Waste Spills From a Second TVA Coal-Fired Power Plant
STEVENSON, Alabama, January 12, 2009 (ENS)
The Tennessee Valley Authority's second waste spill in three weeks at one
of its coal-fired power plants has drawn demands that the federally owned
and operated utility act immediately to secure the waste at its facilities.
A 10,000 gallon leak of process water from the gypsum pond at the Widows
Creek Fossil Plant in Stevenson was discovered just before dawn on Friday.
TVA officials say the leak has stopped.
The utility said Sunday that the spill occurred when a cap dislodged from an
unused 30-inch standpipe in the gypsum pond. This allowed water and gypsum
to bypass the existing system and drain into the adjacent settling pond,
filling it to capacity and causing it to overflow. TVA will fill the unused
pipe with concrete.
As part of the recovery process, Widows Creek crews are performing
maintenance activities to slope the internal wall of the gypsum pond by
bringing in about 3,500 cubic yards of sand.
"The leak from the gypsum pond flowed into an adjacent settling pond," the
federal electric utility said in a statement. "Some material overflowed into
Widows Creek, although most of the leakage remained in the settling pond."
Gypsum ponds hold limestone spray from TVA's scrubbers that clean sulfur
dioxide from coal-plant emissions. Gypsum contains calcium sulfate, which is
used in drywall, a construction material.
Widows Creek Fossil Plant, named for the creek that flows through the plant
site, is located on Guntersville Reservoir on the Tennessee River in
northeast Alabama.
"The Tennessee Valley Authority has a lot to answer for," said U.S. Senator
Barbara Boxer of California, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee. Last week the committe held a hearing to investigate the
December spill of more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry from TVA's
Kingston Fossil in eastern Tennessee.
"The first step is to prevent further spills and damage to communities
around its plants," said Boxer. "I have asked the TVA for a complete
assessment of the safety of its waste disposal sites and their plans for
upgrading those sites."
Boxer said, "This second pollution spill must be a wakeup message to the TVA
and to the U.S. EPA that the current situation is unacceptable."
The Widows Creek Fossil Plant in Stevenson, Alabama
(Photo courtesy TVA)
When the Alabama spill was discovered, TVA notified federal and state
authorities and deployed containment booms on Widows Creek to trap the
contaminated water.
Alabama Department of Environmental Management spokesman Scott Hughes said
the agency has a crew on the scene monitoring Widows Creek for effects of
the spill on aquatic organisms in the creek.
"We inspect all these facilities on an annual basis," said Hughes. "Our
focus is to ensure the water discharged from these impoundments comply with
their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. The lastest
inspection at Widows Creek took place on May 21, 2008, and Hughes says
inspectors found no violations.
The city of Scottsboro about 15 miles downstream from the Widows Creek
Fossil Plant uses the Tennessee River as drinking water.
TVA said results from water and sediment samples taken at four locations on
the Tennessee River on Friday indicate that the samples meet primary
drinking water standards for metals.
Data received Sunday from MicroBac labs, an external laboratory, indicate
the samples contained material from the spill that were well below levels
considered hazardous.
ADEM personnel will provide oversight to ensure cleanup is done in a timely
manner, said Hughes.
The eight coal-fired units at Widows Creek generate about 10 billion
kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to supply 650,000 homes. The
plant consumes some 10,000 tons of coal a day.
This leak is the second at a TVA coal-fired power plant in the past three
weeks. On December 22, a retaining wall broke at the TVA's Kingston Fossil
power plant in eastern Tennessee's Roane County, about 100 miles to the
northeast of Widows Creek. A billion gallons of coal ash sludge spilled into
the Emory River and across 400 acres of the surrounding farm and residential
neighborhood.
"Even as residents in Roane County Tennessee are still trying to grasp the
full impact of the Kingston disaster, communities in northeastern Alabama
are now threatened with a new toxic coal waste spill," said Bruce Nilles,
director of the Sierra Club's National Coal Campaign.
"While initial accounts indicate that this latest spill is smaller than the
Tennessee disaster, we hope that TVA and EPA have learned from the Tennessee
disaster and move quickly to protect residents," said Nilles.
Coal waste can contain harmful substances including lead, mercury and
arsenic that can leak into soil and water, putting people who come in
contact with the contamination at risk for health problems.
"Shockingly, coal waste is largely unregulated in Alabama," said Gil Rogers,
staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina.
"Alabamans deserve straight answers from the Alabama Department of
Environmental Management about how it's handling this waste stream at TVA's
Widow Creek plant and if any corrective action procedures are in place to
deal with it," Rogers said.
"Clearly current regulations are not adequate," said Nilles. "We need the
Environmental Protection Agency to start regulating coal ash before more
communities are put at risk."
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