Coal Ash

If you've read the latest Rolling Stone ( issue #1101, I have read it, i'm hip) you may have seen the "national affairs" section, a piece about coal ash. Usually this section contains an alarmist story bashing industry and the right wing (not necessarily bad..... google coal ash and get scared), and this story is no different. Coal ash is the solid waste scrubbed from the smoke stacks at coal burning power plants and amounts to a huge annual mass...140 million tons according to RS. These companies are required to scrub the effluent of their smoke stakes of dangerous heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, as mandated in the 1970s. Since then, this solid waste has been unregulated as nonhazardous solid waste (contentious) and has been dumped in unlined lagoons. This leads to leaching of the heavy metals into groundwater (drinking water) which is very bad. A recent billion gallon spill of coal ash from a Tennessee lagoon has pushed this issue into the forefront, and the EPA under Obama has finally addressed the issue, with EPA chief Lisa Jackson quoting "The EPA currently has, and has in the past, assessed its regulatory options. I think it is time to re-ask those questions." This news probably has the coal industry's pants on fire, and they are now lobbying hard to keep coal ash designated as unregulated-by-the-EPA nonhazardous material (which it isn't, coal ash has been causing cancer for years). The lobbyists argue that regulation will cost to much and increase energy prices and further hinder the economy. In an effort to keep things political and save space for celeb gossip, RS did not address why regulation will increase cost, nor was there much on remediation of existing coal ash lagoons. Regulation will drive up energy cost due to the complexity of chemical separations. The power companies will have to further separate the heavy metals. As an undergraduate chemical and biological engineering student, I am currently in "separations" class (aka "mass transfer"). This class deals with chemical separations, and is super difficult, with chapter 3 of the textbook alone containing some 300 equations (not easy ones, either). Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Luckily, we have great professors who proficiently explain the material. The coal companies also have top scientists, and they figured out how to separate these toxins from the gasses leaving the plant. Unfortunately they take that scrubbed material and essentially dump it down the drain instead of separating it further (costly/difficult). What will happen next is anyone's guess. Advances in leaching the solid waste or Sequestering the scrubbed material in better, sealed lagoons is probable. Biological remediation is one viable option for the existing lagoons. In the lab where I work at the Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University, microbiologists and engineers are hard at work looking into whether or not microorganisms can transform the valence state of chromium(VI) contained within hazardous waste to render it less transportable by water (huh?). Basically, bacteria could be let loose in a haz-mat, superfund type site to see if the bugs will eat up the deadly stuff. Our lab is funded by the DOE, and my bosses are currently in D.C. hobnobbing with the moneybags there to get funding for exactly this kind of research. Hopefully coal ash site remediation will get similar notice from the DOE and EPA in the near future.