A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.Could TVA please finish Watts Bar 2 and shutter these decrepit old coal plants? In terms of real environmental consequences, this is bigger than any accident ever experienced by the nuclear power industry in the U.S.--Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island, any of them.
The sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.
The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN.
The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River.
"We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide and damage to nearby homes," TVA said in a statement released Tuesday.
TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Furthermore, this is a good example of how "clean coal" can't be expected to be "clean." All the ash will have to be put somewhere--and some will inevitably leak out into the environment, with deleterious effects. But given that "clean coal" primarily exists as a marketing slogan at the moment, it's not really serious competition for new nuclear plants anyway. So make mine nuclear, please. Before your coal plants end up destroying my house and/or killing me.