coal ash
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Toward a medically defensible energy policy
Pollution from coal is not only unhealthy for the environment — it also hurts the human body and contributes to four of the five leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease. So concludes a new assessment of coal’s health effects from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Titled “Coal’s […]
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Big Coal and child victims
This Friday, Nov. 13, marks the 100th anniversary of the Cherry Mine Disaster in Illinois, when an estimated 259 coal miners lost their lives to fire and the buildup of “black damp” or toxic gases. The St. Paul Coal Company Mine in Cherry was hailed by its consulting engineer as the “safest mine in the […]
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Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash
Here’s the damage from a coal ash spill in Tennessee.A civil lawsuit filed last week in state court in Delaware charges Arlington, Va.-based AES Corp. — one of the world’s largest power companies — with illegally dumping 160 million pounds of toxic coal ash waste onto beaches in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic, […]
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Congressional watchdog issues update on coal ash regulation efforts
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still does not know the exact number of coal ash dumps at the nation’s power plants, but it’s moving ahead with plans to regulate them. Those are among the findings of a report [PDF] released last week by the Government Accountability Office on the status of EPA’s efforts to improve […]
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The risky plan to dump coal ash in an old Tennessee mine
Since a dam burst at its Kingston coal-fired power plant last December and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge into a nearby community and river, the federal Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has decided to change the way it stores its coal waste, transitioning from wet landfills like the one that […]
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EPA revamping rules for toxic releases from coal plants
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it plans to revise the existing standards for wastewater discharges from coal-fired power plants. The news came one day after three environmental groups announced they intend to sue the agency for failing to properly regulate such discharges. Many of these releases come from coal ash ponds like […]
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EPA reveals almost twice as many dangerous coal ash dumps as previously known
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released information showing there are 584 coal ash dump sites across the country — almost twice as many as previously identified. The facilities are located in 35 states and concentrated in Appalachia, the Southeast, Midwest and Intermountain West. The release [PDF] came late last Friday in response to a […]
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Study details health risks from TVA’s spilled coal ash
Exposure to dust and river sediment in the area of the massive coal ash spill from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant could present a health risk to local communities. That’s the finding of a study published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It’s the first peer-reviewed, double-blind research paper to […]
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Crackdown on coal ash
The crazy quilt of regulations governing coal ash disposal across the United States got a new patch this week when North Carolina lawmakers passed a law requiring stricter regulation of coal ash impoundments, the giant lagoons where utility companies store the nearly 6 million pounds of toxic combustion waste generated each year at electric power […]
