Surprise: Most Coal Ash Ponds Not Regulated

Published January 06, 2009 @ 06:32PM PT

Continuing my morning's theme of the billion-gallon coal sludge spill in Tennessee:

It turns out that the Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate any of the nation's 1,300+ coal ash ponds, or maintain watch on their effects on the nearby environment, even though they contain billions of gallons of sludge containing heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which the agency identifies as threats to human health and to water supplies. Instead, they are managed by a patchwork of state regulations -- and some states have none.

Amazing.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told reporter Shaila Dewan of The New York Times. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

EPA has been studying the issue for 28 years, but has never released any regulations, because of pressure from industry:

In 2000, the agency came close to designating coal ash a hazardous waste, but backpedaled in the face of an industry campaign that argued that tighter controls would cost it $5 billion a year. (In 2007, the Department of Energy estimated that it would cost $11 billion a year.) At the time, the E.P.A. said it would issue national regulations governing the disposal of coal ash as a nonhazardous waste, but it has not done so.

“We’re still working on coming up with those standards,” said Matthew Hale, director of the office of solid waste at the E.P.A. “We don’t have a schedule at this point.”

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