The Tennessee Valley Authority Produced a Booklet Downplaying Coal Ash Risks. Top Researchers Call it ‘Dishonest.’

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
1

TVA employees distributed the 35-page booklet at a public hearing about corrective action plans for coal ash ponds at the Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee.

A 35-page booklet distributed in a public meeting by the Tennessee Valley Authority about coal ash is filled with “lies” and misleading information, according to coal ash researchers.

The booklet, titled “Know the Facts: Coal Ash,” did not include any TVA branding or author information, but the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says TVA employees distributed the pamphlets at a public comment session on the agency’s coal ash remediation plan for one of its coal plants in Tennessee.

Avner Vengosh, chair of environmental quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the booklet “unbelievable” and part of a “misleading public campaign.”

“It’s scary,” Vengosh told Inside Climate News after reviewing the booklet. “It’s like alternative reality.”

Vengosh leads a research group at Duke that has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on coal ash contamination in the environment. Coal ash, or coal combustion residuals (CCR), is the solid material left over after burning coal. It contains potentially toxic levels of substances like mercury, arsenic and lead that are associated with human health problems, including cancer.

“I’m not sure why they’re having this campaign, but basically everything there is lies, to be the most direct I can,” Vengosh said of the booklet.

Tracy O’Neill, decarbonization advocacy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said she picked up the booklet from a TVA table at the April 15 public comment session held by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on the TVA’s coal ash remediation plan for its Cumberland Fossil Plant.

“At the conclusion of the TDEC presentation, everyone was kind of mingling, and I went to the TVA table, which was outside of the meeting room itself,” O’Neill said. “It was directly outside the door, and there were maybe a dozen or so of these packets.”

The booklet’s first page states “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous,” noting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision not to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

Instead, EPA classifies coal ash as a special waste, along with cement kiln dust, crude oil and natural gas waste, mining and mine processing waste, and other forms of fossil fuel combustion waste.

The TVA booklet does not mention that classification. Instead, it uses charts and diagrams to show that coal ash contains many of the same elements found in “rocks and soil” and noting that the harmful contaminants in coal ash are also found in the natural environment, in trace amounts. The booklet highlighted benefits of coal ash recycling and listed other ways that people could be exposed to coal ash contaminants like arsenic, mercury, lead and other heavy metals.

Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said the pamphlet included “many deceptive statements.”

“The headline declares that ‘Coal Ash Is Not Hazardous;’ this is simply untrue,” Frumkin said in an email. “The list of coal ash ingredients in the pamphlet omits dangerous metals; this is dishonest.

“The pamphlet minimizes the risk of coal ash by equating coal combustion to campfires and coal ash to garden soil; this is like equating an automatic weapon to a slingshot.”

I feel sorry for all the people that live anywhere within 50 miles of a coal fired power plant.

Jaak

12 Likes
2

Is it safe to say there was no mention of the TVA incident in 2008?

On December 22, 2008, a dike ruptured at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, TN. The failure released over 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash slurry, burying 300 acres, destroying homes, and polluting nearby waterways. It remains the largest industrial coal ash spill in U.S. history.
9 Likes
3

This article is a good summary of the coal ash status in the US before Trump 2 Administration came along to tear down the regulations. The article shows an interactive map showing coal ash ponds by state and showing exactly where they are located near your homes and towns.

Coal Ash in the United States: Addressing Coal Plants’ Hazardous Legacy

Coal ash remains one of our nation’s largest toxic industrial waste streams. For decades, utilities disposed of coal ash — the hazardous substance left after burning coal for energy — by dumping it in unlined ponds and landfills. Earthjustice analyzed industry data to explain, state by state, how and where coal ash is disposed and which dump sites are not yet monitored or regulated.

The EPA’s 2015 Coal Ash Rule created the first-ever safeguards for coal ash disposal, but many coal ash dumps remained unregulated due to sweeping exemptions for legacy coal ash ponds and inactive landfills. At many of these legacy sites, the EPA determined that coal ash has contaminated groundwater, but the 2015 rule did not require monitoring, closure or cleanup. Industry has often blamed pollution from regulated dumps on nearby unregulated dumps, a sleight of hand that allows them to avoid cleanup responsibility. In many states, the number of unregulated toxic dumps far exceeded the number of regulated dumpsites.

