September72009
Where to Ash
Here’s another major problem with the TVA spill and cleanup: once TVA gets the coal ash out of the river, there’s really no good way to dispose of it. TVA’s solution has been to pay a poor town in Alabama to let them dump the ash in an abandoned mine. In the short-term, this does help the town financially, and most people agree that this type of “dry storage” is safer than the “wet storage” system the ash had been in before. But it also sounds like the people in Perry County, Alabama, who will be living with the coal ash from now on, are getting some misinformation about the harmful chemicals it contains. Here’s a pretty good article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30ash.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
In the meantime, TVA has announced that as part of its effort to prevent future spills, it will convert all of its wet-ash storage to dry storage. In wet storage, the waste caught in smokestacks after coal is burned is washed out and then stored in water-covered landfills. In dry storage, its removed with a vacuum and then stored in silos.Where
