
Rainforest Action Network
A study released today by Rainforest Action Network (RAN) uncovers how energy companies with hazardous coal ash waste disposal facilities could face $100 million per site clean up obligations for contaminated water adjacent to power plants. The report, Dump Now, Pay Later: Coal Ash Disposal Risks Facing U.S. Electric Power Producers, examines how waste from coal plants has been under regulated and how companies will be required to improve coal ash disposal practices in the near future.
According to the study, power companies dump much of the 130 million tons of coal ash produced at U.S. coal-fired power plants each year into substandard waste disposal sites, including more than 2000 aging coal ash containment ponds and landfills across the country. Coal ash, a residual combustion byproduct created by burning coal, has been known to contain concentrations of heavy metals and other toxic chemicals that cause cancer, respiratory problems and neurological damage to people exposed to contaminated water or air.
“Electric power producers that dump toxic coal waste into poorly built ponds and landfills pose health threats to communities,” said Ben Collins, research and policy campaigner at RAN and author of the report. “New regulations and legal challenges will force companies to clean up these disposal sites and are likely to cost investors a bundle in the process.”
According to the study, several investor-owned electric power producers face growing regulatory and litigation risks related to coal ash disposal because many of the ponds lack a bottom lining, allowing contaminants to leach into groundwater—and depend on aging earthen dams to prevent ruptures. One case includes a sudden failure of an impoundment dam that dumped more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into the Emery and Clinch Rivers in Tennessee, and resulted in more than a billion dollars in clean up costs.
The report names the top five companies with the most coal ash ponds the Environmental Protection Agency classified as significant or high hazards in the event of a dam failure as Duke Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, American Electric Power, PPL Corporation and Southern Company. It also points out that contamination from ponds and landfills has prompted several environmental groups and a major plaintiff firm to file lawsuits on behalf of residents near sites.
The report also ranks five electric companies based on their ownership of unlined ponds that are most likely to cause contamination of ground water, including four of the five named in the other risk assessment. Duke Energy tops both rankings as the owner of the most unlined ponds and the most ponds that pose a hazard risk from potential dam failures.
Electric power producers currently disclose very little information about either their ownership of waste disposal sites, or any plans to manage closures in the future. The report warns that if the companies fail to clean up the sites, investors will ultimately bear the costs of future clean up and legal battles.
Visit EcoWatch’s COAL ASH page for more related news on this topic.
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By David Konisky
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.