SRS coal ash cleanup doesn’t include pollution barrier used by utilities

Every time a dump truck tilts its bed skyward and coal ash slides to the ground at the Savannah River Site, it adds to the height of a government landfill intended to seal off toxins that have sickened wildlife and poisoned water.

But the effort to isolate coal waste from the environment at SRS is missing a key component that power companies are using to protect groundwater and creeks.

The landfill does not have a synthetic liner beneath the ever-accumulating mound of coal ash.

An increasing number of power companies have pledged to dig up toxic coal ash and put the waste in lined landfills. But the U.S. Department of Energy says it doesn’t need a liner at the bottom of its ash landfill on the federal nuclear weapons complex in Aiken, Barnwell and Allendale counties.

Only dirt and clay separate contaminated coal ash in the landfill from the shallow water table. In places, groundwater rises to within 5 feet of the surface and seeps into streams that feed the Savannah River.

The decision not to use a synthetic liner at the SRS landfill is part of a broader strategy by site managers to seal ash in the polluted coal ponds from the top, rather than line them across the bottom. The plan includes consolidating ash into smaller areas so that it will not be spread across as much land. The idea is to keep rainwater from infiltrating old coal basins and picking up pollution in the ash, which site managers say reduces the need for synthetic bottom liners.

At least three areas that contained polluted ash have been closed and capped without synthetic bottom liners since 2007 – and another is planned for closure in the same way in coming years, according to officials with SRS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The DOE’s work, being coordinated through site contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, is part of an effort to cleanse the mess left by burning coal from the early 1950s until 2012. The coal generated energy to run the site. To date, the cleanup has cost more than $50 million, according to the DOE.

“The cleanup of these ash basins ... is being done in a manner that is protective of human health and the environment,” the DOE said in an email to The State newspaper.

While federal and state regulators say they are comfortable with the effort, skeptics worry that the work doesn’t go far enough.

Ash, the residue from burning coal, contains an array of toxins, including mercury, arsenic and selenium, that can be dangerous to people and wildlife.

Lisa Evans, an environmental lawyer and national expert on coal ash issues, said it’s hard to understand why SRS wouldn’t take the extra step and install synthetic bottom liners.

“What you are talking about is a precaution that dramatically reduces the risk of contamination,” said Evans, who is with Earthjustice in Boston. “If they are scooping out the ash, it seems outrageous to put it in the ground somewhere without a liner.”

Synthetic liners prevent rain or groundwater that leaks into landfills from seeping through the bottom. Plastic liners aren’t foolproof, but they are considered better at protecting groundwater than only soil at the bottom of landfills. Bottom liners often are better than top covers at keeping contaminants from reaching groundwater, former state solid waste regulator Art Braswell said.

Research dating to the 1990s shows an array of toxic impacts on wildlife exposed to water in SRS coal ash ponds.

Frogs living in coal ash waste ponds developed deformities and had difficulty reproducing because of exposure to the toxins, according to scientific studies at SRS.

Coal ash spills from waste lagoons also killed vegetation in a wildlife-rich wetland between SRS and the Savannah River until the 1970s. Coal waste contamination still affects the area today.

Records show the ash basins legally discharged for years into a small stream that drained to the Savannah River, a drinking water source that today carries warnings in some areas against eating mercury-polluted fish.

Utilities trump feds

Evans and Frank Holleman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the Department of Energy should be a leader in ash cleanup, particularly since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for years has championed the development of lined coal ash landfills.

“Any third-grade student can figure out that this stuff ought to be in lined storage,” Holleman said.

Environmental threats from coal ash have been a major point of concern nationally for much of the past decade as ash ponds have leaked and spilled, polluting rivers and drinking water. Duke Energy found itself at the center of intense scrutiny last year after an ash pond failure contaminated a river near the North Carolina-Virginia border. A massive spill in Tennessee eight years ago flooded a river valley with black, soggy coal ash.

Because of concerns, the EPA adopted coal ash rules that are intended to stop the leaks. The rules include requirements for synthetic liners when new ash landfills are built.

But the new coal regulations apparently do not affect the current SRS cleanup for several reasons: Much of the work started before the rules take effect this fall, the work is occurring at a federal facility that doesn’t now produce power, and SRS already had state permission to develop an ash landfill without a synthetic liner across the bottom, EPA and state officials said. EPA spokeswoman Dawn Harris-Young said the regulations apply to new ash landfills, but the one being developed at SRS is not considered new.

In any case, Holleman said the energy department should comply with the spirit of the law. Plastic liners already must be used in new municipal garbage landfills, which don’t carry the same risks as ash landfills, he said.

“This is not cutting-edge, 21st century technology,” said Holleman, whose organization has sued some utilities and threatened others in an effort to clean up their sites. “Even simple household waste has to be stored more securely.”

In the past three years, Holleman has brokered agreements in which South Carolina’s three major commercial power companies agreed to dig contaminated ash from their coal waste ponds and either recycle the material or send it to lined landfills. Among the plans:

▪ Santee Cooper is excavating up to 12 million tons of ash from waste ponds across the state. Any material not recycled will be put into a lined landfill, the company says. The company is constructing a landfill in Berkeley County that will have a liner made of HDPE, a thick plastic-like material.

▪  Duke Energy will dig up ash at closed coal-fired power plants in Anderson and Darlington counties and put the material into lined landfills. Ash from the Anderson site is going to a lined landfill in Georgia, while the Darlington site is expected to have its own landfill lined with HDPE. Duke’s landfill design includes both synthetic bottom liners and synthetic top covers.

▪ SCE&G has developed a landfill in lower Richland County that is being lined with HDPE. The landfill is taking coal ash excavated from a waste basin on the edge of the Wateree River. Some of the dug-up ash also is being recycled. SCE&G has in the past disposed of coal ash from its Lake Murray power plant into an unlined landfill but says it is now committed to recycling and landfill designs that use “synthetic liners over clay.”

With the ash landfill under construction in Barnwell County, energy department officials did not explain whether the cost persuaded them against using a synthetic sheet across the bottom. But that’s a possibility, because synthetic liners can be expensive.

It costs about $35,000 per acre to develop a landfill with only a clay liner. In comparison, it can cost more than $250,000 per acre to install a synthetic liner beneath a landfill, said Braswell, a consultant and former Department of Health and Environmental Control regulator.

That means it would have cost SRS $4.2 million to line the 17-acre landfill it is building with synthetics, compared to $595,000 for clay only.

Coal for nukes

The Savannah River Site began operating in the early 1950s to make ingredients for nuclear bombs. A key part of America’s effort to win the Cold War, the federal installation once employed up to 25,000 people along the Georgia-South Carolina border.

During that time, the site created extensive radioactive waste pollution as it made tritium and plutonium. But the federal government also created waste from burning coal that, like the nuclear waste, must be cleaned up.

All told, the coal-fired power plants put about 2 billion tons of coal ash into the site’s unlined lagoons, DOE spokesman Bill Taylor said in an email last week.

These days, cleanup work is occurring in the “D Area,” where an approximately 75-megawatt power plant produced coal ash that was discharged to waste ponds.

SRS officials argue that the protective cap they’re placing atop the D Area landfill, along with the natural geology, is enough to prevent rain from getting into the burial area, trickling through the ash and reaching groundwater. The area below the ash also has additional clay, which makes it hard for water to get through, they said. The site will conduct groundwater testing to make sure contamination hasn’t escaped.

As he visited the D Area recently, site contractor Ron Socha watched backhoes excavate ash and dump trucks haul the blackened material high atop the landfill.

Socha noted that the unlined dump is being developed with the blessing of both DHEC and the EPA. Work to dig out the D Area ash basin and put the waste in the landfill began in late April as the landfill grows to about 40 feet high. Work there will continue for up to four years under the federal Superfund cleanup effort.

“We have got a lot of people who are anxious to see this come to closure and finish it up,” Socha said. “Everybody is working in that direction.”

Socha said the landfill also doesn’t need a synthetic liner because the disposal site is more than a half-mile from the Savannah River.

“You have got to consider all the factors, not just (the fact that this is) an ash basin,” Socha said. “It is where the ash basin is: How close you are to the sensitive environment, how close you are to the river. A lot of the (commercial basins) are right on rivers.”

“What data we have collected here, it doesn’t warrant sometimes that extra level of protection.”

Socha said it’s important to note that SRS has no evidence that coal ash contaminants ever leaked through the ash basin that is now being dug up and closed out. Groundwater contamination came from other activities related to coal-burning in the D Area, he said.

Once the landfill is full, the EPA will check on the site every five years, as it has at sealed ash disposal areas on two other parts of SRS. In those reviews, the environmental agency found no problems with the caps that were installed in 2010 and 2011 atop old coal ash ponds, nor did it find contamination leaking from those sites, EPA cleanup official Robert Pope said.

Pope said those sites were not lined with synthetic material across the bottom. The DOE says synthetics also were not used to make the top covers, only soil.

DHEC spokeswoman Cassandra Harris said her agency is comfortable with the energy department’s cleanup efforts. Socha said he’s optimistic the cleanup and landfill cap will protect the environment but acknowledged there are no guarantees.

“There is a natural clay underneath it and everything else,” he said. “But by design, no, I couldn’t tell you it is lined and it will never leak through. As it sits out there now, I couldn’t tell you that.”

Sick toads

If a leak into groundwater did occur from a coal ash landfill at SRS, it could also affect rivers and creeks that drain into the Savannah River.

“Groundwater ultimately becomes surface water,” said Dennis Lemly, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who has studied the effects of coal ash on southeastern wildlife since the 1970s. “It will seep and rise to the surface and flow laterally. So if (groundwater) is contaminated ... you might as well say that it is a source of contaminated surface water.”

A 2006 study by the National Academy of Sciences cited several examples of how pollution from unlined coal ash landfills leaked into shallow groundwater in other parts of the country – then made its way into nearby creeks. In one case in the 1990s, a wetland and nearby stream in Maryland wound up with a coating of orange, toxic material after polluted groundwater bubbled to the surface, the report said. A key reason was the lack of a synthetic liner and a shallow water table, the report said.

Scientists affiliated with the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a respected wildlife research station that has operated at SRS for some 60 years, have found plenty of impacts from coal ash on amphibians. One 2008 study said 90 percent of frog tadpoles exposed to coal ash pond water developed deformed mouths, a problem that can make it difficult for them to feed.

In another study, published in 2009, selenium is among the pollutants in coal ash that showed up in the eggs of female southern toads living in ash basins and wetlands near the D Area. Research found reproductive success was hampered by 60 percent in the toads.

This story was originally published July 18, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "SRS coal ash cleanup doesn’t include pollution barrier used by utilities."