TVA plan to send coal ash from big Tennessee spill to Alabama stirs opposition among residents

After a holding pond at its Kingston Fossil Plant broke in December, the Tennessee Valley Authority had to fund places to put huge amounts of coal ash. We reported recently TVA's plan to use a Tennessee strip mine as a landfill. Now the federal utililty also wants to use a landfill in Perry County, Alabama, Jason Morton reports for the Tuscaloosa News.

The privately owned landfill near Uniontown has five employees, and advocates say that number could increase to 50 or more if a deal is reached to handle the 3 million pounds of ash TVA wants to send there. Perry County would receive about $4.1 million for housing the ash. “That's like adding 1,500 jobs to a place like Birmingham,” Perry County Commissioner Fairest Cureton told Morton. Cureton is in favor of the landfill accepting the ash and helping curb the current 16.7 percent unemployment rate.

Some say those benefits fail to outweigh the costs, since the ash contains toxic materials like lead and arsenic. Lifelong resident John Osemer, (left, with Tom Vann), doesn't understand how the ash could help his town: "As far as making any kind of benefit for this community, I don't see any." District Attorney Michael W. Jackson agrees, and in a letter to the Selma Times Journal wrote, “The potential for increased cancer rates and other diseases are some of the reasons that most other states turned down the chance to receive this waste.” (Dusty Compton photo)

Alabama officials said they would allow the waste because the toxins are in low concentrations, and the Environmental Protection Agency has not labeled coal waste hazardous. But Lisa Evans, a project attorney for Earthjustice, says that judgment is widely disputed. “What we've been pointing out is that the EPA's research, since 2000, has shown that the waste is increasingly more dangerous than it determined in 2000,” she said. (Read more)