Report flags Cheswick power plant for its lead discharges

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

NRG Energy’s Cheswick coalfired power plant released 387 pounds of lead into the Allegheny River last year, the fourth-highest amount of lead from any power plant in the nation, according to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Those lead discharges occurred not far upriver from the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority’s main water-intake pipe in Aspinwall, and during a time when the authority is dealing with some elevated lead levels in its water supply to customers.

Project spokesman Tom Pelton said the report did not investigate whether there was a link between the higher lead levels in PWSA drinking water and the power plant discharges.

Brendan Schubert, a PWSA spokesman, said water sampling done in May at the Aspinwall intake pipe found lead levels so low that they were termed “non-detect.” Because of higher lead levels, the PWSA is under state and federal mandates to increase testing and monitoring of homes with lead water supply lines, which are viewed as the primary source for the system’s elevated lead readings.

David Gaier, a NRG spokesman, said the power plant’s lead discharges are well within its federal permit limits, and very likely lower than the 387 pounds cited in the report, which is based on conservative discharge estimates submitted by NRG to the federal Toxic Release Inventory. Those estimates, he said, are higher than actual discharge amounts, which are “too low to be detected by the laboratory equipment.”

He said the source of the lead in the plant’s waste water is its flue gas desulfurization system, one of the $400 million worth of environmental control systems installed at Cheswick to ensure that the plant complies with its air permit.

The EIP report, released Thursday, identifies coal-fired power plants as the single largest industrial source of toxic water pollution in the U.S., and says new federal regulations to reduce that pollution are undermined by power plants that are badly behind in installing pollution control equipment.

In addition to lead, the pollutants released into the nation’s waterways by the power plants include arsenic, cadmium, mercury and selenium, which the report states are hazardous in very small quantities.

The full EIP report can be found at: http://environmentalintegrity.org/