The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee
31 comments
·March 14, 2025animal_spirits
jillesvangurp
Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time.
That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.
The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.
Earw0rm
How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff?
Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?
UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
jillesvangurp
More efficient burning means more the waste metals get concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to go somewhere.
wqaatwt
> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated
Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.
awjlogan
Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.
7bit
Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.
gambiting
Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public.
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
wglb
Wikipedia article with more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
latchkey
I am guessing this is coming up now due to the recent changes in regulations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357447
"Prioritizing coal ash program to expedite state permit reviews and update coal ash regulations (CCR Rule)"
Carrok
This article has some great writing overall, but ends with this
> How could this happen? Ansol wondered.
I wish it had dug into this. These sort of things don't just happen. There must be accountability, and journalists are who are supposed to start that process. This was clearly an environmental travesty of monumental proportions. How do we grapple with the fact this sort of thing is apparently just allowed to continue happening?
null
alibarber
It's an extract from a book - which I would hope digs into it.
leetrout
Related I lived through a large coal slurry spill in 2000 in Eastern KY.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_sp...
DecentShoes
If you want me to read your article, don't cover it with a stupid popup in the middle of the screen. I closed the page as soon as I saw that.
hinkley
Man that still feels like it was ten years ago. 17, really?
owenthejumper
Without spoilers...what a disappointing article. This feels like it should have been a long read, and yet, the article ends just as it started, with no explanation, investigation, or conclusion.
tomrod
It's a long form, unclassified advertisement for a book mentioned at the end. Decently written if a little too reliant on cliffhangers.
aaron695
[dead]
JumpCrisscross
[flagged]
pjdesno
I think it’s likely the latter, not the former. If they didn’t like coal ash they’d have voted for someone else.
Mistletoe
Or 3) History has shown us repeatedly that people are easily manipulated by populist fascist dictators making lots of promises about making your country great again.
JumpCrisscross
Sure. I’m not saying they deserve no sympathy. Just that others probably deserve it first.
monetus
You felt the need to comment to tell people to be disinterested in compassion? Anyways, the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance.
JumpCrisscross
> the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance
The point is the survivors of this voted for Trump when he was talking, on the stump, about deregulating coal. One way or another, another coal-ash disaster didn’t strike them as a dealbreaker.
pstuart
But think of all the liberal tears they can savor.
s1artibartfast
And never mind the TVA responsible for this is a government owned and operated organization with sovereign immunity.
s1artibartfast
I'm struggling to come up with a charitable, non-misanthropic, reading of that either/or.
This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded.
- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/613-valley-so-low/