Reality Check: There is no such thing as beautiful, clean coal. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy production from cradle to grave.
From the mountaintops blasted apart to mine it, to the mercury and carbon dioxide that pour from smokestacks when it’s burned, to the toxic ash left behind when the fire goes out — coal exacts a devastating toll on the environment and people’s health at every stage of its life cycle. And no utility in America should know that better than the Tennessee Valley Authority.
I walked the devastation in the communities surrounding TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant in the days after the nation’s worst coal ash disaster in December 2008. I testified before the United States Senate in the weeks that followed, warning of the dangers of coal ash and pleading with TVA to restart its Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) process to study the alternatives to coal. TVA eventually did update its IRP and started retiring old, dirty coal plants. But TVA ignored my warnings about the dangers of coal ash — and workers cleaning up TVA’s mess died after TVA and their contractor told the workers that coal ash was “safe enough to eat” and denied them basic protective equipment, despite having internal documents showing agency officials had known for decades about the toxicity of coal ash.
Now, nearly two decades later, TVA is misleading the public again about the dangers of coal ash, not only distributing industry propaganda telling the public that coal ash is harmless, but it is reversing its own decision to retire the very coal plants that produce it.
In February 2026, TVA’s newly reconstituted board of directors — stacked with Trump appointees after the president fired enough Biden-appointed members to eliminate the quorum — voted unanimously to reverse its own commitment to retire the Kingston and Cumberland coal plants. The board also struck renewable energy goals and diversity policies from TVA’s strategic plan. TVA Vice President Tom Rice opened the meeting by thanking “President Trump, without whom we would not be in the position today to recommend continuing to operate over 3,000 megawatts of beautiful, clean coal.”
Meanwhile, at the White House, the ceremony was even more theatrical. On the same day that the TVA Board voted to renege on retiring coal plants, Trump hosted coal executives in the East Room of the White House for what can only be described as a coal revival meeting. Peabody Energy CEO Jim Grech presented the President with a golden trophy reading: “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal,” while the President enacted mandates for the Defense Department to lock in long-term purchase agreements with coal power plants, enshrining his language of “beautiful, clean coal” into official administrative policy.
There is nothing beautiful about coal ash. Coal ash is like a who’s who of chemistry’s periodic table — including many toxic chemicals. Arsenic. Mercury. Lead. Cadmium. Chromium. Selenium. Radium. Thallium. Boron. These aren’t trace curiosities. They are poisons, concentrated by the combustion process and left behind in staggering volumes — and TVA is now telling the public they are harmless while simultaneously deciding to produce more of them.
TVA Already Decided These Plants Were Too Expensive, Too Unreliable, and Too Dirty
In 2021, TVA announced a decision to retire the Cumberland and Kingston coal plants in the 2026–2033 timeframe. The reasons for retirement were mainly the high costs to continue operating the plants and the degraded reliability of the plants themselves. TVA’s own analysis stated plainly: “TVA’s coal plants are operating well beyond their original book life and are among the oldest still in operation in the nation.”
These weren’t findings by environmental activists. These were TVA’s own conclusions.
The Kingston Fossil Plant first produced electricity on February 8, 1954. Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House. The Korean War had ended only months before. Elvis Presley had not yet cut his first record at Sun Studio in Memphis. Kingston is now 72 years old, and TVA has just voted to run it “for as long as we possibly can.”
The Cumberland Fossil Plant — the “younger sibling” at a mere 53 years old — came online in 1973 and has consistently ranked as one of the largest air polluters in the nation, emitting about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide per year over the last 10 years. During Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, equipment failures at Cumberland brought the plant offline completely — a 2,500-megawatt drop in power availability that triggered TVA’s first-ever rolling blackouts across its seven-state service territory. During Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, Cumberland failed again.
Extending the operation of coal plants well beyond their designed lifespans is not a reliability solution. It is a reliability problem. TVA’s own retirement planning documents cited “reliability challenges that are difficult to anticipate and expensive to mitigate” at Kingston, and acknowledged that “continued long-term operation of some of TVA’s coal plants […] is contributing to environmental, economic, and reliability risks” at Cumberland.
Nothing has changed about the economics or reliability of these plants. Coal hasn’t gotten cheaper. The plants haven’t gotten younger. The maintenance costs haven’t gone down. What changed is the occupant of the White House and the composition of TVA’s board.
