[HN Gopher] The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee
___________________________________________________________________
The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee
Author : awnird
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-03-14 00:45 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oxfordamerican.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (oxfordamerican.org)
| owenthejumper wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's a long form, unclassified advertisement for a book
| mentioned at the end. Decently written if a little too reliant
| on cliffhangers.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| 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/
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| More efficient burning means more the waste metals get
| concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to
| go somewhere.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent
| features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows
| and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all
| other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still
| many times more harmful and killed way more people.
|
| And of course Chernobyl couldn't have happened in the US,
| France, Britain or any other country run by extremely
| incompetent halfwits.
| troupo wrote:
| ~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still
| build hydroelectric plants.
|
| Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it
| was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately
| misleading.
|
| People don't die from flooding because of dams, people
| die from flooding _despite_ dams. Deaths from flooding
| would _not_ vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using
| hydroelectricity /building dams.
|
| Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by
| radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was
| not designed to do so (compare later speculative
| Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile
| material made incidental contamination a non-issue.
| troupo wrote:
| > People don't die from flooding because of dams, people
| die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding
| would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using
| hydroelectricity/building dams.
|
| wat
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout
| Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon
| Nina.
|
| The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in
| history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with
| a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30
| cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll
| ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.
|
| The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8
| million houses
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet
| somehow we still build hydroelectric plants.
|
| By _your_ flawed logic we should 've stopped building
| them years ago. Because multiple human deaths,
| destruction and ecological disaster are literally built
| into every single dam.
|
| Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the
| evacuation of 180 000 people. That's _more_ people than
| were evacuated due to Fukushima.
| myrmidon wrote:
| You missed my point completely.
|
| That dam was _built_ to prevent and mitigate damage
| during floods (besides producing electricity).
|
| Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely!
| But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims
| during flooding, because the flooding then just happens
| completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build
| any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m
| of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from
| starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the
| source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident,
| too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have
| flooding _everywhere_.
|
| > Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the
| evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than
| were evacuated due to Fukushima.
|
| Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute _less_
| people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that
| is the critical flaw in your argument that I 'm pointing
| out.
| troupo wrote:
| > That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage
| during floods (besides producing electricity).
|
| Please educate yourself on how hydroelectric dams are
| constructed.
|
| And a large number of other dams are built not to prevent
| flooding, but to create water reservoirs and/or stem
| river flows.
|
| > Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less
| people during rain if we did not build dams?
|
| In the absolute vast majority of hydroelectric dams, yes.
|
| Following _your_ logic, we should immediately stop
| because human deaths and devastation are built in to the
| dams
| lesuorac wrote:
| > People don't die from flooding because of dams, people
| die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding
| would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using
| hydroelectricity/building dams.
|
| The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
|
| Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to
| the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam
| is built. This causes 2 problems.
|
| 1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land
| upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll
| notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very
| much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get
| that extra space.
|
| 2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will
| make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because
| you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water
| stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood.
|
| ---
|
| However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is
| nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than
| cancer.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
|
| No they are not.
|
| Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have
| buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams,
| you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that
| there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get
| uncontrolled flooding on _dam failure_ , which tends to
| happen less often than... heavy rain.
|
| > The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land
| upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll
| notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very
| much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get
| that extra space.
|
| Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space.
| That is a completely different argument from flood risk,
| though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam
| is even built.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| IIRC, and I forget where I know this from so it might be
| bullshit, but the energy required to live a lifetime at a
| western lifestyle creates a grapefruit sized volume of
| the "highly dangerous don't go near this" type waste.
| awjlogan wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be
| "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just
| different types of radioactive waste being buried
| together?
| awjlogan wrote:
| Coal ash is not classed as radioactive and it was
| abundant and cheap as a useless by-product of burning
| coal. The point is more that things classed as "low
| level" waste from nuclear are most often completely
| harmless, just regulated differently due to public
| understanding of the word "nuclear". As such, its
| disposal is heavily regulated.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Coal ash is not classed as radioactive
|
| And yet the largest human release of radioactive material
| in the environment comes from coal ash.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Coal ash is commonly used in cement [1]. I would suspect
| the nuclear waste is being encased with cement to prevent
| its leakage with of course the punchline being that the
| encasement is more radioactive than its contents.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products
| 7bit wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 99.99% of the extracted material that was already there?
| Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich
| in uranium ores. And uranium operations are pretty small
| on the scale of mine operations. It also is common enough
| in modern mining practice to put the nasty stuff at the
| bottom of the waste dump, as close as possible to the
| conditions where it came from.
|
| That seems unlikely to be causing any problems,
| especially without a source to gauge how political the
| studies are. We're talking populations that live close to
| the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited
| employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure.
| They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as
| good as more urban populations.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > 99.99% of the extracted material that was already
| there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was
| already rich in uranium ores.
|
| This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in
| general.
|
| Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments
| because it leads to more of the harmful extracted
| material; it is harmful because ore concentration is
| often rather low, and the extraction process produces
| millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful
| than the ore), which has to be disposed _somewhere_ (and
| preferably not in groundwater, which is the _cheapest_
| place to get rid of it).
