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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.

How Safe Is Coal Ash?
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by VitrEco February 3, 2012 3:39 PM EST
Fly ash also has dioxins caused in combustion and never mentioned by agencies. However these and heavy metals can all be treated by vitrification, often quoted as expensive but only if you use plasma technology. Glass furnace technology is just as effective and operating at 1/10th the temperature a far more cost effective solution. Not as cheap to the company as dumping into lagoons or landfill but a perminant and sustainable fix. Once the hazards are locked into the chemical matrix of the glass they cannot be released into the environment and as a second grade glass can be used in construction reducing the need for primary aggregates and reducing our consumption of valuable finite resources. This technology was used by Minergy in Wisconsin to clean the polluted Fox River but Environment Agencies ignore the possibility of treatment and are bullied by the big generators who look for short term profits and ignore the health of people who live near these sites, usualy the poor and never the wealthy owners or shareholders. If faced with costs for treating they either threaten closure, price increase or both. Protecting your community is not expensive and over time could return big profits, but if your bonus is based on this years balance sheet why bother to invest in treatment which may take 3 years to pay back, unless you breathe in this muck!
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by NinthSt78 August 16, 2010 5:47 PM EDT
A bucket of ashes sprinkled in the tomato patch made them grow bigger and juicier too.
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by uanir12b October 16, 2009 12:14 PM EDT
What about drilling deep wells and pumping ash mixed with sewage 16000 feet in the earth ? even putting it back in abandoned coal mines ?
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by slewringquickhitch October 13, 2009 10:46 PM EDT
The people most in danger are the guys working closely, over a long period of time with the fly ash, the equipment operators. The ones who smoke while being exposed to fly ash have an increased risk to cancer by 25 times. The radioactive metal atoms in the ash are highly attracted to the smoke particles.

The 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.
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by slewringquickhitch October 13, 2009 10:45 PM EDT
Alpha particle radiation is not a problem when it's on the outside of your body, your dry skin cells will stop it from entering you, but when it is on the inside of your lungs or digestive system thats when it can be a major deal.

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.
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by slewringquickhitch October 13, 2009 7:51 PM EDT
Well done to the people in Anne Arundel Co, Md for making a step in the right direction!!! Take care.
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by slewringquickhitch October 13, 2009 5:32 PM EDT
@big66lake:

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?
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by big66lake October 13, 2009 12:01 PM EDT
Could you please tell me the name of the blue-stone earring Lesley has on? Where can i purchase one please.
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by bkwaas October 12, 2009 2:10 PM EDT
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) ? an unbiased authority dedicated to protecting the environment has a very useful review of coal fly ash (http://www.nrdc.org/energy/coalwaste/default.asp) and its toxicity.

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.
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by bkwaas October 12, 2009 2:09 PM EDT
Unscrupulous companies are trying to Greenwash fly ash and profit from this hazardous waste.

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/
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