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  4. EPA Delays New Rules on Coal Ash

EPA Delays New Rules on Coal Ash

Date: December 17, 2009

Source: News Room

The US EPA announced this week that it is delaying its proposed new rules for regulating ash from coal-fired power plants. EPA cited the "complexity of the analysis" involved in the issue and said agency officials are "still actively clarifying and refining parts of the proposal." It did not set a new deadline. The announcement comes almost exactly a year after the collapse of a coal-ash impoundment at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in East Tennessee spilt nearly a billion gallons of wet ash, containing more than 2.6 million pounds of toxic pollutants, pouring into local streams, fields and homes. Pressure from activists and Congress pushed EPA to set its own deadline of a year to propose new regulations for coal ash disposal. As part of this process, EPA has been gathering data on "wet" disposal ponds but has not yet made it publicly available. The delay may have to do with criticism from activists who charge that they will not have enough time to independently review the data by the time that EPA proposes new rules.

Environmentalists have long pressured EPA to regulate the waste as hazardous and to ban wet disposal in surface impoundments such as the TVA pond that failed. States and industry, however, are lobbying for EPA to issue a non-hazardous classification in order to preserve state enforcement authority over disposal and to protect beneficial reuse of coal ash, which can be recycled into materials such as concrete. Since October, EPA said it is considering several "hybrid" approaches to the rule, including regulating the wet disposal of coal ash in waste ponds as hazardous while regulating dry disposal in landfills as non-hazardous, as well as classifying all coal waste disposal as hazardous while regulating certain beneficial uses as non-hazardous. The industry worries that classifying coal ash as hazardous, even under some conditions, will effectively eliminate recycling which accounts for 40 percent of coal ash generated annually.

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