"Lies", "Unbelievable", "Alternative Reality" All Available In 35-page TVA Booklet Downplaying Coal Ash Risks

"Lies", "Unbelievable", "Alternative Reality" All Available In 35-page TVA Booklet Downplaying Coal Ash Risks

A 35-page booklet distributed in a public meeting by the Tennessee Valley Authority about coal ash is filled with "lies" and misleading information, according to coal ash researchers. The booklet, titled "Know the Facts: Coal Ash," did not include any TVA branding or author information, but the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says TVA employees distributed the pamphlets at a public comment session on the agency's coal ash remediation plan for one of its coal plants in Tennessee.

Avner Vengosh, chair of environmental quality at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, called the booklet "unbelievable" and part of a "misleading public campaign.""It's scary," Vengosh told Inside Climate News after reviewing the booklet. "It's like alternative reality." Vengosh leads a research group at Duke that has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on coal ash contamination in the environment. Coal ash, or coal combustion residuals (CCR), is the solid material left over after burning coal. It contains potentially toxic levels of substances like mercury, arsenic and lead that are associated with human health problems, including cancer.

"I'm not sure why they're having this campaign, but basically everything there is lies, to be the most direct I can," Vengosh said of the booklet. Tracy O'Neill, decarbonization advocacy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said she picked up the booklet from a TVA table at the April 15 public comment session held by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on the TVA's coal ash remediation plan for its Cumberland Fossil Plant. "At the conclusion of the TDEC presentation, everyone was kind of mingling, and I went to the TVA table, which was outside of the meeting room itself," O'Neill said. "It was directly outside the door, and there were maybe a dozen or so of these packets."

Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said the pamphlet included "many deceptive statements." "The headline declares that 'Coal Ash Is Not Hazardous;' this is simply untrue," Frumkin said in an email. "The list of coal ash ingredients in the pamphlet omits dangerous metals; this is dishonest."The pamphlet minimizes the risk of coal ash by equating coal combustion to campfires and coal ash to garden soil; this is like equating an automatic weapon to a slingshot." Frumkin, the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said the pamphlet's claims were "plain wrong."