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are
| _the_ showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ( "harmful
| ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong
| dismissal for that argument.
| roenxi wrote:
| Saying that a mine leaves behind 99.99% of the material
| is a misleading take. Material that has been there since
| before the dawn of recorded history remains there. It is
| a non-statement chosen for emotional effect. I might as
| well say that the overall concentration of uranium in the
| area is dropping because they just dug it up and sold a
| bunch off.
|
| He didn't articulate what his problem with the situation
| was; it is a remarkably vague comment for an area that is
| extremely well understood. What exactly are these harms?
| Especially when considering that living remotely from a
| city is harmful to health outcomes they probably aren't
| particularly interesting.
|
| Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and
| you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a
| whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at
| 11.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > Saying that a mine leaves behind 99.99% of the material
| is a misleading take.
|
| This might be slightly overstated, but uranium at ore
| concentrations of 0.1% and under _is_ mined commercially
| right now. Safely disposing of toxic byproducts of
| Uranium ore extraction and -concentration is already non-
| trivial in sufficiently regulated industrialized nations,
| situation in Kazakhstan or Africa is very obviously worse
| (or are you actually arguing that the operators there are
| gonna restore groundwater quality, and dispose of toxic
| byproducts in a permanently safe way at their own cost?)
|
| > What exactly are these harms?
|
| Again. The harm comes primarily from groundwater
| contamination, which is very hard to prevent because you
| are basically pumping some leaching agent into the
| ground, which is alreay invariably gonna affect
| groundwater quality. Even if that did not, you then need
| to dump slurry/brine byproducts from extraction
| _somewhere_ (and the next river is gonna be the cheapest
| place).
|
| > Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and
| you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a
| whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at
| 11.
|
| People whine about environmental impact of lithium/rare
| earth mining bascially every single time that
| electrification of vehicles comes up (or wind turbines),
| primarily to then make bad arguments in favor of fossil
| fuels...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| What's the uranium concentration of the waste though? If
| it's higher than the .1% natural concentration they're
| mining wouldn't they mine their waste piles? I'm failing
| to see how the waste has more uranium in it than the land
| did to begin with unless it was a case of the surface
| land people deal with being free of it.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > If it's higher than the .1% natural concentration
| they're mining wouldn't they mine their waste piles?
|
| Your mental picture of the process is a bit off: Uranium
| mining happens mostly by pumping a leaching agent
| (typically some acid) into the ground, and extracting it
| elsewhere via wells. This is very obviously not helpful
| for groundwater quality.
|
| And you are not extracting _just_ Uranium (or even other
| "desirable" heavy metals)-- most of the radioactivity
| (>80%) is in economically uninteresting decay products,
| and you just want/need to get rid of those.
| roenxi wrote:
| [delayed]
| pixl97 wrote:
| You seem to misunderstand how mining pollution actually
| works.
|
| When things like uranium are trapped in rocks they are
| typically immobile and not bioavailable. In most ground
| strata things things can be stabally held for millions of
| years. When humans mine the area we can cause what would
| take erosion millions of years in hours. For example
| blasting and mechanical splitting of rocks then loading
| them with equipment causes huge amounts of dust. Also in
| the process of exposing 'fresh' rock we cause sulfate
| materials to be exposed to water creating acids that
| mobilize metals.
| roenxi wrote:
| What case study are you working off? There are only
| something like 50 active uranium projects active right
| now.
| throwaway1298 wrote:
| I live in one of the mentioned countries (Kazakhstan)
| very close to one the major (unenriched) uranium
| processing plants. It's in the very east of the country
| close to the border with China, you'll easily find
| information about it if you're interested.
|
| It most definitely is causing problems, but you will not
| hear about it because: a) nobody gives a flying fuck
| about us, especially our own government, and b) very
| little research is being done because nobody important is
| interested in doing it.
|
| Most of the money made by destroying our health and
| environment goes to Switzerland (i.e. Glencore), and they
| have no incentive to care about us.
|
| I read _one_ study by a grad student who managed to
| escape from here to a French university, and she used a
| scanning electron microscope to find very high levels of
| heavy metal pollution -- including uranium -- in tree
| leaves all around the plant. That 's about it.
|
| And here's a personal anecdote of what the reality is
| here: when I was in college, I was working for a few
| months with a group of researchers that were testing
| novel techniques of reducing particulate pollution from a
| local coal power plant. While we did see some positive
| results, the emission values (both before and after) were
| significantly higher than what is permitted by government
| emission standards, about 8-10 times as much. So we were
| "asked" (and complied -- you don't really say no to these
| things) to reduce numbers to acceptable levels and
| publish that. This makes for a pretty piss-poor study if
| you ask me, it's not really science.
|
| edit: and here's this beauty at close range:
|
| https://0x0.st/8QZm.jpg
|
| https://0x0.st/8QZS.jpg
| roenxi wrote:
| I worry this is going to come off as overly combative;
| but you haven't gotten to the meat of my complaint here.
| What is the harm you are objecting to vis a vis the
| uranium?
