The Reality Blog

The Dirt on “Clean”
Part 2: Less than 100 tons of poison

In part 1 of the Dirt on “Clean,” we introduced you to some of the reasons why the coal industry’s 77% cleaner claim is misleading — their omission of CO2, their sloppy chemistry that lumps different pollutants together, and their numbers manipulation that overstates reductions and hides emissions increases.

Of course, that’s just the beginning of what the coal industry isn’t telling you.

For starters, they don’t mention the poisons — toxic compounds like arsenic, mercury and lead that are all released by burning coal.

The coal industry conveniently doesn’t mention these hazardous pollutants alongside their 77% claim because they “did not track emissions of less than 100 tons per year.” Unfortunately for us, it takes a whole lot less than 100 tons of these poisons to do some serious damage.

What’s the Reality?
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS):

• 1/70th of a teaspoon of Mercury can be enough to make the fish in a 25-acre lake unsafe to eat.
• Water containing 50 parts per billion of Arsenic will cause cancer in 1 out of 100 people who drink it.

So how much of these poisons are emitted by coal? UCS estimates, each year, an average 500 MW power plant produces:

• 170 pounds of mercury
• 225 pounds of arsenic
• 114 pounds of lead
• 4 pounds of cadmium, trace amounts of uranium, other toxic heavy metals

Remember, there are about 600 coal-fired power plants operating in America today. Based on those per plant averages, that would be roughly 67 tons of arsenic, and 51 tons of mercury per year — but don’t worry, that’s way under their 100 ton tracking threshold.

And that’s just the pollution that goes into the air. The coal plant also produces toxic waste that doesn’t go up the smokestack. This coal ash and sludge is a super-toxic stew that includes all the compounds and waste that the coal industry has been forced to keep out of the air.

Most of this waste is stored in landfills and ponds at power-plants. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always stay there.

In December 2008, an embankment collapsed at a coal waste pond in Tennessee, resulting in 1.1 billion gallons of toxic sludge flowing across land and into the Emory River. And just last week, a smaller spill occurred into Maryland’s Potomac river when a coal ash pipe sprung a leak and wasn’t noticed for 12 hours.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced they would consider new regulations on such storage facilities. But the fact remains, there’s nothing “clean” or “77% cleaner” about “less than 100 tons” of arsenic, mercury or lead — whether it’s going up a smokestack, sitting in a storage pond, or polluting our lakes, rivers and lands.

But this is not the end of the Dirt on “Clean.” Next up, we’ll look at how the coal industry proudly touts their gains, while fighting tooth and nail for decades to avoid cleaning up their act.