The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee
48 comments
·March 14, 2025animal_spirits
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.
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.
myrmidon
> 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.
More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup.
Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies.
Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022.
I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
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.
potato3732842
You can mostly thank greenpeace and the hippie generation's legacy of political advocacy for that.
Nations like France and formerly Germany have or had pretty sensible situations when it came to nuclear power.
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.
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.
hannob
Oh, I remember that one.
At the time, the construction of new coal-fired power plants was a controversial topic in many locations in Germany. (Around 30 new coal power plants were planned at times. Some were stopped, but 10 of them were actually build, which is bad enough.) I also tried to raise awareness about this incident in Tennessee, trying to have a look at the environmental issues of coal on a more international level. But it didn't generate much interest.
wglb
Wikipedia article with more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
greenie_beans
kinda insulting to share a wiki article in response to this incredibly well written and reported oxford american piece.
potato3732842
Not everyone wants to read about an industrial accident in the literary style of a novel. Some of us want higher fact density and lower adjective density.
myrmidon
How is linking wikipedia insulting? Those two are perfectly complementary.
The article basically tells a story, while wikipedia (almost clinically) describes cause, effect and timeline.
bondarchuk
Well, one starts with "On December 22, 2008, Ansol Clark woke to a ringing phone. It was sometime before 6 a.m., far earlier than he had intended to get up. He drove construction trucks for a living, but he’d been furloughed recently, leaving him little to do in the three days before Christmas except wrap gifts and watch movies with his grown son, Bergan." while the other starts with "The Kingston Fossil Plant Spill was an environmental and industrial disaster that occurred on December 22, 2008, when a dike ruptured at a coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)'s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 billion US gallons (4.2 million cubic metres) of coal fly ash slurry."
wglb
My intent was to augment the article.
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...
jollyllama
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Blue_Run_Lake
> Another lawsuit was filed in Federal Court by 15 Beaver County, Pennsylvania residents and 36 West Virginia residents who accused FirstEnergy of contaminating groundwater and leaking hazardous waste, including arsenic, sulfates, sodium, calcium, magnesium and chloride[2] into local waterways and groundwater systems.
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]
Terrifying that this could happen as recently as 2008 and, I'm sure, with better understanding of potential consequences.
In 1966, something similar (although with a mining waste dump, instead of ash) happened in Aberfan, Wales (in the UK) with a more tragic outcome[1].
The question should be whether this occurred due to ignorance or ignoring the lessons of history, which rhymes if not repeats.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster