Let's start with the Bad News so that we can end up with the Good News.
Knoxville.biz is reporting the collapse of a retaining wall at a TVA slurry and fly ash storage pond. Dramatic video of the flooding can be seen at the Knoxville.biz web site.
A retention pond wall collapsed early this morning at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston steam plant, releasing a mixture of water and fly ash that flooded nearly a dozen homes and caused a train wreck.
No injuries have been reported, but one house was swept into the middle of Swan Pond Circle Road and huge piles of wet fly ash cover the roadway.
Officials say 4 to 6 feet of material washed out of the pond and now covers up to 400 acres of land adjacent to the plant.
Some of the material made its way into Watts Bar Lake, which flows past the plant, according to TVA spokesman Gil Francis.
"It’s going to take some time to clean up," Francis said.
Eight to 10 homes were flooded, and 12 residences in all have been affected by the break.
Although, this leak was relatively small, there have been some very large ones in the past: In 2000, a 2.2 billion gallon coal waste dam failed in Martin County, Kentucky.
Coal--it can be dirty in so many different ways.
Coal sludge Mildred, Pennsylvania
And now for the Good News (less coal is always good news)
The Tampa Herald Tribune is reporting that:
Under a deal with state regulators, Progress Energy Florida has agreed to retire two of its four coal-fired units at Crystal River, deemed by environmentalists to be among the dirtiest power plants in the nation.
The two units, which were built in the 1960s, will be retired after the utility builds a nuclear plant in Levy County, 10 miles north of Crystal River. The plant is expected to go on line in 2016.
Retiring the two coal units would cut emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to global warming, by 5.5 million tons a year, said Jeff Lyash, president and chief executive of Progress Energy Florida.
"They are our oldest, most carbon-intensive generating resources," Lyash said. "We needed to work our way out of dependence on those plants."
The two units can generate up to 866 megawatts, enough power for 53,000 Florida homes.
In addition, the utility agreed to spend more than $1.3 billion on improvements to its two other coal units at Crystal River. The improvements will reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, the chief causes of smog and acid rain, by 90 percent, Lyash said.
This agreement is part of Governor Charlie Crist's call to reduce Florida's CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2025. Unfortunately, that goal is too modest to meet the requirements for avoiding the 2 degree Celsius temperature rise that climate scientists say is necessary. Nevertheless, it is a start toward dismantling already existing coal-fired power plants which is an extremely important step. There is a lot of attention focused on stopping new coal-fired power plants, which is vital, but we should keep in mind, as Jim Hansen reminds us, that we need to stop using coal altogether by 2030. That means shutting down these older plants, which are the most polluting that we have, not only in terms of GHG's but also conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide.
Good news. Now let's shut down the other two as well.