Coal Ash: 130M Tons of Waste
October 4, 2009 5:00 PM
If coal ash is safe to spread under a golf course or be used in carpets, why are the residents a Tenn. town being told to stay out of a river where the material was spilled? Lesley Stahl reports.
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See all 84 CommentsThe toxicity data of other non radioactive metal concentration levels of different world coals is plentiful across the internet, there is bags of research data to study, and with with a little time and patience can be easily found and understood to some extent.
In leaving, I would like to say that I am neither a scientist nor a 'treehugger' although I do care about my local environment as much as my neighbours do, I understand that the burgeoning demands that we place on the planets resources, and on each other! needs to be looked at. We all need to survive together and progress in some sense, but at what cost? Feeding of each other like parasites...
There is a solution to this problem, and with some focus, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that it can be dealt with in a way that will benefit all.
The thin membrane of your cells walls, lung/intestinal etc, are not dense enough to absorb all the energy from an Alpha particle as it gets ejected from the nucleus of a disintegrating Radium, Polonium, Radon atom.
So all the kinetic energy from the large (compared to Beta Particles & Gamma rays) speeding Alpha particle (which is a helium gas atom nucleus) gets dumped into the cell that the unstable Radium or Polonium atom is resting against.
This can damage the internal components of a cell, mitochondria and such, including your DNA. If you imagine a cell as a little computer that can do things like grow into different shapes etc, DNA is akin to the software that tells your cell what to do, how to grow. If one strand of our DNA gets broken, our bodies can in many cases repair it. If not, our bodies can decide to destroy the cell and recycle it. If both strands of a cells' DNA get broken thats when the problems 'can' start.
Our bodies DNA repair mechanism can sometimes try to repair the DNA, but end up putting it back together in the wrong order, and so the 'code sequence'.... the cells 'software instructions' can start commanding our cells to grow in a haphazard way, ie: multiplying twice as fast. That is what cancer is. Cell mutation and division running out of control.
The worlds nuclear authorities are still (may be not now?) in debate about how much radiation it is safe for a person to recieve. It's a complex debate, of which I have struggled to understand.
Some info here from March 2009:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf30.html
This article from June 2009 has much good information but it will cost you $30.
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15563650902997849
Humans have lived with natural background radiation (Cosmic radiation, Radon seepage from the ground and in mines) for as long as we have been around, so I imagine we have evolved to live with that.
I think the debate is in regard to the radiation received as a result of mankinds proccessing of natural radioactive materials that have been concentrated to such an extent that they can become harmful to life, if not handled and dealt with properly.
So what has this got to do with fly ash? Well, as has been mentioned in previous comments, fly ash contains Uranium and Thorium aswell as Potassium 40, all radioactive substances. Uranium and Thorium are damaging to internal organs just like many other types of metal. The radioactivity of these metals (potassium 40 is a salt) is not that much of a problem. It is the atoms that they eventually turn into that can be a problem.
The 'daughter' products that Uranium and Thorium 'give birth' to can be quite radioactive. The polonium 214 daughter product: radioactive Lead210 has a half life of 22 years, so within that time you could have moved away from the dumps, retired from the plant, and then the million or so lead210 atoms that you sucked down all that time ago decided to go through there last natural decay process and hit your lungs with a double whammy of alpha radiation, which could be the reason why some occupational and local population cancers turn up years later.
This is where the disslocation of a problems source, and eventual crisis comes in to play. Which decaying atom started the cancer, the tenth natural radium atom you breathed in while walking the hills with your kids, or the 10,000th one you breathed in while living next to or working on the fly ash plant?
These Radio-active daughters like to attach themselves to the side of fly ash spheres aswell as becoming caught up inside the spheres as the spheres are formed in the furnace.
As these radio-active particles sit on the spheres and within them they decay into daughter products and spit out alpha particles aswell as some gamma and beta. All of this natural radiation isn't so much of a problem until you start breathing it in or ingesting it.
Here is a link to the USGS pdf on fly ash from 1997:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.pdf
The photograph in figure 3 will show what I just explained above.
Could you please tell me, how you could ask such a shallow question, when there are people choking and dying across your nation over this serious issue?
NRDC categorizes coal fly ash as a Contaminated Coal Waste
NRDC states ?toxic material is laced throughout? the fly ash
NRDC states ?Coal ash contains many toxic metals, including arsenic, which unchecked, can leak into ground water and be extremely hazardous to breathe?
