Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Coal ash ruling
A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court order that would have required TVA to unearth and remove a massive amount of coal ash at one of its Tennessee power plants. The move comes after another coal ash spill in north carolina as a result of Hurricane Florence. In a 2-1 decision, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that leaks from unlined coal ash pits through groundwater into the Cumberland River are a "major environmental problem" at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Gallatin Fossil Plant, but, the Clean Water Act isn't the way to address it. The cleanup would have involved digging up and moving almost 14 million cubic yards of coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal for power. It contains heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and lead. Though the decision was a defeat for environmental interests, state regulators still have a lawsuit pending over similar environmental complaints. The case drew outside interest over how the Clean Water Act is applied. Eighteen largely Republican states, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, national coal industry interests and more than a dozen other groups argued a cleanup would have been expensive for ratepayers. But environmental groups and Tennessee regulators argued that rate hikes would not have been necessary.


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