|
| The only actual evidence you're proffering is that there
| is heavy metals pollution "all around" the processing
| plant. That isn't much to go on. What sort of distances
| are we talking about? What does "very high" mean?
| throwaway1298 wrote:
| Sure, I was too impulsive myself, but it's really
| difficult to read dismissive comments when people all
| around you lose 10+ years of life expectancy to this
| "non-problem" just so that some guy in France can have
| his nuclear energy for cheap.
|
| I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-
| length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed
| into a short paper:
|
| https://sci-
| hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
|
| I'll look around a bit more for the original.
| roenxi wrote:
| Are there any mines involved in this study? There don't
| seem to be any mines involved here. I'm not even sure
| that most of the damage is being done by the Uranium
| processing, we seem to be looking at a heavy industrial
| district. I can't figure out where their colour scale
| comes from but it seems the high Uranium concentrations
| are quite localised to near the Uranium processing plant
| and the area is a witches brew of pollutants from all
| sorts of horrible industrial activities.
|
| I wouldn't choose to live there, I give you that. Not
| convinced it is relevant to nuclear power debate though.
| The studiers seem to be drawing attention to the toxicity
| of the lead-zinc plant.
|
| This goes to the core of my complaint against the anti-
| nuclear people. I think ignoring the Ag, As, Ba. Be, Co,
| Cr, Sb & Zn - and all the other elements in the study -
| and myopically focusing on the U is really
| misunderstanding what an industrial district does. They
| are unhealthy places.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > 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.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes
| decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is
| very expensive.
|
| But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be
| solved? I understand that there are good reasons for
| regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to
| (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on.
|
| And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your
| objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would
| also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy
| of regulatory capture.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is
| tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse
| and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to
| actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have
| started phasing out much earlier and faster.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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)"
| DecentShoes wrote:
| 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.
| wglb wrote:
| Wikipedia article with more detail
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
| hinkley wrote:
| Man that still feels like it was ten years ago. 17, really?
| Carrok wrote:
| 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?
| alibarber wrote:
| It's an extract from a book - which I would hope digs into it.
| leetrout wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hannob wrote:
| 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.
| sierra1011 wrote:
| 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
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| This was featured in an episode of The Crown [0]. I had never
| heard of it and didn't know what the episode was going to be
| about. I think they did a good job conveying the magnitude of
| the tragedy.
|
| [0]https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
| radio/2019/nov/17/televis...
| mrlonglong wrote:
| You were lucky. We in the UK had this back in 1966.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
| twic wrote:
| I've heard of a few of these in the US, but have not heard of any
| in the UK, where we also burned a lot of coal. Did we manage the
| ash differently? I have a vague idea that we have a different
| kind of coal, which produces less ash.
|
| I couldn't find anything conclusive, but found this from 2015:
|
| > Storage, whether in lagoons, silos or landfills, rather than
| re-use, is the default solution for coal ash management in most
| countries. The UK's Department of Environment, Food and Rural
| Affairs (Defra) estimates that, of the eight million tonnes of
| coal ash produced in the country each year, half is re-used,
| while over 300 million tonnes have been stored in lagoons or
| silos since the 1950s. [...] The American Coal Ash Association
| (ACAA) reports on US coal ash production and use each year. In
| 2013, 53 million tonnes of coal ash were generated, of which 23
| million tonnes were re-used. Of the unused portion, the EPA says
| 36 per cent was stored in landfills, and 21 per cent in wet
| storage facilities. [...] Some countries are doing better,
| though: for example, the Netherlands recycles 100 per cent of its
| coal ash because landfill is not allowed in the country. In
| Germany, where around 10 million tonnes of coal ash are produced
| per year, around 97 per cent is re-used, with the rest stored
| only on a temporary basis. According to the European Coal
| Combustion Products Association (Ecoba), of the 48 million tonnes
| of coal ash produced in 15 EU countries in 2010 (the latest
| available figures), 13.8 million tonnes were re-used.
|
| https://www.powerengineeringint.com/coal-fired/managing-coal...
|
| The "re-use" is by processing it into materials which can be used
| for various construction and materials manufacturing processes.
| There's lots of other fascinating details about coal ash in
| there. Wikipedia is pretty good too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products
| throwaway519 wrote:
| The UK had the Aberfan disaster that led to better awareness
| and enforcement of above-ground tip management be it mine or
| combusted slag or ash.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
| jamiescoop wrote:
| https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/osha-officials-admit...
| jamiescoop wrote:
| https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/osha-officials-admit...
| https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/05/23/jacobs-engineering-s...
| These stories should give you the info you need to understand
| what happened to the Kingston workers. I spent years as an
| investigative journalist revealing this travesty through dozens
| of stories.
| fransje26 wrote:
| Oh. The picture at the top of the second article, with the cars
| for scale, really drives home how huge that storage hill was.
|
| Thank you for sharing those articles.
| sourtrident wrote:
| Feels like disasters like this aren't just random accidents -
| they're symptoms of slowly ignoring the cracks until everything
| breaks open. Makes you wonder what else we're overlooking right
| now that's quietly falling apart around us.
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