Oct 28 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Tony Bartelme The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.

On the banks of the Great Pee Dee River, Santee Cooper wants to build a giant power plant that would consume 410 tons of coal every hour and generate enough electricity for 600,000 homes.

Burning all that coal also will generate huge volumes of potentially harmful ash, and Santee Cooper plans to store it in a landfill and holding pond on a bluff above the river.

This ash likely will be more toxic than ash from older, less-sophisticated plants, because of Santee Cooper's efforts to install the latest pollution-control equipment. Why? These state-of-the-art scrubbers clean the air but also leave behind ash laced with higher concentrations of arsenic, mercury, selenium and other dangerous chemicals.

"It's wonderful that we're making the air cleaner," said William Hopkins, a Virginia Tech biologist who has done extensive work on the effects of coal combustion waste on wildlife. "But the pollutants have to go somewhere."

Too often, coal ash with high concentrations of heavy metals ends up in poorly designed landfills and ponds, a Post and Courier Watchdog investigation found. In South Carolina, ash dumps and ponds have tainted groundwater with arsenic and other chemicals many times the federal drinking water limit. Will Santee Cooper's ash disposal operations be any different?

In interviews, Santee Cooper officials say that along with the best available air scrubbers, they'll build a sophisticated fly-ash landfill and bottom-ash pond to prevent ash contaminants from polluting the Great Pee Dee and nearby groundwater.

But even Santee Cooper's own study on the plant's environmental effects recognizes that despite the utility's best efforts, some toxic materials will end up in the river, which already has fish with mercury levels so high the state warns residents not to eat certain species.

"Some amount of mercury will be deposited into the bottom ash pond" and "some mercury will be carried with the discharge from the bottom ash pond into the Great Pee Dee River," the study said.

The utility's environmental chief, Jay Hudson, described the 991-page study as a preliminary look at the site's effects on the environment. To get federal and state permits, the Army Corps of Engineers is doing a much more thorough environmental study -- one that Hudson is confident will show the utility can prevent mercury and other ash contaminants from getting into the Great Pee Dee.

Unlike other ash ponds and landfills in Santee Cooper's system, the Pee Dee's landfill will have a clay base and a synthetic liner, along with a system of collecting any water that may filter through these layers, he said. This water will be treated if needed, and then pumped into the bottom-ash pond.

Besides, Hudson said of the future Pee Dee landfill, "we hope not to use it." Instead, he said he hopes Santee Cooper will recycle much of its ash by selling it to the cement industry and other companies. In that case, the landfill would mainly be used as a staging area.

Santee Cooper's plans to build a new coal plant have generated opposition from a coalition of conservation and citizens groups, and the idea of having a landfill and ash pond near the Great Pee Dee doesn't sit well with many of them. Mike King, head of the Pee Dee River Watchers, is one particularly vocal critic.

King said contaminants "will go right in (the groundwater) like a sponge. When it comes to coal plants, ash isn't something people think about, but it's laden with all sorts of stuff." No matter what the intentions, "accidents always happen at these places, and I think it will happen here, too."

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