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After the storm comes the flood. Hurricane Florence spilled 8 trillion gallons of rain over North Carolina, and now the landscape between the Cape Fear River and the barrier islands of the Carolinas is an aquatic world. Because ecological disasters occur in ironic loops, this means that long-recognized hazards have become additional disasters. First, the flood waters found thousands of literal pits containing the waste of 6 million pigs and on Friday the waters reached a pool of toxic coal ash.
The water pierced the cooling lake of the LV Sutton natural gas plant on the Cape Fear River, forcing it to shut down. Two basins of coal ash, at least one of which contains 400,000 cubic yards of material, according to the plant's owner, Duke Energy, may already have coal ash in the river.
Coal ash is the ironic part. The coal plants were to be located near the coal mountains and near the waterways that the power plants needed to boil the coolant and water to run the turbines. "One of the consequences of burning coal is ash, so you have to be there for something," says Stan Meiburg, director of graduate studies in sustainability at Wake Forest University and former deputy administrator of the University of Ottawa. EPA, both in DC and the southeast. "The first practice was to put the ashes near the power station."
Coal consumption decreased in the United States, but in 2011, the country produced 130 million tonnes of coal-burning residues each year. More ironic: better air quality management technology has allowed more fly ash to be captured before it can get out of the chimneys, thus increasing the amount of CCR. Dry, ashes fly everywhere and can be a toxic inhaler. But get wet, like mud, and it stays still and easier to transport to landfills.
After the oxidation of carbon in coal, there remains only a list of metals that you hope not to find in jewelry: lead, mercury, selenium, arsenic, cadmium, chromium and a crowd other bad actors. For decades, people have suspected that grime in the pools could seep into the groundwater, or that a storm could pierce the walls of a pool and that the ash mud would penetrate into a river or a lake. There were indications that they could cause problems – fish and amphibians in lakes and watercourses near coal ash ponds had reproductive problems, organ damage, metabolic rates more high levels indicating some physiological stress. The metals accumulate in the animals that eat them. In a particularly disturbing result, the researchers found tadpoles with scoliosis and deformities of the mouth – they lacked not only teeth but rows of whole teeth.
Hilariously, none of the more than 1,000 coal ash ponds in the United States were regulated. And then in 2008, one of them opened up and dumped a billion liters of manure in eastern Tennessee. Mr. Meiburg recalls that it would have cost $ 50 million to the pond restoration company, the Tennessee Valley Authority; it cost more than a billion dollars to extract the ash mud from the river bottoms.
In 2014, it has arrived again. Two stormwater drains under Duke Energy's ash basin in North Carolina collapsed, spilling 39,000 tonnes of ash and 27 million gallons of manure into the Dan River. North Carolina has adopted regulatory laws. The EPA has gotten regulations together. In 2015, there was at least a timetable for utilities to move their coal ash to safer landfills. "The community of public interest has called for the closure of dangerous and unlined ponds. The Obama administration's 2015 rule did not go that far, "says Lisa Evans, senior advisor with the environmental group Earthjustice. "It has improved the situation enormously, but the work has not been done."
Ironically again: One of the first things the EPA did under President Trump was to re-weaken these regulations on coal ash.
And the irony again: the coal ash at the Sutton factory? "The ponds should be closed by the middle of next year," says Duke Energy spokesperson Paige Sheehan. "Some of the material was hauled by train to a doubled structural embankment. The rest is moved to a new landfill site. But Duke knows the situation is risky. Another by-product of coal combustion from the company's stores in Sutton, the cenospheres – microscopic, hollow spheres made of silica and alumina sometimes recycled into concrete or other composite materials – "tributary into the Cape Fear River," she says. "We can not rule out that coal ash could also leave the basin."
LV Sutton is not the only plant that is problematic. Another site, the Grainger Closed Generating Station near the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, has 200,000 tonnes of coal ash within flood range. Sheehan says Duke also watches the pools at another plant called HF Lee in Goldsboro. "It's like a natural experience going on there, because the possibility of more pool systems like these are failing to release their waste, combined with all the other waste from the farms. Pig farming, "says Christopher Rowe, a biologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. It is difficult to understand.
What is the complexity? The immediate risk depends on the volume actually released, and the next days at high tide will determine that. Living beings in downstream waters can absorb this broad spectrum of suspended heavy metals as solids, with varying effects. But then these solids sink to the bottom.
But it could still be dangerous. "Even if the water in the river becomes very clear and you can not find traces of contaminants," says Avner Vengosh, researcher in water quality and geochemistry at Duke University. "Ashes of coal buried in the bottom slowly but surely release contaminants into the surrounding environment."
The source is "interstitial water", water mixed with sediments of coal ash within about five inches of the riverbed. There is no oxygen there, so the dirt becomes the electrochemical opposite of oxidation, what chemists call "reduce". "In an oxidizing form, it would tend to be absorbed by sediments. In a reduced form, it tends to be water soluble, "says Vengosh.
So you have to clean this mud – a dangerous process in itself. At least 30 people who worked on the cleanup of the 2008 oil spill have died and, according to reports, another 200 are ill; a trial is in progress.
And time is a factor, because climate change means that hurricanes, like Florence, will be more intense and result in lower precipitation, some directly in the Carolinas. The ultimate irony: One of the main causes of the greenhouse gases causing climate change was of course all coal-fired power plants.
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