Tennessee not-so-clean coal sludge spill estimate grows to 1 billion gallons:
[Via Climate Progress]
CNN updates the coal story of the year:Estimates for the amount of thick sludge that gushed from a Tennessee coal plant last week have tripled to more than a billion gallons, as cleanup crews try to remove the goop from homes and railroads and halt its oozing into an adjacent river.
That would be “enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools” assuming you wanted to fill your pool with “concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.” And that is, as Richard Graves puts it, “more than 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster and, in fact, more than every drop of petroleum used in the United States that day.”
The next time someone says “clean coal”; be sure to do that bit where you cough and say “B.S.” Or maybe skip the coughing part.
This will be a huge cleanup process. Holding waste in any sort of retaining structure is not a long term sustainable approach. Finding ways to deal with wast will be one of the major conundrums that will be solved in order to create a sustainable world.
Otherwise, we will all be swimming in our own waste, something that is not really desirable nor fun to imagine.
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