Utility Companies Don't Want To Clean Up Their Toxic Coal Ash; Shitstain's EPA Will Grant Their Wish

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The companies contend that the federal government has overstepped its authority in its enforcement of these two areas of regulation. The letter asked Zeldin to go easy on them — by delivering the regulatory authority back to states and rescinding a 2024 rule that mandated cleanup of coal ash at inactive power plants. What the power companies call “coal combustion residuals,” and describe as “a natural byproduct of generating electricity with coal … used for beneficial purposes in U.S. construction and manufacturing,” is known more colloquially as coal ash — a toxic mixture of heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which, because coal plants are usually built near bodies of water, often comes in contact with groundwater when it is buried in an unlined pit. Over the last century and a half of American coal power generation, power companies have dumped coal ash at hundreds of active and inactive power plants across the country.

Zeldin is now the administrator of the EPA, and it appears the power companies are getting their wish. Amid a barrage of press releases that, on March 12, proposed 31 deregulatory actions, were two that seem designed to significantly weaken enforcement of coal ash regulations, environmental attorneys told Grist. Zeldin called it “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” In the first, the EPA announced that it will encourage states to take over permitting and enforcement of the coal ash rule. When states are delegated the authority by the EPA to issue their own coal ash disposal permits, they are supposed to adhere to standards at least as stringent as the federal rules, but in some cases state environmental agencies have simply gone rogue and flouted this requirement.

Georgia, which received the authority to issue its own permits for coal ash disposal in 2019, has controversially approved plans at several coal plants for the utility Georgia Power to permanently store millions of tons of coal ash in unlined landfills that are partially submerged in groundwater, despite being notified by EPA that this violates the federal rule. In neighboring Alabama, state regulators sought the same delegated authority that their counterparts in Georgia had been granted, but last year the EPA denied their application because they planned to issue permits to Alabama Power that violated the federal rules in the same manner as Georgia’s.

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Power companies are supposed to dig wells to assess the groundwater quality at coal ash dumps, and in order to gauge their contamination level they compare it to what should be uncontaminated water samples nearby. But the 2022 report documented examples like coal plants in Texas, Indiana, and Florida where the EPA found that the “background” wells used for the purpose of providing baseline samples of water quality were dug in contaminated areas near the coal ash dump. The report also documented the practice of “intrawell” monitoring, or simply analyzing the data from each well in isolation, in order to assess changes in contamination levels over time, rather than contrasted with uncontaminated wells. This method doesn’t work unless the wells aren’t contaminated to begin with, and is prohibited by EPA guidelines — but the report found it was in use at 108 coal plants nationwide.

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https://grist.org/health/coal-ash-epa-lee-zeldin-trump/