Residents of Perry County Alabama are trying to keep it from becoming the “Ashhole of Alabama.”
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the nation’s largest public utility, has been spending about a million bucks a day cleaning up more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge that spilled out of a holding pond at its Kingston power plant and all over hundreds of acres in and along the Emory River.
But the question must be asked, “Where will all that polluted ash end up?”
It turns out that much of it is being loaded on trains and shipped 350 miles away to a landfill in rural Perry County, Alabama – much to the consternation of many local residents who are worried about the health threat possibly posed by the coal ash.
It turns out that local leaders voted to allow the importation of the waste from the Tennessee spill based on economic reasons – namely, the waste tonnage fees collected and the handful of jobs created by the project.
The New York Times covered the ongoing clash yesterday.
As one local resident was quoted in the story: ”I won’t feel comfortable until I see a delegation from EPA and TVA standing on the courthouse square, each member stirring a heaping spoonful of this coal ash into a glass of Tennessee river water this stuff has already fallen into, and gargling with it.”
How do we explain to our children that we leveraged their futures of mercury and chemically lased ground water against the immediate gains of profits for poison? Until we stop this type of madness, the shift from dirty energy to clean energy may take longer than even the skeptics like to admit.
Source: NRDC Switchboard
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