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If you have never heard of mountain top removal (MTR) mining, be advised that it is exactly what it sounds like. Some have called it strip-mining on steroids. The goal: get the sequestered coal. However, in a manic drive to cut costs, coal companies use huge amounts of explosives to remove as much as 1000 feet of mountaintop. Over 480 Appalachian Mountains in four states have thus been maimed. The physical waste of this process – the thousands of tons of rock and debris that contain toxic arsenic, lead and radioactive uranium – is then dumped into the valleys below. This process has buried and destroyed over 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams, directly affecting local communities that depend on these watersheds and permanently disfiguring forest and wetland ecosystems. An executive order signed this past November by then-President Bush loosened the regulations on valley filling, making permits easier to acquire.
Beyond the systematic destruction of Appalachia, a catastrophe struck less than a month before Inauguration Day that the loosened rules only served to make worse. On Dec. 22, a retention pond wall ruptured at the Kingston coal plant in Harriman, Tenn., spilling 5.4 millions cubic yards of coal ash across hundreds of acres of the Tennessee Valley. Far more toxic than the detritus from MTR and 100 times as voluminous as the oil from the Exxon Valdez spill, homes were destroyed beneath it and towns were abandoned.
This arsenic-laden sludge is still not classified as toxic waste, and the Environmental Integrity Project found that there are nearly 100 other unregulated, unlined retention ponds outside coal plants throughout the United States – each ready to foment its own disaster.
Anyone who watches television or uses the Internet is bombarded with “clean coal” propaganda. Barring whether coal companies ever get around to applying carbon-sequestration technology to their plants – so far there is still absolutely no cost-effective means of doing so – and whether it will make any difference towards mitigating climate, the production and burning of coal will never be clean. The utilization of coal burns the carbon found within the coal rock and concentrates the remaining radioactive elements, making coal ash more radioactive than nuclear waste – an issue which “clean coal” technology only begins to address.
We can hope that Obama will begin turning the screws on the coal industry, but with pressure currently upon his administration, plus lukewarm environmental commitments during the election season, the chances of that happening are slim. As this country attempts to prepare for an energy crisis abetted by economic and environmental instability, we must be aware that “clean coal” does not and will not exist for some time, if ever. It would be nice to think the U.S. has a cheap, domestic source of electricity for its near future, but as cost-cutting becomes more desperate and regulations continue to erode, coal will simply become not a sustainable option by any measure. This realization will mean major change or major panic, but this is reality: “clean coal” cannot exist, and we cannot allow the coal industry to convince us that it can be a part of our energy future.
Jeff Hake is a recent horticulture graduate.
Bangor Daily News