Toxic Souvenirs

 

We don’t like to talk about it, but what happens when an energy producer goes bankrupt or reaches a level of toxicity that only a government can afford to repair? We all know about the massive, thousands of years of lost access, when a nuclear powerplant fails dramatically. Chernobyl. Fukushima. And those nuclear plants where the operations have ceased, the fuel rods removed, but the remaining structures are still too toxic to remove, well they are all over the world. Or so-called “integrated disposal sites,” where spent nuclear fuel is presumably stored safely for eternity… like those massive leaking drums of spent fuel at the Hanford, Washington, which, since operations began in 1996, has received more than 18.5 million tons of mostly nuclear waste. This 108-acre Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility sits on the Columbia River, where it is poised to inflict incalculable damage if efforts to detoxify are not completed fast enough.

Nuclear waste and meltdowns are spectacular news-generating stories. We all quiver in fear at the threat, and new nuclear power plants are now designed along entirely different engineering requirements… and still pose a threat if there is a malfunction. We also have those stories, particularly in poor and politically ignored communities (a toxic story that seems most prevalent in Louisiana), when toxic chemicals had been dumped for decades into local streams, rivers, aquifers and simply out on “vacant” land. Duke Energy in North Carolina, the toxicity leached into the Flint, Michigan water system… well these stories abound.

As large companies have literally torn the tops off mountains to extract coal, copper or iron ore, the tales of what happens when bankruptcy leaves massive scars and toxicity on the land… Even the clean-up superfund from the Environmental Protection Agency is decades, if not centuries, away from removing environmental toxicity where private extractors and environmental abusers have left without the financial resources to clean up what they have decimated. And as we transition away from fossil fuels to alternative energy, the economic displacement of fossil fuel extractors looms large.

While this may be difficult to contemplate as energy sources soar, as demand for fossil fuels seems to find the war in Ukraine a convenient excuse to profiteer, this too shall pass. Nothing screams obsolescent fossil fuel like coal. Nations are running away from coal as fast as they can. It seems as if nothing will contain this plunge. In 2010, pundits projected the United States would generate 46% of its electrical power from coal by now, but coal power has dropped to a mere 17%, and international demand is falling fast as well. Despite the words “clean coal,” that means that for the most part, effluents from coal production are simply pumped underground.

Coal-producing states are also facing severe economic displacement, as coalminers are losing the jobs in record numbers. While they could migrate into the massive new jobs created in the alternative energy sector, most prefer to believe the false pledges of the radical-right that their jobs can be restored. Yet, there were more coal mines closed during the Trump presidency that at any time in history. The explosion of job loss and toxic abandoned mines is evident in every coal-producing region in the country. So today, I will focus on a simple exemplar of unparalleled coal-driven environmental disaster: Kentucky. James Bruggers, writing for the April 18th Inside Climate News, explains:

“As the coal industry has collapsed in Kentucky, companies have racked up a rising number of violations at surface mines, and state regulators have failed to bring a record number of them into compliance, internal documents show.

“Enforcement data from 2013 through February, along with recent internal emails, both provided to Inside Climate News by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet in response to a state open records law request, paint a picture of an industry and its regulators in a state of crisis.

“The documents reveal an agency struggling to enforce regulations designed to protect the public and the environment from some of the industry’s most destructive practices amid mining company bankruptcies and an overall industry decline that has also seen the shedding of thousands of coal mining jobs in the state.

“Environmental advocates fear lax enforcement could also be happening in other coal mining states, such as West Virginia, Virginia and Pennsylvania, due to similar pressures on the industry and regulators, despite a recent uptick in coal mining. And they are calling on federal regulators to make sure slowed, idled or bankrupt mines are not left to deteriorate.

“‘This data shows there are a lot of zombie mines out there,’ said Mary Varson Cromer, an attorney and deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center Inc., in Whitesburg, Kentucky, using a term that refers to mines that have been idled, sometimes for years, without the required reclamation work on their sites.

“In one Dec. 15 email, a state official noted that the number of notices of noncompliance with surface mining regulations statewide had reached a record high of 810 the previous month. The increase came even though the number of active mining permits had declined 28 percent since 2013, a year when there were roughly half as many unresolved violations despite more mining activity.

“‘This is completely out of control, warned Courtney Skaggs, a senior environmental scientist in the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources, in a separate Dec. 15 email to the department’s commissioner, Gordon Slone. ‘This is going to blow up in someone’s face’ wrote Skaggs, a former acting director of the agency’s Division of Mine Reclamation and Enforcement… The enforcement data can be explained by ‘an unprecedented number of bankruptcies caused by market forces in the coal industry that are outside of the control of (the cabinet),’ [John] Mura [spokesman for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, which oversees environmental regulations in the state] said in a written response.” The accelerating number of bankruptcies in this sector have overwhelmed state environmental agencies to respond, resulting minimal enforcement. And it gets so much worse from here.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are so concerned about keeping taxes low for the richest in the land that we are willing to let our land explode into an increasing mire of medically harmful toxicity, in our water, land in the air we breathe.