The Tennessee Valley Authority toxic coal disaster
There’s an fascinating article in the latest issue of The Nation about the coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee, which spilled over a billion gallons of the coal waste into the Tennessee River basin, destroyed homes and, most of all, could cause irreparable damage to affected areas and ecosystems. 
The article’s author, investigative reporter Kelly Hearn, writes:
Millions of tons of coal ash–laden with toxic substances, including arsenic, selenium and mercury–are produced each year. A large percentage of the dry ash is sold to companies as an industrial ingredient to make products like cement, concrete and mulch. But a lack of federal regulation and the patchwork nature of state laws mean utilities are all but free to decide what to do with the ash. “Unfortunately, the cheapest way to dispose of coal ash is to mix it with water and dump it into unlined lagoons,” says Ben Dunham, associate legislative director of Earthjustice. There are more than 1,300 dumps across the country like the one that failed in Tennessee. And most, experts say, fall under little or no regulation. Even though the ash contains toxins the EPA has determined are dangerous for drinking water and public health, the agency has twice declined to declare ash a hazardous waste. As a result, there has been no federal regulation of coal ash and little monitoring of groundwater, which studies show can become contaminated through leaching. “For years, utilities have been largely free to do what they want,” says Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace.
Yet the Kingston spill, as others have reported, could be just the beginning. More after the jump.
Hearn’s piece continues on to shed light on the lack of regulation—sound familiar?—within the TVA, which allowed a catastrophic disaster like the Kingston spill to occur.
Indeed, The New York Times has done some incisive reporting—though much more could still be done—on the lack of regulation of similar coal ash dumps throughout the country. In other words, there could be plenty more Kingstons to come.
As The Times’s Shaila Dewan has reported:
The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.
Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.
Again, the consequences of allowing corporations and companies to self-regulate—be they financial corporations or the Tennessee Valley Authority—have been disastrous. Put simply, such companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves; if there’s a lesson to be taken from these events, it’s quite simply that self-regulation doesn’t work.
