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Friday, December 28, 2007
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Political Wire: "A new Research 2000 poll in Iowa shows the Democratic presidential race is a virtual three-way tie, with John Edwards rising to tie Sen. Barack Obama for the lead and Sen. Hillary Clinton just one point behind. Edwards and Obama each get 29% support, with Clinton behind with 28%. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee remains in the lead with a 7-point edge over Mitt Romney, 34% to 27%. Fred Thompson is a distant third with 11%, followed by a three-way tie for fourth between Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Ron Paul, with 8% each."
"2008 pres"
4:52:52 PM 
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Here's a look at the problem of combustion waste from coal-fired power plants, from The Cortez Journal. They write:
[Raymond] Hunt's not upset about global warming or the pollutants that pour out of the [San Juan Generating Station's] smokestacks. He's mad about coal combustion wastes -- CCWs, as activists call them -- the solid remnants left over from burning coal. Hunt says they've sickened his family and neighbors, even killed his sheep. Each year, power plants in the United States collectively kick out enough of this stuff to fill a train of coal cars stretching from Manhattan to Los Angeles and back three and a half times. It's stored in lagoons next to power plants, buried in old coal mines and sometimes just piled up in the open. It is the largest waste stream of most power plants, and a recently released study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that people exposed to it have a much higher than average risk of getting cancer. Yet the federal government refuses to classify the waste as hazardous, and has dragged its feet on creating any nationally enforceable standards. And with new attention focused on coal power's impacts on the air, this great big problem may get worse, and continue to be ignored...
By the mid-1970s, the two plants together were cranking out nearly 4,000 megawatts of power and sending it to some 4 million homes in California, Nevada and Arizona. They spewed thousands of tons of particulates, sulfur dioxide and a host of other pollutants into the air. But that wouldn't last: New national air quality laws, paired with regional activism, forced the power companies to install pollution control devices so that, by the early 1980s, the plants' plumes had receded and the haze was reduced enough for the environmental community to breathe a sigh of relief. But because every pound of pollution kept out of the air ends up in the solid waste stream, the pollution control methods in the stacks only made the problem on the ground worse. The solid waste consists of fine and dusty fly ash, a gravelly, gray material called bottom ash, and the rela tively benign glassy clinkers or boiler slag. The stack scrubbers that pull sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide out of the smoke create perhaps the most malignant material, called scrubber sludge. All of that was typically piled up near the plant, where it could blow into the air, or get washed into an arroyo, or leach into the ground. In the early 1980s, people who lived along the Shumway Arroyo and drank from wells began getting sick. Hunt suffered from muscle spasms, lost 60 pounds and had a cornucopia of other problems. "I looked like a P.O.W. after World War II," Hunt says. His wife and kids got sick; his neighbors, too. Though Hunt's illness was never definitively traced to a specific cause, he and other activists are pretty sure some of the stuff in coal combustion waste made it into his water.
Around the time Hunt got sick, researchers found unusually high levels of selenium -- which tends to be highly concentrated in coal combustion waste -- in the Shumway Arroyo. And some of his symptoms match up with selenium poisoning. The illnesses may also come from lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury or sulfates, all of which are commonly concentrated in coal combustion waste. Whatever the poison, it soon became clear that the water was tainted. Those who were sick sued the Public Service Company of New Mexico, which operates the plant; the company never admitted fault, but ultimately settled with the affected families. It also tightened up its waste disposal, becoming one of the first power plants in the nation to go to a zero discharge permit, which means it can't release any water onto the land. After a lot of legal wrangling, Hunt settled, too. But the sheep butcher never settled down. He got mad, instead, and enlisted attorneys, a hydrologist and a handful of environmentalists to join his fight, which has spread outward from the one plant near his house, to the ways in which industry disposes of coal combustion wastes in general. And when he wants to show people another example of a giant disposal pit, he needn't travel far -- there's one right across the river. About five miles south of Hunt's place, a flat-topped mound spreads out under the soot-stained smokestacks of the Four Corners Power Plant, operated by Arizona Public Service. Unlike the beige, scrub-covered mesas nearby, this one's uniformly shaped; its dusty soil is gray and smooth, deep-orange water pools on its surface, and nothing grows here. That's because this isn't a mesa. It's some 40 years' worth of accumulated coal combustion waste -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million tons -- from three of the plant's five generators (the other 50 million tons of waste is buried nearby, in the massive Navajo surface mine). For people who worry about coal combustion waste and the way it's regulated, this place is Exhibit A. "My first thought when I saw this," says Lisa Evans, an attorney for Earthjustice, "was, this can't be the United States." Except that it is. And, by all accounts, there's nothing about the massive pile that violates state or national guidelines. Therein lies the rub for folks like Evans and Jeff Stant, a consultant for the Clean Air Task Force and one of the nation's pre-eminent activists when it comes to CCWs.
Coal waste is clearly dangerous, they say, but the EPA refuses to treat it as hazardous waste. Instead, it falls under the rules for non-municipal, non-hazardous waste, which provide only general guidelines. The result is a hodgepodge of regulation that varies from state to state and even from one dumpsite to another at the same power plant. It's not that the EPA hasn't considered clamping down. In 2000, the agency determined the need for national regulation, acknowledging that "these wastes could pose risks to human health ... and there is sufficient evidence that adequate controls may not be in place." But seven years have passed, and the EPA hasn't followed through. That's in spite of the fact that its own research has found that placing CCWs in unlined ponds or piles can significantly increase health risks for those living nearby (and there are hundreds of unlined sites across the country); and in spite of the fact that the agency has confirmed at least 24 cases in which human or ecological health has been compromised by CCW dumping.
"2008 pres"
11:07:00 AM
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Here's a look at health issues and oil and gas development from The Rocky Mountain News. From the article:
Regulators from the Environmental Protection Agency down to state and local health departments are in the earliest stages of trying to understand what, if any, connection there is between complaints from rural residents about fatigue, headaches, rashes and other ills and fumes or tainted water resulting from drilling. "EPA hasn't gone out there to do much sampling, but from the data we're seeing, we're not seeing a smoking gun," said Susan Griffin, a Denver-based toxicologist with the agency, in an interview this fall. "That's just based on data we've received, and I think we could be doing a whole lot better." Mounting anecdotal evidence, however, has caught the attention of state lawmakers. New legislation calls for greater consultation between the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment. A rulemaking process to spell out just how that would work is under way...
A recent Rocky Mountain News series reported that oil and gas companies have at times reached secret settlements with people complaining about contamination related to oil and gas impacts. Some of those cases include purchases of residents' homes and water wells. No one has tallied how many such settlements have occurred in Colorado, though one activist group counted at least five in Garfield County.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
"2008 pres"
10:25:15 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 1:55:22 PM.
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