Dirty Energy and the Lost Promise of the TVA – Scalawag
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It was down in the valley that's called Tennessee<br>Uncle Sam started something in the year thirty-three<br>We dreamed a great dream then, that's now here to stay<br>Saw democracy's future when we built TVA
Now rivers that once ran unchecked to the sea<br>Use the force that was wasted for electricity<br>And, rains that washed topsoil away in the night<br>Helped the great turbines turn dark into light
Pete Seeger, "The TVA Song"
On December 22, 2008, a coal ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant near Kingston, Tennessee, burst, letting loose more than a billion gallons of a black, sticky slurry that collapsed houses and flooded nearby properties. Owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Kingston was the largest coal power plant in the world when it was finished in 1955. Firing at peak capacity, it could burn 14,000 tons of coal every single day. What was left behind after it burned was dumped into wet ponds, covered with grass and earth, and allowed to sit while the water evaporated. From a distance, it was just another hill, even if it wobbled or shook at times.
Miraculously, nobody died in the flood that day. In the subsequent cleanup, however, hundreds of workers were exposed to dangerous levels of coal ash toxins. Coal ash is the substance that is left behind once coal has been through a furnace. It's a fine dust that's grayish-black when it's dry. Most of it consists of silica, the fine dust that has poisoned coal miners' lungs for generations, but coal ash also contains arsenic, cadmium, radium, and other heavy metals that poison the human body. More than 60 of the people who worked on the cleanup have died, while more than 200 are sick with lung diseases and cancer today.
The TVA understood that coal ash was dangerous, but the coal power plant and its subcontractor, Jacobs Engineering, downplayed the threat that coal ash posed. Tom Bock, the safety officer on site, insisted that you could eat a pound of ash every day and be fine. Workers tasked with cleaning the site were actively discouraged from wearing safety equipment; showing up in a dust mask was seen as a way to be let go.
Coal ash isn't recognized as a hazardous material by the EPA, thanks to lobbying by the coal industry. Even when new rules for coal ash disposal were drafted in 2015, they exempted "legacy" sites, of which there are approximately 700 in the United States. In any event, the new rules haven't been enforced at all since they were drafted, and under the second Trump Administration, it's almost a certainty that they won't be enforced for the foreseeable future.
Cleanup for the 2008 Kingston TVA coal ash spill took more than six years, and the toxic coal ash was trucked to the Arrowhead landfill in Uniontown, Alabama, a majority-Black town. Residents say they can smell it on the wind.
What happened to the TVA?
The TVA began with high, contradictory hopes for a region that the whole country saw as troubled. The Tennessee Valley was one of the poorest regions in the United States by the time of the Great Depression. Only three percent of farms in the region had access to electricity, and most farmers worked as cotton sharecroppers. The Tennessee River was difficult to navigate, and when it flooded, it devastated communities. Malaria affected close to 30 percent of the population. Millions of acres of farmland were badly eroded from years of cotton overproduction, and the median income in the region was close to one-third the national average.
For years, progressives in both parties had taken aim at democratizing private utilities. Senator Gerald Norris of Nebraska made the issue into his own crusade. At Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the federal government had started a dam during World War I that was finished in 1924, but it only generated a fraction of its full power. Norris's attempt to use the dam to provide cheap public power was stymied by Herbert Hoover, who vetoed a bill in 1931 that would have adopted the project. Norris felt that the issue was blocked by private companies, who "want no yardstick which would expose their extortionate rates…" But Norris's vision won out a few years later when Franklin Roosevelt was elected. Roosevelt liked the idea of expanding on what had been done at Muscle Shoals, and in April of 1933, he asked Congress to "create a Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation clothed with the power of government, but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." With that, the Muscle Shoals dam was adopted into the TVA system.
While the TVA began as a Great Depression relief program, it was far more ambitious than programs like...