TVA had used the planned coal plant retirements to justify spending billions of ratepayer dollars on new natural gas plants and pipelines at both Kingston and Cumberland sites. Now ratepayers will be paying for both the new gas plants, the big gas pipeline projects to supply those new plants, and the continued operation of the old coal plants — the worst of both worlds. Regular working people shouldn’t have to pay to keep expensive, polluting power plants online just because politicians want to prop up the coal industry.
While Extending the Life of Its Coal Plants, TVA Is Telling the Public Coal Ash Is Safe
This is where TVA’s cynicism becomes truly breathtaking. At the very same time that TVA is reversing course to burn more coal and produce more coal ash, the utility and its industry allies are distributing a glossy propaganda piece at public meetings titled “Know the Facts: Coal Ash.” The handout, apparently produced by the American Coal Ash Association or a similar industry group, declares in bold letters that “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous.”
This handout was distributed at a public meeting about TVA’s Cumberland Fossil Plant, where TVA is seeking approval from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to permanently leave roughly 25 million cubic yards of coal ash in unlined pits — and where TVA’s own investigations have already found arsenic, cobalt, lithium, and molybdenum contaminating groundwater above protection standards.
TVA is simultaneously telling you coal ash is safe while seeking a permit to address the contamination coal ash has already caused.
I have spent nearly two decades studying and advocating on the issue of coal ash. The handout’s claims don’t survive contact with the actual science. Here is what the industry is telling you — and what the facts actually show.
INDUSTRY CLAIM: “Coal Ash Is Not Hazardous”
THE FACTS:
Coal ash contains arsenic, a known human carcinogen for which the EPA has identified no safe level of exposure. The federal drinking water standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion — and even at that level, EPA estimates that up to 600 people out of every million could develop cancer over a lifetime of exposure. EPA’s own leachate testing found that coal ash leaches arsenic at concentrations up to 100 times the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for drinking water, and selenium at up to 200 times its MCL.
Coal ash also leached arsenic, thallium, boron, and barium above RCRA’s own hazardous waste threshold — meaning the waste that the industry calls “non-hazardous” actually produces leachate that meets the legal definition of hazardous.
Coal ash also contains lead, which causes irreversible brain damage in children, and has no safe level of exposure. It contains mercury, which causes cognitive deficits and developmental delays. It contains cadmium, which causes kidney disease and cancer. It contains hexavalent chromium, which causes cancer. It contains radium-226 and radium-228, which are radioactive and accumulate in bone tissue.
According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, coal ash toxics have the potential to injure all of the major organ systems.
The industry’s handout compares coal to ordinary rocks and includes a chart comparing the elemental composition of coal ash to ordinary soil, emphasizing that both contain silicon, aluminum, iron, and calcium. But what matters in the context of public health is the concentration of toxic elements, their chemical form, and how they reach people. Burning coal concentrates heavy metals by a factor of 10 or more compared to the original coal. Disposing of that concentrated waste in contact with water mobilizes those metals into groundwater in ways that undisturbed natural soil does not.
INDUSTRY CLAIM: “The Constituents in Coal Ash Are Naturally Occurring”
THE FACTS:
The fact that a substance exists in nature tells you nothing about whether concentrated industrial quantities of it are dangerous. The industry’s pamphlet provides individual fact sheets for each contaminant — antimony, arsenic, boron, and so on — all follow the same template: “X Is Naturally Occurring,” “X in Soil,” “X and Food.” The goal is to normalize each element individually so you never confront the full picture: that coal ash is a concentrated cocktail of all these toxins together, in quantities that dwarf their natural occurrence, disposed of in ways that increase their ability to reach people.
In 2007, EPA published a report assessing possible environmental damages from coal ash storage sites, which identified contamination from coal ash in 23 states. Damage documented in other studies includes drinking water contaminated in at least eight states; hundreds of cattle and sheep killed and families sickened in New Mexico from water poisoned by coal ash; entire fish populations destroyed by selenium contamination in Texas and North Carolina; and developmental abnormalities documented in nearly 25 species of wildlife in coal ash-contaminated wetlands in South Carolina.
A 2019 comprehensive national study by the Environmental Integrity Project found groundwater contamination at coal ash sites across the country, with contaminants at staggering multiples of safe levels — lithium at 193 times safe levels, molybdenum at 171 times safe levels, and arsenic at 3 times safe levels at a single site. At least 26 sites nationwide have documented contamination of private drinking water wells.
INDUSTRY CLAIM: “86 REACH Studies Proved Coal Ash Is Non-Hazardous”
THE FACTS:
The REACH studies cited in the handout tested coal ash as a “whole material” — measuring acute toxicity from direct contact with dry, intact ash. But that is not how communities are exposed. People don’t sit in piles of dry coal ash. They drink water from wells that tap into groundwater contaminated by decades of leaching. They eat fish from streams where coal ash contaminants have bioaccumulated. Their children play in soil where coal ash has been used as fill.
