Coal news and updates

Coal ash at The US power plant site greater than first reported

Evidence that a Duke Energy power plant site near Hartsville is more contaminated than previously suspected continues to grow as state regulators, environmentalists and company officials learn more about the property.

Records show that a coal ash waste pond at the H.B. Robinson plant contains about six times as much ash as reported last year by Duke.

About 4 million tons of ash are in the 55-acre coal waste pond in Darlington County, according to data recently published on Duke Energy’s website.

Last year, the power company reported only 660,000 tons in the ash basin near Lake Robinson, a popular recreation spot outside of Hartsville and about an hour’s drive east of Columbia.

Duke says it updated the statistics after learning more about the property, which it acquired in a merger with Progress Energy three years ago. Duke said that as it continues to investigate, the company is developing a cleanup plan for the old Progress power plant site – one of the few in the country with both a nuclear plant and a coal plant.

Statistics showing more ash in the pond follow revelations in March that nuclear waste had been dumped in the ash pond and that poisonous arsenic has been found at levels substantially higher in groundwater than previously known by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

The atomic waste dumping, which took place in the 1980s and 1990s, initially occurred without federal or state approval, but later was authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to federal records obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center and reviewed by The State newspaper. Rarely has low-level atomic waste been dumped in a coal ash pond, federal officials have said. The 1960s-era Robinson coal plant is now closed.

Issues surrounding the Robinson plant prompted a flurry of questions Thursday at the state Public Service Commission, whose members expressed dismay at the extent of the problems outlined by Frank Hollemen, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“This is pretty daunting information,” state Public Service Commissioner Elizabeth Flemming said, noting that “it’s hard to believe that this information wasn’t dealt with in a much sooner time frame.”

Holleman, a Greenville attorney, told the commission his organization had not made cleaning up Robinson a priority until recently because neither Duke nor the public had raised any questions about the property. But as his group began to examine public records late last year, it found a host of problems that make the Robinson site prime for aggressive cleanup efforts by Duke.

“What we have found was contrary to what we thought,” Holleman said. “Robinson is not a small coal ash storage site without serious problems.

“Instead, it is a place where Duke Energy stores a large amount of ash in an unlined pit, next to an important water resource, where Duke Energy has been .... contaminating groundwater with high amounts of arsenic, where coal ash is stored deep into the groundwater, and where low-level radioactive waste was dumped over a period of almost 20 years.”

Flemming said it was “bothersome” that the contamination could have been such an issue without the PSC knowing about it. Commissioner Butch Howard suggested that Duke and state environmental regulators should have corrected problems long ago.

“I feel like there is some responsibility there,” Howard said. “I hate to say it, but somebody might be negligent.”

Holleman said the Robinson coal pond is the last commercial site without a cleanup plan in South Carolina.

Duke said earlier this year it would clean up some 3 million tons of ash from its other waste basins at a power plant site in Anderson County. Previously, the SCE&G and Santee Cooper power companies have said they would dig out all the ash. More than 2 million tons of coal ash are being removed from an ash basin in lower Richland County by SCE&G.

source: http://www.heraldonline.com