If I’ve said it once I’ve said it, oh, around eleven kazillion times now: "coal is cheap" because the coal industry externalizes costs.
Take, for instance, coal ash. It contains several substances that are classified as toxics individually, but the ash itself isn’t thus classified. That means it can be stored in enormous pools with no liners, behind earthen dams that, as the disaster in Tennessee illustrates again, periodically fail.
What would happen if ash were classified as toxic? The answer can be found in this stellar piece from Bloomberg.
Increased regulation would bring costs to upgrade or close more than 600 landfills and waste ponds at 440 plants nationwide. While the Environmental Protection Agency put the price tag at $1 billion a year in 2000, power generators predict the cost would be as high as $5 billion, said Jim Roewer, executive director of the industry-funded Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, in a telephone interview.
Why so costly?
An EPA report in 2000 found a quarter of retention ponds and 57 percent of landfills lacked liners to prevent pollution from leaking into nearby water supplies, though the 2007 follow-up study found such controls more common at newer sites.
So much for cheap.
Also note this macabre/hilarious bit:
AEP, the biggest producer of coal-fired energy in the U.S., stores ash both in wet slurry ponds like the one in Tennessee and in dry landfills, said Melissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for the Columbus, Ohio-based utility, in a phone interview.
"Some of these ponds have been operating for decades without a spill," she said. "We have a regular inspection schedule for each site and the largest ones have instruments to tell us when there’s a problem."
Oh, well, as long as some of your waste facilities haven’t disgorged hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic sludge on poor surrounding communities, I guess we’re good!
Another coal plant bites the dust
Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!
Seventh Generation launches anti-toxics campaign with wee gimmick
Comments
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wesrolley Posted 1:48 pm
02 Jan 2009
But, you will have to replace a bunch of Congress Critters to make either coal or nuclear do that.
Wes Rolley
CoChair - EcoAction Committee
Green Party US
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Pompey Road Posted 12:17 am
03 Jan 2009
The pre 1977 environmental damage was thrown back on the tax payers. The rest of the country pays for the clean up and reclamation down here now for the most part. You can rest assured your cost will be increasing when and if the sludge ponds are ever listed on the EPA's Hazardous list. The ponds containing a host of heavy metals and chemicals identified individually by the EPA guarantee's there inclusion at some point. Although after 1977 large bonds are supposed to be posted for coal strip job area's and it takes 20 years to get out from under a bond having been released in stages after certain reclamation criteria have been met. In reality the rules and regulations of the 1977 Surface Mine Act have been weakened so as to make the Act useless in regards to environmental protection. The absence of a viable clean water act and the further corrosion of what little we had by George Bush's midnight regulation changes to EPA will ensure that the U.S. tax payer will be getting a bill that will be massive and long lasting at some point.
Following the same plan as the Wall Street bailout that was thrown over on the American tax payer by the Corporately connected the reclamation and clean up after the coal corporations will fall primarily on the American tax payer. This may create some good WPA or CCC style government jobs for somebody's economic rescue package or new deal. I would rather see the money spent on alternative energy development and mass transit. So as you debate the cost of clean coal and the price of cleaning it up keep an eye on the future environmental damage caused by MTR and coal preparation sludge ponds. We have several pre 77 projects ongoing and more listed each year. With MTR and coal sludge we will be assured our growth industry in reclamation will have ongoing security for years to come. We actually need the work and we are glad we have the suckers called tax payers to fund it.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Pangolin Posted 12:53 am
03 Jan 2009
Eventually all that stuff will bind to something and stabilize but, like Chernobyl, it's a not-in-your-lifetime event.
Sure, the government can build some kind of bioremediation trap to minimally clean the discharge from these sites but governments get kind of forgetful and heavy metals pollutants are kind of forever. The real job is going to be explaining that living in the waste plumes of a coal ash site is begging for cancer and nerve damage.
Somebody sold your mountains and valleys to the gods of don't go there and that land is poison. It's a shame that most don't know enough to be upset. We're going to be left with places out of Grim's fairy tales where the woods are twisted with blight and inhabited by trolls. This is how we explain polluted lands and people to ourselves.
Nice future you got there.
Put the Carbon Back
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Pompey Road Posted 12:45 am
04 Jan 2009
Pangolin was not being facetious we are being sacrificed for a dirty carbon fuel that will destroy us long before it destroys the planet.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:14 am
04 Jan 2009
Homeowners fell for the deal, so many homes have this toxic mess leeching into the groundwater that feeds their wells.
I was able to narrowly convince a neighbor not to do it on a common road we share, my argument wasn't environmental, it was economic. I pointed out that the few hundred bucks saved on gravel would lower the resale value of our properties by catastropic percentages.
The ugly nature of the stuff alone would do that, but once the pollution issue became obvious, it might make our homes untouchable by any future buyers.
Could spreading this stuff as gravel and landfill cause losses in propery value that would make the cost of cleaning up these official toxic sites look like chump change? Think about the loss of home value in the credit crisis alone, 2 trillion so far.
What if the loss in value of every home with groundwater contaminated by this stuff were calculated?
Primates with simple hand tools? A nuisance. Primates with bulldozers, trucks, mining equipment, and power plants? They are what killed us, we just haven't dropped to the ground yet.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Cyril R Posted 4:29 am
04 Jan 2009
5,000,000,000 USD for 2,000,000,000,000 kWh = 0.0025 USD/kWh to clean up the ash. That's 0.25 cents, call it 0.2 - 0.3 cents/kWh as sensitivity proxy.
Not very expensive at all. Of course there is the CO2 thing which is tricky (unknown macro economical costs). Olivine sequestration might be cheap enough at 1-2 cents/kWh. Further improving other pollution abatement equipment (scrubbers, active carbon filters etc) will likely add another cent at least. Mining impact is sometimes difficult to restore so is another problem for economical quantification.
All things included, coal is at best rather expensive, at worst very expensive, but even then not prohibitively so IMHO. That said I wouldn't mind a moratorium for coal at all.
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mwildfire Posted 1:19 am
06 Jan 2009
The main point I want to make, however, is that if we're going to talk about externalities let's talk about ALL of them. The province of Ontario in Canada made the decision a few years ago to phase out coal power even though its plants were already operational, because they calculated that the cost of switching to clean power would be less than the health costs from the coal air pollution--and in Canada, of course, the state pays healthcare costs. But the guy who came here to WV to explain this decision emphasized that Ontario does not have an indigenous coal mining industry, or this choice would not have been politically possible. This means they surely did not include the land damage or health and safety costs of coal mining in their analysis, nor the costs to the roads of trucks weighing up to 100 tons careening over them. This piece looks at one of the most overlooked costs, the disposal of the ash from the plants--but there is another kind of toxic coal slurry pond, created by the washing of the coal near where it is mined. Three hundred million gallons of this witch's brew spilled into rivers in Kentucky in 2000. And then of course, there is climate change. I doubt the Ontario government included that (and how can you assign numbers to something that may literally cost us the Earth?) So if you are going to run analyses of the FULL cost of coal, you need to include all these things. When you do that, solar doesn't look so expensive--and wind is downright cheap.
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traveler255 Posted 4:11 am
06 Jan 2009
Never stop using your brain!
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