather Stapleton and Gary Dwyer, all of Duke. Support came from the National Science Foundation and from Mooresville, N.C., community funding, led by Susan Wind, a former resident.

CITATION: "Evaluation and Integration of Geochemical Indicators for Detecting Trace Levels of Coal Fly Ash in Soils," Zhewn Wang. Rachel M. Coyte, Ellen A. Cowan, Heather M. Stapleton, Gary S. Dwyer and Avner Vengosh; Environmental Science & Technology, July 20, 2021. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c01215