In 2024, after years of litigation and grassroots activism, the EPA issued a new rule that extended federal monitoring and cleanup requirements to hundreds of previously excluded older coal ash landfills and ponds that have been leaking toxic pollution into groundwater.

The rule addresses gaps in the 2015 Coal Ash Rule that left half of coal ash unregulated and allowed coal plants to avoid cleaning up toxic coal ash across the country.

Click on the states above to learn more about the number of federally regulated landfills and surface impoundments (ponds) in each state, as well as how many coal ash dumps were not regulated by the 2015 Coal Ash Rule.

Coal ash contains hazardous pollutants including arsenic, boron, cobalt, chromium, lead, lithium, mercury, molybdenum, radium, selenium, and other heavy metals, which have been linked to cancer, heart and thyroid disease, reproductive failure, and neurological harm. Industry’s own data indicate that across the country 91% of coal plants are currently polluting groundwater above federal health standards with toxic pollutants.

The EPA must move quickly to stop the flow of toxic releases from hundreds of leaking dumps and require effective cleanups.

The companies that profited from burning coal for decades must not be allowed to walk away from dealing with the hundreds of coal ash dumps leaking toxic waste into groundwater.

3 Likes
4

“Contains” is a critical word. The earth’s mantle also contains all these elements.

The question is how easy are toxins to leach from the matrix. You expect flyash to be mostly iron and silicates.
Google: It consists primarily of microscopic glass spheres made of silica, alumina, iron oxide, and calcium oxide.

The toxins mentioned are natural materials found in the coal. How readily are they leached it critical. Not a problem if they are immobile. You can bet the first step in analysis is strong acid to completely dissolve the sample. Not what leaches out.

image

image

),

1 Like
5

With all due respect, so what? We live on the Earth’s crust. The mantle is about about 15 to 40 miles below us. There’s quite a lot in the mantle that we do not want to live directly on or adjacent to. Such as lava.

11 Likes
6

The pamphlet given out at the meeting did not list an author, but O’Neill said TVA manager Missy Hedgecoth was present at the table and speaking with attendees about coal ash.

Hedgecoth has made multiple presentations at the annual World of Coal Ash conference sponsored by the American Coal Ash Association and the University of Kentucky about interacting with the public about coal ash, and her title is listed as TVA’s CCR program manager.

At the 2024 WOCA conference, she is listed as co-author on a presentation titled “Coal Ash & the Public – Tell your story before someone else does!” that included some of the same graphics used in the TVA pamphlet from April 15. The presentation description says the coal ash industry is “a convenient target” for negative press, and says the presentation will “focus on how TVA has utilized a variety of tools and resources to move the needle of public opinion across their seven-state service area.”

“Technical reports containing 99% good news can become grist for the mill due to a single line or paragraph that feeds a headline, particularly where human health is concerned,” the program description states.

“Can you ensure that only good news is delivered to a waiting public? No. But through effective and targeted outreach tools, you can work to level the playing field in the court of public opinion, reducing unwanted impacts to your organization.”

The presentation includes what appear to be screenshots of pages nearly identical to the ones in the booklet TVA handed out at the public meeting. But the slides from the 2024 presentation include the TVA logo on the cover page and the top right corner of each face sheet. The paper copies distributed at the meeting had no TVA logo, according to O’Neill.

The Stewart County Standard newspaper quoted Hedgecoth at the event saying people “play up arsenic, lead and mercury.

“We only have four constituents here that every so often get a little bit above the exceedance, one of them is arsenic,” Hedgecoth said, according to the newspaper. “The requirement is 10 micrograms per liter and we got to 13.

“If you put that into perspective about arsenic, that is about the amount you would get by drinking one cup of hot cocoa, a glass of wine has three times that.”

Vengosh called that statement “totally incorrect.”

“In many cases the contaminated groundwater reached hundreds of micrograms per liter, far above the 10 micrograms per liter that is the EPA drinking water standard,” Vengosh said in a follow-up email. “I have no idea where the number ‘13 micrograms per liter’ came from; it could be one case, but there are numerous cases across the USA where arsenic content in contaminated water was [greater than] 100 micrograms per liter.

“This is a misleading public campaign,” he said. “I have no idea where they brought the values of arsenic in wine or hot cocoa.”

Asked to clarify the comments attributed to Hedgecoth at the meeting, TVA did not respond.

