animal_spirits 9 hours ago

This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded.

- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/613-valley-so-low/

  • jillesvangurp 6 hours ago

    Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time.

    That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.

    The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.

    • Earw0rm 5 hours ago

      How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff?

      Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?

      UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.

      • jillesvangurp 4 hours ago

        More efficient burning means more the waste metals get concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to go somewhere.

    • wqaatwt 4 hours ago

      > That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated

      Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.

      • awjlogan 2 hours ago

        Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.

        • ZeroGravitas 30 minutes ago

          Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just different types of radioactive waste being buried together?

      • 7bit 38 minutes ago

        Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.

      • gambiting 4 hours ago

        Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public.

        https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...

        And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.

        • immibis 2 hours ago

          Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.

          • wqaatwt 2 hours ago

            True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people.

            And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.

Carrok 6 hours ago

This article has some great writing overall, but ends with this

> How could this happen? Ansol wondered.

I wish it had dug into this. These sort of things don't just happen. There must be accountability, and journalists are who are supposed to start that process. This was clearly an environmental travesty of monumental proportions. How do we grapple with the fact this sort of thing is apparently just allowed to continue happening?

  • alibarber 3 hours ago

    It's an extract from a book - which I would hope digs into it.

DecentShoes 9 hours ago

If you want me to read your article, don't cover it with a stupid popup in the middle of the screen. I closed the page as soon as I saw that.

hinkley 8 hours ago

Man that still feels like it was ten years ago. 17, really?

owenthejumper 9 hours ago

Without spoilers...what a disappointing article. This feels like it should have been a long read, and yet, the article ends just as it started, with no explanation, investigation, or conclusion.

  • tomrod 9 hours ago

    It's a long form, unclassified advertisement for a book mentioned at the end. Decently written if a little too reliant on cliffhangers.

JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago

[flagged]

  • pjdesno 8 hours ago

    I think it’s likely the latter, not the former. If they didn’t like coal ash they’d have voted for someone else.

  • Mistletoe 8 hours ago

    Or 3) History has shown us repeatedly that people are easily manipulated by populist fascist dictators making lots of promises about making your country great again.

    • JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago

      Sure. I’m not saying they deserve no sympathy. Just that others probably deserve it first.

  • monetus 8 hours ago

    You felt the need to comment to tell people to be disinterested in compassion? Anyways, the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance.

    • JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago

      > the ash spill is from well before Trump's ascendance

      The point is the survivors of this voted for Trump when he was talking, on the stump, about deregulating coal. One way or another, another coal-ash disaster didn’t strike them as a dealbreaker.

      • pstuart 8 hours ago

        But think of all the liberal tears they can savor.

    • s1artibartfast 8 hours ago

      And never mind the TVA responsible for this is a government owned and operated organization with sovereign immunity.

  • s1artibartfast 8 hours ago

    I'm struggling to come up with a charitable, non-misanthropic, reading of that either/or.