Is Byproduct Coal Ash more Radioactive than Nuclear Waste?

The classification of coal ash is back in the news as US authorities decide on how to label and regulate this byproduct. The following article, first published in Summer 2011 deserves another look CP

 One would never think of taking a bath in sewage, or, for that matter, ‘drinking’ a glass of anything harmful to our system.. Our health care providers, after the fiasco in Walkerton, would be abhored at the presence of anything harmful in our drinking water (water wells, in particular, are stringently monitored by authorities, who are now extremely paranoid of any contaminents whatsoever..) There is one thing, however, that is not monitored, should be at the top of the list for testing of those ground water supplies, and that ‘thing’ is “radioactivity”… It seems the upcoming election, with it’s schism between parties that want to maintain the status quo, and keep the coal-fired electrical generating facilities, and those in the present governing party that want to go ahead with Green Energy electrical production by means of Wind Turbines and Solar Arrays, are at loggerheads with one another… They BOTH have studies, and, arguments (fiscal, as well as, science-based) that have caused massive rifts, shifts, and polarization in the minds of the voters… But, one thing that both parties don’t want the Public, at large, to know, is their dirty, DIRTY, little secret…

Those mountains of fly-ash (pictured above) at the Ontario Power Generation facility in Nanticoke, are, in actuality, huge mountains of toxic waste that must be buried at least 3500 feet below the ground, in order to prevent ground water (drinking water, in other words..) contamination… The reason.. It’s quite simple.. Those hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fly-ash in those small mountains, covered, after a hot, dry, and cruelly humid Summer with weeds, are Highly Radioactive…

If the costs of transporting that, toxic mountain, back to the very coal mines that the raw coal came from, now abandoned, in Kentucky and Tennessee, were ever factored into the costs we pay for electricity today, we could expect to have the costs of building the Pickering/Darlington and Bruce Nuclear plants added as “Debt Reduction” costs (presently what we pay EXTRA for, on our monthly electricity bills, is the debts associated with the building of the Nuclear Energy Plants, that went so far over estimated costs, our children will be paying for them ‘ad eterna’..)… That the Conservative Party of Ontario wants to keep those coal-fired generating plants going, without ‘informing’ the Public of Ontario about the radioactive, toxic byproducts of the process, without informing them of what is common knowledge within the coal and electrical generation industries, just to achieve a state of denial for the neccessity of a Green Energy Initiative, is culpable to a criminal act… What is wrong is that the TRUTH is going to cost us much more than fiscal damage control…

If anyone, living in the downwind footprint of the ashfall from those 550 foot tall smokestacks at Nanticoke, that lost a loved one to CANCER, ever subpoenaed the Ontario Health System for the numbers of deaths by cancer in those areas up to 25 miles East of those smokestacks, AND, determined there existed enough of a cancer “cluster”, and, took those findings to a lawyer….., the Ontario Public would be facing a grievous mega lawsuit that would make ‘Erin Brocovitch’ look pale in comparison… Having run a Convenience Store in Rainham Centre for fifteen years, I often questioned the number of deaths, from cancer, in the families and couples that patronized my business… My wife’s own battle with breast cancer made me even more acutely aware of something naggingly simple that was causing the outrageous numbers of cancers.

It wasn’t until I wound up working with a fellow employee, at a firm I had been with for over 10 years as well as running the Store, who happened to have grown up in Liverpool, England,… and we, one day, were discussing the Nanticoke Generating Facility and it’s mountains of fly-ash, and he said to me, “Bill, they used to make a cinder-block out of that fly-ash that they called ‘fly-brick’.. but, they built a few suburban townhouse complexes with them, and, all the kids started to get cancers,… Mostly throat and lung cancers, but there was a lot of Leukemias as well..”

That got me to thinking about the premise for this article.. and, when I started looking on the internet for some background to his tale, and the corelation to the ‘cancer cluster’ that seems to be in our area down-wind of those stacks, this link was the first hit… Silo Direct Link to coal-ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste YOU, make your own decision in this election… I’m going Green.. Bill Stewart is a writer for The Silo. Search his name from any of our sites pages to read more articles from Bill.