Recent Coal News - Dirty & Dangerous As Ever

There's been a lot of news out about various aspects of the coal industry lately, so I wanted to share the links to get it out there. These are in no particular order, but all are interesting.

First up, last Friday the newspaper Business Lexington in Kentucky published side-by-side editorials on mountaintop removal coal mining, one from our Sierra Club folks there and one from a coal industry rep.

Also last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified officials in West Virginia and Ohio about the integrity of coal ash storage site (impoundment) at an AEP facility in West Virginia. EPA officials say the impoundment is suffering from issues similar to those that caused the coal ash dam failure in Tennessee last December:

As part of that effort, EPA contractors identified factors at the AEP Philip Sporn facility that are similar to the Kingston facility – specifically, both facilities piled coal ash and bottom ash around the impoundment to raise the impoundment’s walls.

In similar news, residents in Trimble, Ohio, are worried about a planned coal ash impoundment expansion near the Ohio River.

More in coal ash news, did you see EPA's coal ash report? The agency released it last week, and we've taken a look at it:

The report shows that coal power plants are discharging huge amounts of toxic pollution including arsenic, mercury, and selenium into rivers, streams, and groundwater across the country, contaminating wells, killing wildlife, and risking lives.  EPA’s report concludes that an “increasing amount of evidence indicates that the characteristics of coal combustion wastewater have the potential to impact human health and the environment.”  The report documents decades of damage, ranging from a single spill which wiped out 200,000 fish to reports of well water laced with selenium, which can cause infertility.

The Tennessean had a good article on the report and what it means.

In "that shouldn't be funny but it is" news, the Faces of Coal folks tweeted a disturbing note recently: "Coal helped us get a healthcare industry, which we did not have" In response, a friend of ours quipped, "Yeah, helped us get a healthcare industry by creating a market for it with ailments like black lung." To that we'd add the thousands of health and respiratory issues caused by pollution from burning coal.

Moving on to other coal environmental health issues, the Sierra Club has worked on coal dust issues before, and we're at it again - this time in Alaska. Our Alaska chapter teamed up with the Alaska Center for the Environment and Alaska Community Action on Toxics:

Local conservation groups put Alaska Railroad Corporation and Aurora Energy Services on notice that the companies need to control the coal at the Seward coal loading facility. A lack of adequate pollution controls at the facility has resulted in ongoing dumping of coal debris into Resurrection Bay and uncontrolled blowing coal dust, damaging water quality in the Bay and threatening the tourism industry it supports.

You can read the full press release here (PDF).

And finally, as if that wasn't enough news about the risks of using coal, here's another link to back that up. Pediatrician Dr. Keith Sebert wrote an editorial in Georgia's Bryan County News about mercury in waterways being a risk to children. Where does the mercury come from? You guessed it: Coal-fired power plants.