Around 1 a.m., a 60-foot-high earthen wall surrounding a solid-waste containment area collapses. A mudflow wave of 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry breaks free. The sludge flows into nearby tributaries of the Tennessee River and quickly covers approximately 300 acres of land up to six feet high.
The Kingston Fossil Plant incident of 2008 was the largest coal-related slurry spill in U.S. history. The goop released was enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-sized swimming pools, and its volume exceeded that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill by 50 times. Estimated cleanup costs ranged from $675 million to $975 million. The spill was a headline-grabbing case in point of the hidden health and environmental costs of energy production and consumption in the United States.
Catastrophes aside, there are also less-publicized daily costs far, far greater than that cleanup. Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon chaired a U.S. National Research Council committee that issued a report estimating those "hidden" costs of energy production and use. The committee quantified an estimated $120 billion damages annually in the United States—an astronomical cost that primarily reflects health damages from air pollution. Electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation were at the forefront:
- $62 billion in damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity
- $56 billion in health and other nonclimate-related damages from transportation, which relies almost exclusively on oil and accounts for nearly 30 percent of U.S. energy demand.
The report was requested by Congress.
—Elizabeth May
