Utility ordered to dig up, remove coal ash now at Tennessee plant
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge on Friday ordered the nation’s largest public utility to dig up its coal ash at a Tennessee power plant and move it to a lined waste site where it doesn’t risk further polluting the Cumberland River.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville ruled in favor of the Tennessee Scenic Rivers Association and the Tennessee Clean Water Network, saying coal ash storage at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Gallatin Fossil Plant has been letting pollutants seep into the river for decades in violation of the Clean Water Act.
As long as the coal ash remains at the plant about 40 miles from Nashville, dangers, uncertainties and conflicts will continue, Crenshaw wrote. However, he added that there’s scant evidence so far of concrete harm beyond the mere risk and presence of pollutants.
He wrote that removing the ash is the only adequate way to resolve an “untenable situation that has gone for far too long.”
“While the decision to build the Ash Pond Complex is in the past, the consequences of that decision continue today, and it now falls on the Court to address them,” Crenshaw wrote. “The way to do so is not to cover over those decadesold mistakes, but to pull them up by their roots. TVA, as the entity responsible for the ponds, must be the entity to do so.”
TVA has said it would cost roughly $2 billion for TVA to excavate and truck out the ash. Spokesman Scott Brooks said it’s too soon to say if TVA will appeal the ruling, and the utility is reviewing the order. Brooks pointed out that the court noted no evidence of adverse human health or environmental impacts from the coal ash ponds.
TVA has said it would cost about $230 million and may be safer and more environmentally friendly to keep the ash where it is and cover it with a cap.
That method, also known as “closure in place,” would amount to “rolling the dice” and hoping it’s good enough, Crenshaw wrote.
“If closure in place did prove inadequate, the likely, if not inevitable, result would be yet more litigation — and, of course, decade after decade of the public simply having to hope that whatever unplanned, incidental leakage that was coming from the impoundments was not enough to do them significant harm,” the judge wrote.