NRDC states that coal ash ?is contaminated by 10 metals classified as toxic by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR): Antimony, Arsenic, Beryllium, Cadmium, Chromium, Cobalt, Lead, Manganese, Mercury, Nickel and Selenium.?
NRDCs states ?Coal-fired power plants produced more than 126 million tons of contaminated coal waste?
It also states ?the waste produced in a single year contains nearly 100,000 tons of toxic metals?
This is the waste that Calstar wants to make bricks of and sell to unsuspecting consumers.
Bricks that are laced with toxic metals.
Toxic metals that leach out from the bricks ? according to Calstar?s own data.
Calstar would like people to believe that the toxicity of fly ash is not an issue.
Calstar would like people to believe that bricks made from a Contaminated Coal Waste laced with toxic metals are not an issue.
Calstar would lke people to believe that it is ?beneficially recycling? toxic fly ash and producing a ?Green? product.
How is a product that is laced with toxic metals ?Beneficial?? Beneficial for lining Calstar?s managements pockets?
How is a product that is laced with toxic metals that leach out ?Green?? Is polluting the environment and poisoning people with a contaminated waste the new ?Green?? Perhaps the ?Green? is the money Calstar is hoping to make from selling the toxic bricks.
Does the management of Calstar have any decency?
Calstar ? a company bereft of morals, trying to sell the new Asbestos.
Calstar Products is trying to sell coal fly ash bricks - the company is claiming that the bricks are safe, but their own results show that they leach toxins like arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, lead, manganese, mercury and nickel.
These crooks are going to poison people - their fly ash bricks are going to be the next asbestos.
See the following links:
http://techpulse360.com/2008/10/23/reader-comments-on-fly-ash-brick-toxicity-cal-star-hype/
http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/post/here-comes-the-green-brick-664/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10359630-54.html
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/inside-the-green-brick-house/
I live within 1 mile of a fly ash dump and heard how safe it was. I started to reasearch the subject because developers wanted to build Big Boxes on it and had all kinds of data on how safe it was. I have never read so many lies in one document as they had put forward. I went to DEP in the state and talked to the overseer of the project. He admitted he knew very little about the subject but he checked on the selenium readings and if it was ok, that was it.
Read about Chisman Creek, a superfund site, or The Town of Pines, Indiana, The Fight for Clean Water.Check out this list:
? City of Beverly/Vitale Brothers Fly Ash Pit, Massachusetts
? Virginia Power Yorktown Power Station Chisman Creek Disposal Site, Virginia
? WEPCO Cedar-Sauk Landfill, Wisconsin
? Lemberger Landfill, Wisconsin
? WEPCO Highway 59 Landfill, Wisconsin
If you seriously want to know how dangerous this is read:
GROUND WATER IMPACTS FROM COAL COMBUSTION ASH
DISPOSAL SITES IN WISCONSIN by Michael Zillmer
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Milwaukee Service Center
and Philip Fauble Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Madison, Wisconsin, then
Human and Ecological Risk Assessment of
Coal Combustion Wastes Draft Prepared for: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Solid Waste, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Prepared by: RTI P.O. Box 12194 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
August 6, 2007,and EPA/600/R-06/008, January 2006 and
Characterization of Mercury-
Enriched Coal Combustion
Residues from Electric Utilities
Using Enhanced Sorbents for
Mercury Control
F. Sanchez1, R. Keeney2,
D. Kosson1, R. Delapp1, and
S. Thorneloe3
1Vanderbilt University
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Nashville, TN 37235
2ARCADIS G&M, Inc.
4915 Prospectus Drive, Suite F
Durham, NC 27713
3U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Air Pollution Prevention and Control Division
Research Triangle Park, NC 27711
Category III / Applied Research
I have much much more but the fact is that our goverment and the Coal/Utility Industries have known about the dangers for decades and have ignored it. It's alot like the Tobbaco Industry.
Since the Clean Air Act passed fly ash has become much more hazardous. Heavy meatls are toxic to the environment in many ways but it bio-accumulates and builds in the food chain. There is far greater risks than just physically being exposed or breathing it. For example it leaches into the ground water, entering fish populations.(Research about heavy metal bio-accumulation and it impact) They are putting it on the soils we grow are foods in, things like peanuts etc.
I'd love to see these fools eat and drink this toxic cocktail. All of us share in the blame because we want to have all these conveniences and we are far to willing to turn a blind eye. We all have to accept responsibility and correct this problem so our childrens children will have a future free of these pollutants.
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