It's been decades, but EPA says it will finally adopt federal coal ash regulations.
Parties in a lawsuit yesterday reached an agreement for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to issue national rules on the management and handling of toxic coal combustion wastes, including ash, by Dec. 19.
According to Lisa Evans, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, the settlement is a result of a lawsuit 10 groups and the Moapa Band of Paiutes, who alleged EPA failure regulate coal ash.
In a blog posting, she notes that the settlement does not spell out what action the EPA will take. It has been weighing options to regulate it under hazardous or solid waste provisions of the law. According to Evans:
This consent decree ends the inexcusable and destructive 30-year delay in establishing rules for safe disposal of the nation's second largest industrial waste stream. No other industry in this country, save the mining industry, has a license to dump toxic waste in our water at the massive scale enjoyed by our coal-burning power plants. The industry estimates that they have generated 3 billion tons of coal ash since the beginning of the last century. Not an ounce has been subject to disposal regulations that ensure its safe, long-term disposal. This, we hope, will change in 2014.
I am curious now to see if Congress will try to beat the deadline and come up with its own rules through pending legislation supported by many in the Kentucky congressional delegation. That legislation would largely shut the EPA out of regulating coal-burning wastes, leaving it to the states.
As I have reported on numerous occasions, what we have now is a hodgepodge of state by state regulations. Some are more protective than others, but often they fail to require even basic protections such as ash pond liners to protect groundwater. Kentucky, for example, does not even require groundwater monitoring at ash ponds, which can leak through their bottoms.
The EPA promised rules in 2009, shortly after the massive Kingston TVA coal ash disaster. Since then, EPA has documented even more examples of where coal ash with its toxic heavy metals has contaminated the environment, but has declined to act.