Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Maryland Learns The Truth About Clean Coal

So much for "clean coal": a 4,000-gallon coal ash spill at a Maryland paper mill narrowly avoided disaster by, luckily, being only 4,000 gallons (Tennessee’s was over a billion gallons).

In other news: paper mills create coal ash sludge? Apparently, yes:
The ash comes from coal the company burns to power the mill. Three 800-foot pipelines carry the ash to a 1.2 million gallon storage lagoon across the river.

Wow, that’s alarming news. How many smaller coal sludge lagoons dot the landscape across the country, I wonder? Who’s regulating them? Who's monitoring them? Who's watching the pipelines to make sure there aren't any leaks, which is what happened here?

These coal ash ponds contains arsenic, radioactive elements, and other toxins. And apparently they’re as common as swimming pools in Southern California.