8 Likes
7

I would feel sorry for them if they hadn’t voted for it.

6 Likes
8

That’s probably the exact same thing the workers were told while they were cleaning up the coal ash disasters. That’s probably the same justification the EPA is using to roll back regulation.

Don’t be a useful idiot is propagating misinformation.

I feel sorry for them because they voted for it.

6 Likes
9

That is indeed the first step. But the next step is to test for mobility. The analysis is called toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP). The TCLP value is what determines what type of landfill can accept a waste stream.

That pamphlet was a load of BS, btw. Coal ash is legally defined as non-hazardous waste. But it absolutely is medically hazardous. Zero question on that point.

4 Likes
10

Meanwhile, in the front end mines of the coal fuel cycle, black lung cases are reportedly on the rise in Appalachia.

From the link:

When tiny particles of silica are inhaled, they act like minute shards of glass, leading to severe tissue scarring and inflammation and eventually to progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of black lung disease. Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimate the disease now afflicts one in 10 working miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. Rising rates of the disease have led to stark increases in lung transplants and mortality. Between 2013 and 2017, hundreds of cases of progressive massive fibrosis were identified at three Virginia clinics alone, leading NIOSH to declare a renewed black lung epidemic. Black-lung-associated deaths, which declined between 1999 and 2018, rose between 2020 and 2023.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

More than 70% of India’s power is generated from coal-fired plants, and energy experts told CNBC that the share is expected to rise this year.

And:

Coal-fired power generation in India in April increased to 164.9 average gigawatts, compared with 160.7 average gigawatts last year, according to data shared by S&P Global Energy. According to the data, coal-fired power generation rose sequentially by 5.6 average gigawatts, or 3.5%, in April.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Of course, China burns 4 times more coal than India, and 11x more coal than the US.

_ Pete

3 Likes
11

Yep. Ironically, technology and automation mean there are fewer coal miners overall, but those miners are spending more time exposed to more dust. Hence, more miners are getting sicker at a younger age.

We’ll be using plenty of coal for a long time, but pushing to use more of it is mistaken policy, for lots of reasons.

5 Likes
12

A much-discussed “return to coal” by some countries in the wake of the Iran war is likely to be far more limited than thought, amounting to a global rise of no more than 1.8% in coal power output this year.

The new analysis by thinktank Ember, shared exclusively with Carbon Brief, is a “worst-case” scenario and the reality could be even lower.

Separate data shows that, to date, there has been no “return to coal” in 2026.

While some countries, such as Japan, Pakistan and the Philippines, have responded to disrupted gas supplies with plans to increase their coal use, the new analysis shows that these actions will likely result in a “small rise” at most.

In fact, the decline of coal power in some countries and the potential for global electricity demand growth to slow down could mean coal generation continues falling this year.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that “the big story isn’t about a coal comeback” and any increase in coal use is “merely masking a longer-term structural decline”.

Instead, they say clean-energy projects are emerging as more appealing investments during the fossil-fuel driven energy crisis.

‘Return to coal’

The conflict following the US-Israeli attacks on Iran has disrupted global gas supplies, particularly after Iran blocked the strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint in the Persian Gulf.

A fifth of the world’s liquified natural gas (LNG) is normally shipped through this region, mainly supplying Asian countries. The blockage in this supply route means there is now less gas available and the remaining supplies are more expensive.

(Note that while the strait usually carries a fifth of LNG trade, this amounts to a much smaller share of global gas supplies overall, with most gas being moved via pipelines.)

With gas supplies constrained and prices remaining well above pre-conflict levels, at least eight countries in Asia and Europe have announced plans to increase their coal-fired electricity generation, or to review or delay plans to phase out coal power.

These nations include Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Germany and Italy. Many of these nations are major users of coal power.

Such announcements have triggered a wave of reporting by global media outlets and analysts about a “return to coal”. Some have lamented a trend that is “incompatible with climate imperatives”, while others have even framed this as a positive development that illustrates coal’s return “from the dead”.

This mirrors a trend seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which many commentators said would lead to a surge in European coal use, due to disrupted gas supplies from Russia.

In fact, despite a spike in 2022, EU coal use has returned to its “terminal decline” and reached a historic low in 2025.

Gas to coal

So far, the evidence suggests that there has been no return to coal in 2026.

Analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that, in March, coal power generation remained flat globally and a fall in gas-fired generation was “offset by large increases in solar and wind power, rather than coal”.

