The Tennessee Valley Authority Produced a Booklet Downplaying Coal Ash Risks. Top Researchers Call it ‘Dishonest.’ 

A 35-page booklet distributed in a public meeting by the Tennessee Valley Authority about coal ash is filled with “lies” and misleading information, according to coal ash researchers.  

The booklet, titled “Know the Facts: Coal Ash,” did not include any TVA branding or author information, but the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says TVA employees distributed the pamphlets at a public comment session on the agency’s coal ash remediation plan for one of its coal plants in Tennessee. 

Avner Vengosh, chair of environmental quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the booklet “unbelievable” and part of a “misleading public campaign.”

“It’s scary,” Vengosh told Inside Climate News after reviewing the booklet. “It’s like alternative reality.”

Vengosh leads a research group at Duke that has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on coal ash contamination in the environment. Coal ash, or coal combustion residuals (CCR), is the solid material left over after burning coal. It contains potentially toxic levels of substances like mercury, arsenic and lead that are associated with human health problems, including cancer.

“I’m not sure why they’re having this campaign, but basically everything there is lies, to be the most direct I can,” Vengosh said of the booklet.

Tracy O’Neill, decarbonization advocacy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said she picked up the booklet from a TVA table at the April 15 public comment session held by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on the TVA’s coal ash remediation plan for its Cumberland Fossil Plant.  

“At the conclusion of the TDEC presentation, everyone was kind of mingling, and I went to the TVA table, which was outside of the meeting room itself,” O’Neill said. “It was directly outside the door, and there were maybe a dozen or so of these packets.”

The booklet’s first page states “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous,” noting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision not to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. 

Instead, EPA classifies coal ash as a special waste, along with cement kiln dust, crude oil and natural gas waste, mining and mine processing waste, and other forms of fossil fuel combustion waste. 

The TVA booklet does not mention that classification. Instead, it uses charts and diagrams to show that coal ash contains many of the same elements found in “rocks and soil” and noting that the harmful contaminants in coal ash are also found in the natural environment, in trace amounts. The booklet highlighted benefits of coal ash recycling and listed other ways that people could be exposed to coal ash contaminants like arsenic, mercury, lead and other heavy metals. 

Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said the pamphlet included “many deceptive statements.”

“The headline declares that ‘Coal Ash Is Not Hazardous;’ this is simply untrue,” Frumkin said in an email. “The list of coal ash ingredients in the pamphlet omits dangerous metals; this is dishonest.

“The pamphlet minimizes the risk of coal ash by equating coal combustion to campfires and coal ash to garden soil; this is like equating an automatic weapon to a slingshot.”

Frumkin, the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said the pamphlet’s claims were “plain wrong.”

“The pamphlet implies that EPA has found coal ash to be free of hazards; in fact, EPA concluded in 2014 that coal ash in surface impoundments and landfills poses risks to human health,” Frumkin said. “Overall this pamphlet seems much more dedicated to protecting polluters than to protecting the health of people and communities.”

TVA: Fact Sheets ‘Advance Public Understanding’

The TVA is America’s largest public utility, created by the federal government to distribute electricity throughout the Tennessee Valley. TVA service territory includes Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia. 

TVA did not respond to Inside Climate News’ questions about why the booklet at the meeting had no TVA branding. But TVA spokesman Scott Brooks said in an email that the “fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources, including federal and state agencies, scientific studies, and publicly available regulatory materials.”

“The common narrative around coal ash is not rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today,” Brooks said. “We owe it to the communities we serve to provide clear, factual information about coal ash, including its constituents, how it is regulated as a non-hazardous solid waste under federal and state regulations, and the many ways it is safely managed and beneficially used.”

But the TVA fact sheets lacked any mention of the potential dangers of the contaminants of coal ash. The EPA’s National Enforcement and Compliance Initiative website calls coal ash “potentially toxic,” and notes “coal ash can contain contaminants known to cause cancer and other serious health effects.” 

“The harm to human health and the environment from noncompliance with EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Coal Ash Program can be significant and occur through catastrophic releases of contaminants into the surrounding environment or long-term release of contamination into groundwater, drinking water, or surface water,” the EPA website states. 

The TVA booklet includes sections for many of the potentially harmful contaminants in coal ash, such as mercury, arsenic, selenium, boron and thallium. Each section includes a disclaimer that the publication was “for informational purposes only and should not be considered public health or professional medical advice.” 

