A summary of Insightus' latest investigative report: Duke Energy’s Poisoned Power: How the giant utility's bad science – and friends in high places – hide the poisoning of North Carolina's drinking water by Duke's coal ash
Coal — about 1 billion tons of it a year — still powers a third of all electricity generation in the U.S., in the process creating 200 billion pounds of toxic coal ash annually. Coal-burning power plants like those operated by North Carolina’s Duke Energy (America’s largest electric utility) mix that ash with water, pump the slop (brimming with lead, mercury, arsenic, and cancer-causing chromium-6) into unlined ponds beside the state’s major rivers...and forget about it.
But in the aftermath of North Carolina’s 2014 Dan River disaster, when a drainage pipe failure spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan, the state legislature passed into law without Republican Gov. McCrory’s signature the Coal Ash Management Act (CAMA), mandating the closure and remediation of all of Duke Energy’s 14 coal ash dumps across the state. The law empowers state regulators to decide, on a case-by-case basis, how soon each of those sites must be closed (ranging from 5 to 15 years from now), and with what degree of cleanup (ranging from just throwing a bit of dirt over the top of the mess, to excavating and moving it inland to dry, lined, closely-monitored landfills — the latter a multi-billion dollar proposition).
Regulators will base those decisions primarily on scientific data, produced by Duke Energy itself, regarding the degree of hazard to public health each individual site presents. But those regulators — political appointees of Gov. McCrory at the Dept. of Environmental Quality — are, like McCrory himself, ex-Duke Energy executives and are ‘business-friendly’ in the extreme. Will they err on the side of caution, thus protecting the next generation of North Carolina children, or instead in favor of Duke Energy’s bottom line, saving the corporation billions?
With those high stakes and long odds in mind, Insightus (a non-profit ‘data-driven activism’ organization) has just completed a review of representative data submitted by Duke Energy to the state in support of its contention that one of its 14 sites, Allen Steam Station in Gaston County, NC, poses “no imminent hazard to human health” (which, if true, should qualify it for late closure and minimal remediation).
Our investigation’s findings are too voluminous to detail here. But, in summary, we caught Duke in the act of committing just about every trick of willfully bad science known to man, including:
- Cherry-picking(ignoring data which leads to a conclusion you don’t want to hear). A critical question regarding whether or not Allen Station’s coal ash dump poses an imminent hazard to its 100+ neighboring residents (who draw their water from private wells) is: which direction does groundwater flow away from the ash dump? Hydrogeologists determine the direction(s) of groundwater flow by comparing water elevations in a network of observation wells (underground water flows ‘downhill’ from a higher water table elevation to a lower one). But, with 45 shallow observation wells’ data available to it, Duke Energy chose to compare water elevations from just 9 wells. Perhaps not surprisingly, those 9 data points all suggested that groundwater flows from the ash dump away from neighboring wells. We cranked the numbers for the remaining wells and found that the data which Duke ‘forgot’ points in the opposite direction, documenting groundwater flow from the ash dump straight toward neighboring residential wells.
- Methodological errors in computer modeling. The fine points of computer modeling are far too wonky to detail here; suffice it to say that we found that Duke’s computer model of contaminant transport underground was riddled with design errors which must necessarily lead to that worst of all sins, garbage in, garbage out. And, of course, the garbage that comes out of Duke’s computer model is highly favorable to the corporation’s contention that Allen presents no imminent hazard to human health.
- Unsupported ‘background’ measurements. Carcinogenic chemicals like chromium-6 and vanadium do occur naturally in groundwater — usually at very low levels — so some baseline level of these chemicals is attributable to Nature, not to coal ash. Measuring those baselines requires sampling of wells located sufficiently far away from — and demonstrated to be unaffected by— sources of pollution. But Duke chose ‘background’ wells which our analysis indicates may be located within the plume of toxic chemicals streaming away from its ash dump at Allen Station, and the company offered no evidence that those wells sample ‘background’ water. As one of my colleagues observed, “If the baseline wells are actually contaminated, then toxic becomes the new normal.“
- Moving the goalposts. Two of the most prominent carcinogens detected in residential wells neighboring Allen Station, chromium-6 and vanadium, are not currently regulated under federal drinking water safety standards. But CAMA required the state’s Dept. of Environmental Quality to test residential wells within half a mile of Duke’s ash dumps for those and other pollutants, and also required state epidemiologists to decide what levels of those contaminants would present a hazard for nearby residents. Based on the standards those experts chose, the state’s health department issued ‘do-not-drink’ advisories to hundreds of Duke’s neighbors in response to the well test data. But Gov. McCrory’s highly politicized Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) protested that move, successfully pressuring health officials to rescind those warnings, arguing that those residents’ well water “is as safe to drink as most cities and towns across the state” [sic]. We crunched the numbers for chromium-6 and vanadium levels in four major North Carolina cities and proved DEQ wrong — Duke’s neighbors are drinking well water containing tens to hundreds of times higher levels of these carcinogens than nearby city-dwellers are exposed to in their water.
- Lack of objective review. It goes without saying that Duke’s scientists would be hard-pressed to be perfectly objective in their studies, when billions of their employer’s dollars (and thus, their jobs) are on the line. That’s where outside review comes in. Duke chose as the reviewer for its studies the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry organization on whose board of directors Duke Energy holds a seat. We reviewed EPRI’s review, and documented multiple examples of deficiencies so obvious that they must be considered to reflect either unprofessional levels of carelessness, or else an extraordinary willingness to ‘see no evil’.
Hardly a day passes lately in which North Carolina’s coal ash predicament — and yet more dirty tricks by Duke’s friends in government designed to avoid real solutions — aren’t in the news. Meanwhile, the words of one young mother movingly capture many innocent Tar Heels’ fears:
I just remember shock, feeling shock, and I couldn't hardly hear what they were saying to me because I was replaying in my mind every time I had fixed a jug of Kool Aid, every time I had made a pot of tea. So I couldn't even pay attention to what they were saying because, as a mom, all I could think about was, "What have I done? What have I allowed my children to drink?"
For the complete story, read our full report online.