OLD KING COAL
SH: I cannot answer that question
H: Phil, is that something you can
answer?
PD: It’s not a hazardous waste.
H: Ok, so to the extent that it’s not
classified as a hazardous waste,
there should be no public health
concern?
PD: You said that, Tom, I didn’t.
H: Well, what would you say?
PD: I would say what Scott said.
To be sure, the safety of coal ash is
a hotly debated topic and to date, it
remains unregulated at the federal
level. Until last year, Alabama had
no rules for coal ash at all.
A combination of increased elec-
“This is all we have.
Nobody seems to care, but
let me tell you that this is
only the beginning. You
can listen or wait ‘til later
to see what happens.”
— Esther Calhoun, a Uniontown
resident, addresses regulators
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
tricity demand and better pollution controls, which now capture
many of the noxious constituents
that, in previous years, would have
been spewed into the air over the
nation’s coal burning power plants,
have led to a precipitous rise in the
amount of coal ash produced.
The United States produces
more than 130 million tons of coal
ash annually, according to the
American Coal Ash Association,
an industry group. Roughly 43
percent of that is used as an additive in concrete products, bricks,
shingles and other materials.
The rest has been traditionally deposited in loosely regulated landfills, or unlined holding
pond systems like one that failed
in Kingston, and environmental
groups have busied themselves
documenting the slow leaching of
coal ash constituents, including
arsenic and other heavy metals,
into the groundwater surrounding
such storage sites.
In the aftermath of the Kingston
spill, the EPA revisited the coal
ash issue in earnest, and in 2010,
it proposed two options for bringing the waste material under the
purview of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the 1976
legislation that sets rules for the
disposal of both non-hazardous
and hazardous wastes in the United States.