TVA owes us transparency on replacing Kingston fossil plant

Soon, the Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors will make a decision about the future of the Kingston Fossil Plant site. The coal plant is expected to close, and the board will decide how to replace it after it’s demolished. This decision should happen at a public board meeting instead of behind closed doors. Here’s why:

In late December 2008, my husband got a call in the middle of the night to respond to a major disaster in Harriman, Tennessee. A dike at TVA’s Kingston coal plant had given way, and a billion gallons of wet coal ash had dumped into the rivers and onto the land nearby.

At first, I thought that shocking call also held a blessing — it was nearly Christmas and my husband needed good-paying work. But the workers who cleaned up the spill were falsely told the coal ash was safe enough to eat. My husband would come home from work and clean the gray coal ash from his nose and ears. I had to replace my washing machine twice in the five years that he worked at Kingston because the ash corroded the parts.

My words about respirators haunt me

When workers at Kingston asked for respirators, they were told they would be fired if they wore them on the job. At one point I said to my husband, “TVA and [the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation] are there. If the contractor says you don’t need a mask, you must not need one.” Those words haunt me.

Since the cleanup, hundreds of workers have developed serious illnesses, including rare cancers and respiratory disorders. My husband has never smoked but is sick with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many of the friends he knew from working at the spill have died from these diseases. The dangers of TVA’s coal ash, including its toxic heavy metals and radioactivity, were reportedly known by those in power, but that information and the decision-making around it was kept behind closed doors.

TVA shouldn’t bring more pollution to Kingston community

Now, TVA has the option to do the right thing — at the very least, it owes us the transparency that was never given to the Kingston workers. The TVA board should make the decision about the future of the Kingston site at the next public board meeting in Nashville instead of over email or private discussion. They should also choose a future for Kingston that does not include more pollution in a community that has already suffered one of the worst polluting events in U.S. history.

Two options are being considered for replacing the Kingston coal plant. Option B would replace it with multiple solar and Battery Energy Storage System facilities. TVA can build these facilities at industrial sites, over parking lots, on brownfields and on other marginal land so farmland is not affected. As demand for electricity in the Tennessee Valley grows, producing power is something everyone can contribute to — similar to how Americans pulled together to grow Victory Gardens during World War II. If TVA would support net metering, we could all work with our utility to generate electricity from our own rooftops and sell back the excess to the grid.

Decentralizing our electricity would improve reliability and help TVA avoid rolling blackouts, like the ones that happened in 2022 when the gas and coal plants failed in the extreme cold. Renewable energy is also cheaper and would create 20 to 30 times more jobs than the gas plant TVA is considering.

It’s been 15 years since the coal ash spill and TVA is still making decisions without transparency. Recently, TVA announced that it will allow a company to use the recently closed Bull Run Fossil Plan to test nuclear fusion technology. For years prior, TVA had told the local community it would remediate that site and build a greenway. This change in plans happened behind closed doors and without public input.

No more lies. It’s time for transparency and for TVA to clean up its act, at Kingston and throughout the Tennessee Valley. And with a true public power system, we can all be a part of the solution.

Members of the public may contact the TVA Board of Directors about a transparent and pollution-free replacement for the Kingston Fossil Plant by emailing board@tva.gov.

Julie Bledsoe is a lifelong Tennessean who advocates for community and worker safety.