More than two years after Knox News sounded the alarm that children could be exposed to radioactive coal ash on an East Tennessee playground, an independent scientific study has confirmed coal ash waste at the site.
The study published this week in one of the nation s top environmental science and technology journals reveals coal ash contamination at a children’s playground adjacent to the Tennessee Valley Authority s Bull Run coal-fired power plant in Claxton and on several properties downwind of the plant.
Coal ash is the byproduct of burning coal to produce electricity, and it contains a toxic stew of 26 cancer-causing pollutants and radioactive heavy metals.
New Tests Can Detect Tiny but Toxic Particles of Coal Ash in Soil labmanager.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from labmanager.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
June 30, 2021
Waste product often dumped in communities of the least powerful
MEMPHIS – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09) today questioned expert witnesses at a Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on “Toxic Coal Ash: Adverse Health Effects from the Puerto Rico Plant and Options for Plant Closure.”
In April, Congressman Cohen introduced the Ensuring the Safe Disposal of Coal Ash Act, which would strengthen protections against coal ash contamination by rectifying deficiencies in the 2015 Coal Ash Rule weakened by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In his questioning of witnesses Congressman Cohen said in part:
“Coal ash is a toxic by-product of coal plants filled with dangerous heavy metals and can become lodged in people’s lungs and cause asthma, lung disease or cancer…What’s going on (with coal ash) in Puerto Rico is awful…It’s also going on in Memphis, Tennessee, and up in East Tennessee
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METHANE ON THE BRAIN: Study: EPA underestimated methane emissions from oil and gas development
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has underestimated methane emissions caused by oil and gas production by as much as 76 percent, according to research published Tuesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
The assessment found emissions at levels between 48 percent and 76 percent higher than the EPA s estimates.
How’d they find that? Researchers from Pennsylvania State University collected data in the mid-Atlantic, mid-South and central Midwest of the U.S. from 2017 to 2019, tracking the movement of carbon dioxide, methane and ethane within weather systems. They then studied ethane-to-methane ratios from oil and gas production basins and compared to them an EPA inventory of those emissions