EPA’s own risk assessment — the one the industry handout conspicuously omits — found that the cancer risk to children drinking groundwater contaminated with arsenic from unlined coal ash ponds is as high as 1 in 110. That is 900 times higher than EPA’s acceptable risk threshold of 1 in 100,000. That cancer risk is nine times higher than the risk from smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.
Furthermore, as air pollution controls that catch air pollutants at power plant smokestacks have improved under the Clean Air Act, the ash has become more toxic, not less. The mercury, arsenic, selenium, and other pollutants that scrubbers and filters now capture before they leave the smokestack end up concentrated in the coal ash instead.
The “clean coal” sales pitch is a shell game: the pollutants don’t disappear — they just move from the air into the ash, and from the ash into your water.
INDUSTRY CLAIM: “EPA Classified Coal Ash as Non-Hazardous”
THE FACTS:
In March 2000, EPA determined that the regulation of coal ash as a contingent hazardous waste was warranted. The agency found the waste had “the potential to present danger to human health and environment,” identified eleven proven damage cases, and documented that disposal practices lacked basic safeguards. Weeks later — under intense coal industry lobbying — the determination was reversed with no new scientific findings. Even the reversed determination still concluded that federal disposal standards were required.
The 1980 Bevill Amendment, which temporarily exempted coal ash from hazardous waste regulation, was supposed to last only until EPA completed its study. That “temporary” exemption was extended and exploited by industry for 35 years. The non-hazardous label is a political achievement of the coal lobby, not a scientific conclusion.
Kingston: The Disaster TVA Wants You to Forget
Of all the utilities in America that might distribute a handout claiming coal ash is safe, the Tennessee Valley Authority should be the last.
In the early morning hours of December 22, 2008, an earthen dike ruptured at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Harriman, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge — 100 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It was the largest industrial disaster on land by volume in American history. Three hundred acres were buried, homes were destroyed, and the Emory and Clinch Rivers were flooded with arsenic, lead, mercury, and radium.
I was there in the days that followed. I walked through communities buried under feet of gray toxic sludge. I saw what a billion gallons of coal ash does to a landscape, to a river system, to a community. It is an image I will never forget, and it is an experience that has driven my work on advancing beyond coal for nearly two decades.
TVA knew the risks. The utility had been aware of seepage at its Kingston ash ponds since at least 1980. Leaks were patched nearly every year. Two major dike failures had occurred in 2003 and 2006. Engineers proposed switching to dry storage, which would have cost $25 million, or installing a liner costing $5 million. TVA rejected both as too expensive and chose a $480,000 patch instead — partly because a liner “would set precedence for other dredge cells.”
The cleanup cost over $1 billion. The human cost is still being paid.
In January 2009, just weeks after the spill, I testified before the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. I warned that coal combustion waste represents a significant threat to human health and the environment. I urged comprehensive federal regulation. I pleaded with TVA to undertake a transparent Integrated Resource Planning process to study alternatives to coal, which TVA eventually did. But my warnings about the dangers of coal ash to workers and communities went unheeded where it mattered most: on the ground at Kingston.
Workers were hired through contractor Jacobs Engineering to clean up the spill. They were told the coal ash was safe. One Jacobs manager told workers they could literally eat coal ash. TVA instructed Jacobs that no workers should be seen wearing respirators or protective suits — not because the equipment wasn’t needed, but because it would frighten the public. Workers felt threatened that they might be fired just for asking for dust masks, and the company actually disposed of any available masks in the trash. Court documents revealed evidence of tampering with air monitors and testing equipment.
More than 50 cleanup workers are now dead — from brain cancer, lung cancer, leukemia, and other diseases linked to coal ash exposure. Over 150 others are sick or dying. Workers are worried about their children’s serious health effects. Hundreds of cleanup workers and their families sought help through the legal system, with court proceedings beginning in 2013, and finally, a settlement was reached in 2023 — fifteen years after the spill.
On the ten-year anniversary of the spill, while about 150 workers gathered near a homemade wooden cross on the cleanup site to commemorate 36 fellow workers who’d died, TVA took out a full-page ad, congratulating itself and the workers on the cleanup. It did not mention the dead workers.
The “Know the Facts: Coal Ash” handout being distributed at public meetings does not mention them either.
