Toxins Leak From Ash Pits And Dumps Filled By 130 Coal Plants; But No Cleanup Necessary, Nosiree!!
A new report based on electric utilities’ own records reveals a significant challenge confronting the Biden administration as it grapples with enforcing coal ash regulations adopted seven years ago in the wake of natural disasters. The Environmental Protection Agency waited until January to take its first significant enforcement actions to protect communities from the hundreds of polluting piles of coal ash and other coal-burning waste scattered across the country, often leaking toxic contaminants.
But only half of 265 power plants with ash ponds or landfills that are known to be contaminating groundwater agree that cleanup is necessary, and 96 percent of these dissenters are refusing to propose any groundwater treatment, according to the 212-page report, “Poisonous Coverup: The Widespread Failure of the Power Industry to Clean Up Coal Ash Dumps,” by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice.
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A “glaring hole in the current rule” does not help, said Abel Russ, a senior editor with Environmental Integrity Project, also a co-author. The 2015 rule excluded dumps that stopped receiving waste before 2015, and ash ponds that were completely dried out by then and had also stopped receiving waste. “In my experience, most power plants have at least one or two coal ash dumps that are not covered by the current rule. This obviously makes groundwater cleanup much harder.”
In August, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Environmental Integrity Project, the Sierra Club and several other organizations to close the loophole in the agency’s rules regulating the management of coal ash dumps that have leached toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes across the country. The environmental advocates, combing through records posted by utilities on their websites as required by the 2015 regulations, had identified buried ash from power plants dumped in open pits in nearly 40 states, often with no liner systems to protect groundwater, or dumped in old landfills—all still unregulated by EPA.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03112022/coal-ash-power-plants-cleanup/