Ash Ponds, Spent Rods, Future Robots

It’s been a good Christmas for Mother Earth this year as colorfully illustrated by last Monday’s ecological disaster in Tennessee. In case you missed the story, a retaining wall of a coal ash pond collecting waste from an electrical plant forty miles from Knoxville burst and flooded the Emory River and surrounding areas. Coal ash contains the radioactive elements uranium and thorium which become concentrated during the burning process and now there’s 5.4 million cubic yards depositing heavy metals in river water or waiting to dry out and become dust, borne by the four winds to anywhere and everywhere.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, owners of the plant in question, have run tests and found unsafe levels of lead and thallium in the Emory but express confidence that the contaminants will be eliminated from drinking water by standard filtration processes. This comforting thought from the same people who initially estimated the spill at 1.7 million cubic yards not to mention their space-aged storage methods which allowed the flooding to occur. Neither the TVA or our neutered government watchdog the EPA have felt it important to release any analysis of the ash itself, deigning it sufficient to note that by not eating any of the coal ash people can avoid any health problems. Local residents remain concerned about the effects of re-dehydrated ash getting into their homes, lungs and food and no one seems prepared to make a statement about that either.

A new year is upon us and soon a new president will sit in the White House. While the reality-adjusted economy will be a policy obsession for the next several months energy plans will also be drafted, debated and scuttled. Coal firing plants account for almost half of America’s energy production and the toll is obvious from the mine shaft to the smokestack. Despite just enjoying our coolest year in a decade and the rabid denials from disreputable talking heads the world is attempting to seriously grapple with the seemingly inevitable catastrophe of global warming, albeit by pursuing market based solutions and heel dragging which will doom a large chunk of the world’s population to dislocation, hunger and disease. Coal’s contribution to melting polar caps and climbing sea temperatures cannot be downplayed or ignored, and the future of energy production demands a steady decrease in its use.