And now TVA wants to keep the Kingston plant — the site of the worst coal ash disaster in American history — burning coal indefinitely.
What This Means for Cumberland — and for Every TVA Ratepayer
The decision to reverse the retirement of the Cumberland and Kingston coal plants doesn’t just mean more air pollution and more carbon emissions. It means more coal ash — millions of additional tons of toxic waste that will need to be stored somewhere, for centuries.
At Cumberland, TVA is already seeking TDEC approval to cap-in-place 25 million cubic yards of existing coal ash on a peninsula between the Cumberland River and Wells Creek. Extending the plant’s life means the ash will keep accumulating, and the groundwater contamination that TVA’s own investigation has already documented will worsen. TVA’s draft “Corrective Action/Risk Assessment” (CARA) plan for the coal ash at Cumberland recently made available to the public confirms that arsenic, cobalt, lithium, and molybdenum are present in downgradient wells at levels exceeding regulatory groundwater protection standards.
The same assessment claims that “97% of environmental samples were below screening levels.” That means roughly 30 samples out of over 1,000 exceeded safety thresholds — for contaminants like arsenic that cause cancer at any exposure level. You don’t just average away cancer risk.
TVA proposes to cap the ash in place rather than excavate it and move it to a lined landfill where toxic leaching would be better controlled — citing costs of $120–$230 million for capping versus $2.6–$4.9 billion for removal. But this comparison ignores the perpetual costs of monitoring and maintaining the cap for centuries, the risk of catastrophic cap failure from flooding, and the fact that after Kingston, TVA spent over $1 billion cleaning up a spill that proper prevention would have avoided at a fraction of the cost. At Cumberland, 25 million cubic yards of ash — roughly five times the volume released at Kingston — sits on a river peninsula. The power plant itself has failed during extreme weather events twice. Why would anyone trust an engineered cap on this site to hold for centuries?
TVA Is Playing Politics with Your Health
TVA’s board, as it was formerly composed of different members, concluded that the Cumberland and Kingston coal plants were too expensive and unreliable to keep running, based on TVA’s own engineering and financial analysis. The Trump administration then fired enough board members to reshape the board, and the new board reversed the retirement decisions without any public input or public meeting.
A senior executive of the nation’s largest public utility, with a proud history of engineering accomplishments, publicly thanked a president for giving him permission to ignore engineering and economic reality and keep burning “beautiful, clean coal.”
There is nothing clean about coal, and there is nothing beautiful about the ash it leaves behind.
TVA’s ratepayers’ bills are going up, and they will pay higher costs to keep these aging, unreliable plants online. Communities near these plants will breathe more toxic pollution and face more coal ash contamination. And the industry-funded propaganda telling them it’s all perfectly safe will keep showing up at public meetings — produced by the same industry that profits from burning coal, distributed by the same utility that presided over the worst coal ash disaster in American history.
The workers at Kingston were told that coal ash was safe. I warned that it wasn’t. Over 50 of them are dead. The communities around Cumberland deserve better. They deserve the unvarnished truth, not the coal industry’s financially motivated misinformation.
What You Can Do
The public comment period for TVA’s Cumberland Fossil Plant Corrective Action/Risk Assessment plan is currently open through TDEC through this Friday, May 15, at 5:30 pm Central Time. We urge you to submit comments demanding:
Full removal of coal ash from the Cumberland site and relocation to a lined landfill away from water — not cap-in-place — given the site’s location on a river peninsula, documented groundwater contamination, and the heightened flood risk from climate change.
Independent environmental and health monitoring not controlled by TVA or its contractors, including testing of private drinking water wells in surrounding communities.
A true lifecycle cost analysis that includes perpetual monitoring and maintenance costs, catastrophic failure scenarios, and the cost of continued ash generation from extending the plant’s operating life.
An end to industry-funded misinformation at public meetings. Communities deserve science-based information about coal ash hazards — not propaganda paid for by the coal industry.
A reversal of the decision to extend the life of the Cumberland coal plant. TVA’s own analysis concluded this plant was uneconomical and unreliable. That analysis was correct. Political pressure from Washington does not change the physics of a 53-year-old power plant or the toxicology of coal ash.
Comments on the plan can be emailed to TDEC.CCR@tn.gov. Comments must be received by 4:30 p.m. Central on Friday, May 15, 2026, to assure consideration.
There is no such thing as clean, beautiful coal. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy production from cradle to grave. The people of Tennessee — and the 10 million people TVA serves — deserve an energy future that doesn’t poison their water, sicken their children, or leave mountains of toxic waste as a legacy for generations to come.
