Coal Combustion Residuals
(hat tip OMB Watch)
Coal Combustion Residuals, often referred to as coal ash, are currently considered exempt wastes under an amendment to RCRA, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. They are residues from the combustion of coal in power plants and captured by pollution control technologies, like scrubbers. Potential environmental concerns from coal ash pertain to pollution from impoundment and landfills leaching into ground water and structural failures of impoundments, like that which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plant in Kingston, Tennessee. The need for national management criteria was emphasized by the December 2008 spill of CCRs from a surface impoundment near Kingston, TN. The tragic spill flooded more than 300 acres of land with CCRs and flowed into the Emory and Clinch rivers.
EPA is proposing to regulate for the first time coal ash to address the risks from the disposal of the wastes generated by electric utilities and independent power producers. EPA is considering two possible options for the management of coal ash for public comment. Both options fall under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Under the first proposal, EPA would list these residuals as special wastes subject to regulation under subtitle C of RCRA, when destined for disposal in landfills or surface impoundments. Under the second proposal, EPA would regulate coal ash under subtitle D of RCRA, the section for non-hazardous wastes. The Agency considers each proposal to have its advantages and disadvantages, and includes benefits which should be considered in the public comment period.
Coal Combustion Residuals – Proposed Rule (PDF) (563 pp, 1.30MB, About PDF) – Pre-publication Version (signed May 4, 2010) – We are providing this unofficial pre-publication copy for public reference. This document has not been published in the Federal Register and is not an official version of the final rule. The official rule will be available here as soon as it is published by the Federal Register Office.
The support materials for this rule and the public comments EPA receives on the proposal are available for public review online at Regulations.gov.
What do you think of the recycling of these byproducts – or really the re-use? I have heard of them being used mixed with concrete & wood pulp to make home siding. Probably not enough volume in the re-use to keep up with the volume produced.
If I might butt in here as someone who has been looking at this problem?
Traditionally we make the distinction between flue ash (what goes up the chimneys and is collected by scrubbers) and bottom clinker (what’s left on the bottom of the boiler). They are very different indeed in their make up.
I don’t know the numbers for the US but bottom clinker, in the UK, some 50% is used for other things. Hardcore for roads, mixing into cement and so on. What’s not sued gets dumped but we’re not too worried about the dumping. Little in it that we would worry about.
Fly ash is different. There’s a lot of heavy metals in there (well, ” a lot” by the standards of what we’d like to be spreading over the countryside) which of course is one of the reasons why we’ve got the scrubbers in the first place. So there’s very little reuse of this fly ash.
One of the details of the EPA proposal is that anything which does go off to be reused, or have something extracted from it, doesn’t fall under the new rules. Once you’ve tried to extract whatever it is then you can dump the leftovers just as before. So we might see various naughty people suggesting to coal fired power stations that what they want to do is set up a small extraction plant….and then they get to dump the waste from that.
Do you think I should dig out the old 1950s plant which extracts germanium from fly ash, or the newer Chinese one that extracts alumina from it?
This post reminds me of a proposal to build a coal gasification plant near my hometown of Wichita KS back in the mid 70s. My somewhat subversive chemistry teacher thought it useful to have us study what might be produced as byproducts of the conversion of coal to propane (can’t really call it natural gas can we?)
Once people realized the tons of nasty heavy metals etc that would be produced in a typical year by the plant the proposal quietly died. To be fair real natural gas was so cheap and plentiful it would be hard to cover the costs of the plant much less the expensive remediation required to avoid trashing what was a lot of valuable farm land surrounding it.
http://www.coal-ash.co.il/sadna/Abstract%20-%20H.%20J.%20Feuerborn.pdf bottom clinker uses
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2009/01/remember-water-table.html TVA disaster
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2009/01/tva-budgets-fixes-and-selling.html Monopolies
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2009/01/fixing-monopolistic-utilities.html who pays
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Kentucky_and_coal interactive map
Gosh…do we need any more proof that humanity is on the way of the Neandertals? Combine this with The Bomber’s ‘Drill Baby, Drill!’ plan and Nuklar power plants in Georgia, as state where Toyota declined to build an auto plant ’cause the residents were deemed to dumb to train, and….
…Halleluyah the Stupid continues it’s ascendancy to pre-eminence in American life.
Tim: Actually something like 43% of fly ash is currently recycled in the U.S. The most common usage is in cement. It has significant beneficial properties in a number of applications, but producing stronger, lighter concrete for applications in seismic zones is one of the best. So, fly ash for cement, bottom ash for aggregate–what’s the problem? Transport. These materials have low values by weight, so freight is a big factor in reducing their re-use. This is why you see onsite storage in environmentally unprogressive states. As an example, I believe sand and gravel (bottom ash competitor) makes up the largest freight category by weight in the U.S. but because it rarely travels more than 50 miles it is in a much lower category for ton-miles.
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