Report renews efforts against proposed Santee Cooper plant

Local environmentalists are finding new reasons to fight against Santee Cooper’s proposed coal-fired power plant thanks to documents recently released by President Obama’s administration.

According to a summarization report by released today by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, two national environmental watchdog groups, the Environmental Protection Agency researched the safety of coal-fired facilities, but never released the findings of the study.

The Pee Dee Energy Campus, Santee Cooper’s proposed 600-megawatt coal-fired generation facility, would be located on a 2,709-acre tract in Kingsburg and feature at least one coal ash pond. The facility is scheduled to become operational sometime after 2012 at a cost of about $1.25 billion to build.

Ben Moore, director of climate and energy at the Coastal Conservation League, said the administration change is the primary reason for the release of the findings.

“We know that the previous administration had different views on environmental issues than this one,” he said.

Moore said he expects change is coming to federal regulations regarding coal plants.

“Right now, (coal ash ponds) are not regulated as hazardous waste,” he said. “I think this indicates that the era where utilities could just build these things and not have to deal with the regulations that apply to normal hazardous waste is ending.”

Moore said many people don’t realize that the Pee Dee Energy Campus is planned with at least one ash pond on site.

“Santee Cooper often says this is one of the cleanest coal plants built in the country and they’re really talking about air emissions,” Moore said. “They’re basically scrubbing out a lot of these pollutants. Then they go into these ash ponds and into our drinking water.”

Nancy Cave, Northcoast office director of the Coastal Conservation League, said the report shows what the CCL has said all along: coal-fired power plants are not safe.

“They basically show that there is a high risk of cancer ... to Americans living near landfills and wet ponds that are associated with coal plants,” she said.

The summarization said that under the Bush Administration, the EPA made a concerted effort to delay the release of this information.

“We feel that this is just part of the need for regulation on coal plants,” she said. “It continues to be part of the argument on why Santee Cooper should not be building a coal plant.”

Freedom of Information Act requests to EPA during the Bush Administration were denied or resulted in the production of documents with the cancer and noncancer risk estimates blacked out.

In the report, the EPA predicted that unlined ash ponds can increase the risk of other “noncancer” health effects, such as damage to vital organs like the liver and kidneys and, in the case of lead, damage to the central nervous system. According to the EPA, unlined waste ponds that mix ash and coal refuse will result in exposures up to nine times the federal standard for lead.

“We hope that this type of information will lead to congress beginning to regulate coal waste,” Cave said.