The printed booklet then provided URLs for a CDC website for each contaminant, advising readers to visit those sites for “more information on the potential health effects” of the compound in question. 

TVA’s response to Inside Climate News did not address Vengosh’s comments, but focused on his lab’s credentials, saying the Nicholas School “is not certified by the state of North Carolina,” and “nor are their academic and research methodologies approved by the EPA.” 

Vengosh responded that TVA “denies the scientific facts that were published in peer-reviewed high level journals and were evaluated by numerous outside scholars.” 

“I think it is unfortunate they keep misleading the public about basic scientific facts,” he said.

TVA’s Troubling Coal Ash Legacy

Stephen Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, based in Knoxville, said that TVA’s attitude was particularly troublesome, given the company’s coal ash history that includes the massive 2008 coal ash spill after a dam breach at its plant in Kingston, Tennessee. 

“This is not unusual for TVA to basically have their staff pushing out coal industry propaganda downplaying and misleading the public about the dangers of coal ash,” Smith said. “And the sad irony of it is that TVA had the largest coal ash disaster of any utility in the country, and workers who were involved in the TVA cleanup actually died.”

The Kingston spill released 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry into the Emory and Clinch rivers, destroying three homes and damaging dozens more. In the six-year cleanup that followed, hundreds of cleanup workers reported developing illnesses they attributed to coal ash exposure. Dozens of workers died and others suffered ailments, from skin rashes to lung disease and cancer. 

In 2018, a federal jury found the TVA contractor overseeing the cleanup failed to protect workers or properly inform them about the dangers of working around coal ash.  

After beginning his second term, President Donald Trump fired three Biden-appointed members of the TVA board of directors and has appointed four of the seven current TVA board members since last July. The Trump-picked board also approved TVA’s new interim CEO in April.

TVA had been advancing plans to retire all of its coal units but has now backtracked on those commitments under its new leadership, Smith said.  

“It’s breathtaking that they’re now going this far backwards,” he added. 

The pamphlet given out at the meeting did not list an author, but O’Neill said TVA manager Missy Hedgecoth was present at the table and speaking with attendees about coal ash. 

Hedgecoth has made multiple presentations at the annual World of Coal Ash conference sponsored by the American Coal Ash Association and the University of Kentucky about interacting with the public about coal ash, and her title is listed as TVA’s CCR program manager. 

At the 2024 WOCA conference, she is listed as co-author on a presentation titled “Coal Ash & the Public – Tell your story before someone else does!” that included some of the same graphics used in the TVA pamphlet from April 15. The presentation description says the coal ash industry is “a convenient target” for negative press, and says the presentation will “focus on how TVA has utilized a variety of tools and resources to move the needle of public opinion across their seven-state service area.”

“Technical reports containing 99% good news can become grist for the mill due to a single line or paragraph that feeds a headline, particularly where human health is concerned,” the program description states. 

“Can you ensure that only good news is delivered to a waiting public? No. But through effective and targeted outreach tools, you can work to level the playing field in the court of public opinion, reducing unwanted impacts to your organization.”

The presentation includes what appear to be screenshots of pages nearly identical to the ones in the booklet TVA handed out at the public meeting. But the slides from the 2024 presentation include the TVA logo on the cover page and the top right corner of each face sheet. The paper copies distributed at the meeting had no TVA logo, according to O’Neill. 

The Stewart County Standard newspaper quoted Hedgecoth at the event saying people “play up arsenic, lead and mercury. 

“We only have four constituents here that every so often get a little bit above the exceedance, one of them is arsenic,” Hedgecoth said, according to the newspaper. “The requirement is 10 micrograms per liter and we got to 13.

“If you put that into perspective about arsenic, that is about the amount you would get by drinking one cup of hot cocoa, a glass of wine has three times that.” 

Vengosh called that statement “totally incorrect.”

“In many cases the contaminated groundwater reached hundreds of micrograms per liter, far above the 10 micrograms per liter that is the EPA drinking water standard,” Vengosh said in a follow-up email. “I have no idea where the number ‘13 micrograms per liter’ came from; it could be one case, but there are numerous cases across the USA where arsenic content in contaminated water was [greater than] 100 micrograms per liter. 

“This is a misleading public campaign,” he said. “I have no idea where they brought the values of arsenic in wine or hot cocoa.”

Asked to clarify the comments attributed to Hedgecoth at the meeting, TVA did not respond.