Want a 1 in 50 Shot of Getting Cancer? Live Near a Coal Ash Pond.

People who live near sites used to store ash or sludge from coal-fired power plants have a one in 50 chance of developing cancer, according to a just released government report kept from the public for seven years by the Bush Administration.

Driving home from work the other day, I caught the tail end of an NPR broadcast. Apparently, back in 2002, the EPA did a study on Coal Ash Ponds and found that people who live near them, run a 1 in 50 risk of developing cancer. The study was buried by the Bush Administration. What? This is America were living in, right? How many people have died as a result of that hushed up report? We may never know.

The data was finally released on Thursday, due to the diligence of  Earth Justice and the Environmental Integrity Project,  and suggests that environmental contamination from the storage sites could last for a century or longer.

The Iowa Independent reported in March that there are four disposal sites across Iowa where coal ash is being stored in unmonitored and unlined containment facilities, raising concerns that dangerous materials in the ash could poison groundwater supplies, damage ecosystems and jeopardize human health.

The largely unregulated sites include three abandoned quarries in Cedar Rapids, Goose Lake and Waterloo and one mine in Buffalo. Each received a waiver from the Department of Natural Resources allowing them to accept coal ash as fill in the sites’ reclamation process.

Coal ash, also known as fly ash, is the waste produced by burning coal. The nation’s power plants produce enough ash to fill 1 million railroad cars a year, according to a 2006 report by the National Research Council. Coal-burning power plants in Iowa produce 20,000 to 30,000 tons of coal ash every year. The Hawkeye State also imports coal ash from Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

The ash contains high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury and boron, each of which has been known to cause cancer, neurological and development problems, and other illnesses. Yet for three decades, rules governing coal ash have been left up to the states, creating a patchwork of differing regulations with questionable effectiveness.

Environmental groups want the state to more strictly regulate these types of sites by requiring state-of-the-art liners and multiple monitors to safeguard human health and the environment.

The state DNR has been working for more than a year on draft rules to better regulate these disposal sites. But opposition from site owners and coal-burning businesses, along with uncertainty about what regulations the federal government may eventually impose, have caused the effort to stall.

The Obama administration’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, said her agency will begin drafting new regulations for coal ash, likely to be released by the end of 2009. But environmentalists fear the new regulations won’t address the problem of unlined disposal sites.

Every time I hear someone talk about how “cheap” or “reliable” coal generated power is, I think about the human and environmental consequences of this so called “super fuel.”

The fossil fuels Coal and Oil, are not cheap. They are not reliable. They cost us Billions of dollars in extraction and environmental clean up. We can not rely on them to keep us safe from harms way. We must look forward to a sustainable and renewable energy future.

Source: The Iowa Independant

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