Environmentalists Rattled by Radioactive Risks of Toxic Coal Ash

When the wind blows the wrong direction, Esther Calhoun can smell it. 

Calhoun’s home is often downwind from the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown, Alabama, a site that accepted toxic coal ash in the wake of an environmental disaster in neighboring Tennessee. 

Calhoun spoke out against the landfill at the time, a move that landed her in court, a defendant in a $30 million lawsuit accusing her and other residents of libel and slander against the company that owned the landfill. That suit is over now, settled in the community’s favor, but the impacts of the coal ash Calhoun decried are still simmering. 

In November 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a draft risk assessment that updated the agency’s understanding of the health risks associated with coal ash, the waste left over after coal has been burned to produce electricity. 

The assessment, part of EPA’s ongoing effort to expand regulations around coal ash, concludes that even small amounts of the toxic material can lead to harmful health effects, including risks of cancer 35 times higher than previously suggested by the federal regulator. The draft, which focuses on the use of coal ash in previously unregulated settings, often for so-called “beneficial” uses such as structural fill, also outlined that the presence of heavy metals like arsenic and radioactive isotopes like radium in coal ash waste could pose significant risks to human health. The draft found that those exposed to coal ash could face an “elevated cancer risk from incidental ingestion of arsenic and radium, in addition to direct exposure to gamma radiation from radium.”

These new findings raise concerns about the continued storage of coal ash in unlined pits across Alabama, experts have said, but they also raise questions about what risks citizens are being exposed to in their everyday lives. So-called “beneficial uses” of coal ash like its use in structural fill, go largely unregulated in many states. In Alabama, for example, the state environmental regulator told Inside Climate News that the agency “does not have regulations to address the use of CCR material.” CCR, or coal combustion residuals, is industry jargon for coal ash waste. 

In a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan sent after the risk assessment’s publication, more than 150 community groups from across the country asked the federal agency to address those concerns directly:

“We ask the EPA to take the following actions: (1) quantify the full range of health risks posed by coal ash used as structural fill, particularly the risk from radiation; (2) investigate areas where coal ash fill has been placed near residences and require cleanup; (3) initiate a rulemaking to prohibit the use of coal ash as structural fill; and (4) issue a public advisory recommending that coal ash fill in residential areas be immediately terminated pending a final rulemaking.” 

Calhoun said that over time, she’s become skeptical of regulators at both the state and federal level when it comes to protecting her community and those like it from the health effects of coal ash, whether it be in structural fill, a landfill, or a waste pond at a utility site. Risk assessments like the one issued by EPA amount to cheap talk, Calhoun said. Only concrete action based on those assessments, she added, will show that the agency is serious about protecting ordinary people. 

How Did We Get Here?

Calhoun thought she knew where the threat came from. 

For her, it began in 2008, when a coal ash impoundment in Kingston, Tennessee, breached, spilling more than a billion gallons of toxic sludge onto over 300 acres of land and into the Emery River channel. The result was one of the largest environmental disasters in US history. The spill cost the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which owned the coal impoundment, over $1 billion to clean up. Ten years after the spill, dozens of the roughly 900 workers employed during the cleanup were already dead. More than 250 were chronically ill. 

In 2010, with approval from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), TVA transported more than 800 million gallons of toxic waste from the Kingston site to Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown, Alabama, a majority-Black town of around 2,000 people. 

That’s when Calhoun spoke up, calling out what she and other residents viewed as environmental racism. They filed civil rights complaints against ADEM alleging the regulator had acted in a racially discriminatory manner in allowing the coal ash to be placed in a nearly all-Black community. The EPA, under President Donald Trump, would eventually…