Ash spill shows need for rules, senator says

Everyone points to a similar ash spill in 2005 at PPL Corp.'s Martins Creek power plant in Pennsylvania as a clue to the costs facing TVA. Some 100 million gallons of ash and water escaped through a defective drain in a lined sediment pond, about a tenth of the size of the TVA flood.

The PPL spill covered a much smaller area, coating only 20 acres and affected no homes. Most toxins flowed into the Delaware River, where they were vacuumed up. That cleanup cost $37 million, including a $1.5 million fine.

"Ours was much smaller in a number of ways," PPL spokesman Paul Wirth said. "If you look at the ash alone, we had 85,000 cubic yards escape. They (TVA) had 5.4 million. That's less than 2 percent of the amount of ash that came out of our basin."

The TVA also faces costs if it changes the way it stores coal ash to prevent future disasters. TVA is likely to install a dry ash disposal system at Kingston at untold cost. After a leak at the Kingston dike in 2003, TVA considered switching from wet ash disposal to dry ash, but considered the $25 million estimate too expensive. Dry disposal increases chances the ash becomes airborne, but eliminates the need for sedimentation ponds.

"I can tell you it is going to be a lot more (to convert now) than the $25 million they refused to spend back then to make sure the structure is safe," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's national coal campaign.

Changes at other TVA plants?
A conversion to dry ash disposal at Kingston could prompt demand for similar safeguards at five other TVA wet-ash coal-fired power plants in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. TVA gets 60 percent of its electricity from coal and has five coal-fired stations already with dry ash disposal.

If ratepayers do face an electricity increase, it would come on the heels of another hefty hike. TVA adopted a 20 percent electric rate increase last fall to support a $12.6 billion budget. The rate hike was the largest in three decades and blamed largely on rising fuel costs.

As a federal corporation, TVA can issue bonds but can't issue stock for financing, so its options to generate more money are limited. The cleanup bill also comes on top of hefty debt. While TVA has been able to trim its bonded debt by more than $2.5 billion since 1997 to about $25 billion, TVA watchers have worried the federal agency could hit its congressional limit of $30 billion if it pursues plans to complete or build more nuclear plants.

Sansom said TVA won't shirk its duty to victims of the ash spill even though it will be expensive to recover.

"We are embarrassed about it; wished it didn't happen," Sansom said. "But we have got to do what we can to make everything right."

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