However, as some governments only announced their coal plans towards the end of March, these figures may not capture their impact.

To get a sense of what that impact could be, Ember assessed the impact of coal policy changes and market responses across 16 countries, plus the 27 member states of the EU, which together accounted for 95% of total coal power generation in 2025.

For each country, the analysis considers a maximum “worst-case” scenario for switching from gas to coal power in the face of high gas prices.

It also considers the potential for any out-of-service coal power plants to return and for there to be delays in previously expected closures as a result of the response to the energy crisis.

Ember concludes that these factors could increase coal use by 175 terawatt hours (TWh), or 1.8%, in 2026 compared to 2025.

(This increase is measured relative to what would have happened without the energy crisis and does not account for wider trends in electricity generation from coal, which could see demand decline overall. Last year, coal power dropped by 63TWh, or 0.6%.)

Roughly three-quarters of the global effect in the Ember analysis is from potential gas-to-coal switching in China and the EU.

Other notable increases could come from switching in India and Indonesia and – to a lesser extent – from coal-policy shifts in South Korea, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

However, widely reported policy changes by Japan, Thailand and the Philippines are estimated to have very little, if any, impact on coal-power generation in 2026. The table below briefly summarises the potential for and reasoning behind the estimated increases in coal generation in each country in 2026.

3 Likes
13

In other news, Alabama Power has the potential to do even worse damage:

Alabama Coal Ash Lawsuit Can Continue, Appeals Court Rules

The lawsuit challenges Alabama Power’s plans to leave more than 21 million tons of coal ash in an unlined pond at the head of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, an area sometimes called “America’s Amazon” for its rich biodiversity.

A yearslong court battle over the 21.7 million tons of coal ash sitting in one of Alabama’s most ecologically sensitive areas will continue after an appeals court ruling handed down Monday.

“We certainly feel vindicated, but more importantly, I think it feels like an opportunity here for Alabama Power to see that there’s a different way forward than battling this,” Kistler said.

Alabama Power, through a spokesperson, said its coal ash ponds were in compliance with the law.

“Alabama Power continues to be in compliance with all applicable federal and state environmental laws and regulations,” the company’s response said. “We will continue to follow any final court or agency decisions. Because litigation related to Plant Barry coal ash plans is ongoing, we are unable to comment further at this time.”

Coal ash, or coal combustion residuals, is the solid material leftover from burning coal. It often contains substances like arsenic, mercury, lead and heavy metals that can cause human health problems, including cancer. At large coal plants like Barry, this ash material was flushed into wet, unlined impoundments or ponds for decades, building up massive volumes of toxic substances and often significantly polluting groundwater in the area.

New EPA coal ash rules enacted in 2015 required utilities to close most unlined coal ash ponds either by moving the ash to lined landfills or by covering the ash in place, provided the utilities could prove contaminants from the ash were not polluting groundwater.

Alabama Power quickly announced plans to cover all of its ash ponds in place, and has remained committed to those plans, despite significant pushback, especially around Plant Barry. The ash pond at Barry is located on the banks of the Mobile River, just upstream from the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

The Delta is a largely undeveloped tangle of streams, bayous and swamps that flows south toward Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It is one of the most biodiverse places in North America, and has been dubbed “America’s Amazon” for the remarkable variety of plant and animal species found there.

In 2018, Alabama Power was fined $1.25 million for groundwater pollution violations around its coal ash ponds, and received another $250,000 fine in 2019.

In 2023, the EPA issued Alabama Power a notice of potential violations over the coal ash at Plant Barry, stating that the company had “potentially failed to meet the criteria for conducting the closure of the Plant Barry Ash Pond.”

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawsuit by Alabama-based environmental group Mobile Baykeeper challenging Alabama Power’s plans to leave the coal ash in place can proceed, overturning the decision of a lower court that had dismissed the complaint.

Mobile Baykeeper’s lawsuit argues that the nearly 600-acre coal ash pond at Alabama Power’s James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, near Mobile, violates the Environmental Protection Agency’s coal ash rules, largely because much of the coal ash remains saturated with groundwater.

Baykeeper’s Cade Kistler told Inside Climate News he hopes the ruling will spur Alabama Power to agree to remove the coal ash rather than continue to fight to leave toxic waste from the coal-fired power plant in the impoundment pond.