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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA federal review of the nation’s coal ash storage sites
includes 14 Indiana power plants where the byproduct of the state’s reliance on
coal for power is stored in a series of ever-growing ponds and landfills.
Several utilities that own or co-own those 14 coal-burning plants must
provide the Environmental Protection Agency with detailed descriptions of their
coal ash storage sites and the history of spills and inspections at each
one.
The EPA’s request, sent Monday, seeks data on some 300 coal ash ponds and
landfills nationwide within 10 business days. It comes after December’s failure
of a dike at a Kingston, Tenn., power plant that released a flood of toxic coal
ash that ruined homes and killed millions of fish.
Most of Indiana’s 14 power plants included in the EPA’s request are located
in the state’s southern third, where Indiana’s coal reserves are
concentrated.
Coal-fired power plants provide about 95 percent of the state’s electricity.
The large amount of resulting coal ash can pose a threat to drinking water and
wildlife because it contains heavy metals and other toxic contaminants, said
Jeffrey Stant, director of the Coal Combustion Waste Initiative for the
Environmental Integrity Project.
Stant, who works out of an office in Indianapolis, said his Washington,
D.C.-based group wants an end to all wet disposal of coal ash, preferring
instead that it be stored in landfills with proper liners to prevent it from
entering ground water.
Stant said the coal ash stored at Indiana’s power plants is prone to damage
from flooding because the plants were built near rivers to provide them with a
source of cooling water. Some of those coal waste ponds are up to a half-century
old, he said.
“All these massive deposits of ash have been dumped right along rivers,
immediately over flood-plain aquifers. They’re in flood plains. This is the
worst place to put these ponds,” Stant said. “The ash needs to be excavated and
put in safer places, like in landfills with farther distances between the waste
and the water table.”
Indiana ranked first in the nation in 2005 in the amount of toxic coal ash
disposed of in its coal ash storage ponds, according to an Associated Press
analysis of Energy Department data.
That analysis, performed in January, showed that in 2005 Indiana utilities
disposed of more than 2.27 million tons of coal waste in 13 such coal ash ponds.
Ohio was second on that list with 2.19 million tons of coal waste disposed of in
ponds in 2005.
Duke Energy, Indiana’s largest power provider, owns or co-owns five of the 14
Indiana plants the EPA wants information about.
Those plants include the state’s largest coal-fired power plant – Duke’s
3,000-megawatt Gibson Power Station near the Gibson County town of Owensville,
which has a recent history of contamination linked to its coal ash ponds.
Most recently, the chemical element boron was found last August in the wells
of about 10 homes and businesses in adjacent East Mount Carmel.
Duke Energy spokeswoman Angeline Protogere said Duke is supplying those
residences and businesses with bottled water and is installing a municipal water
line to supply them permanently.
“We did this as a precaution and we wanted to react before the issue became
any type of threat,” she said.
Protogere said the Gibson Power Station is currently being converted from wet
storage of coal ash to dry handling and storage of ash in landfills.
Duke also is building a 9.5-mile-long line to bring water from the
Wabash River to a wetlands area at the Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge
used as a nesting site by an endangered bird called the least tern.
That nesting site had been found to be tainted with elevated levels of
selenium coming from the power plant’s cooling lake, which contains coal ash
residue, Protogere said.
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