Glenn Puit: Wolverine Bets Its Ash on Lake Huron

Perhaps the biggest unknown in Wolverine Power Cooperative’s Rogers City coal plant proposal is how the firm will dispose of toxic coal and petroleum-coke fly ash, on site, without poisoning the waters of nearby Lake Huron.

Wolverine’s “Clean Energy Venture” calls for building a 600-megawatt “solid fuel” plant in a limestone quarry near the lake’s shoreline and burying the ash there.

Coal fly ash is laden with mercury, among other heavy metals. Pet coke ash has no mercury, but its list of toxic heavy metals is longer, and they show up in larger amounts.

But there are few details on how Wolverine will contain the ash with cancer-causing contaminants in a land fill in either its Presque Isle County special use permit or in the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s draft Permit to Install, the subject of last Tuesday’s final agency hearing in Lansing.

That bothered former county planning commissioner Tom Harkleroad when he questioned Wolverine closely about the landfill during his panel’s consideration of the plant in 2006. Mr. Harkleroad noticed that the landfill was originally proposed for an elevation below Lake Huron’s water line, even though lake water continually leaks into the quarry.

“I’d never heard of a landfill below the lake level, right next to the lake,” Mr. Harkleroad told the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service. “How do you put that fly ash, with all that mercury and heavy metals, down in that hole below the lake level? They are pumping water out of (that) hole constantly. How are you doing that without putting that mercury and heavy metals back out into the water?”

But it’s unclear that putting the landfill above the water line would help. Limestone is highly porous, and the county’s pervasive limestone geology does not bode well for landfill leaks, particularly so close to Lake Huron.

“They wouldn’t answer the questions,” Mr. Harkleroad said of Wolverine.

The firm must apply for a state landfill permit, but remains mostly silent about its ash disposal plans. As it has since we published our first news article about the Rogers City plant, Wolverine again declined to answer our questions.

The company briefly addressed waste storage at a March 20, 2008 meeting in Rogers City. According to public records, Wolverine spokesman Ken Bradstreet said landfill questions had already been answered, that the “landfill will be sited above the lake level,” and that he “hopes these comments will put the issue to rest.”

Hardly. One needs to look no further than the environmental disaster unleashed last month by one of the Tennesee Valley Authority’s coal plants, near Knoxville. A dike broke on a pond holding coal ash, sending a river of toxic sludge into the Tennessee River. The disaster smothered three hundred acres, destroyed homes, and contaminated the river and drinking water.

So, are we fear mongering about plans for Wolverine’s ash, as Mr. Bradstreet often says?

We report; you decide: It was revealed earlier this year in the Bay City Times that two coal ash landfills in Michigan’s Bay County have leached arsenic into Saginaw Bay for years. And The New York Times reports that the Tennessee dump is one of more than 1,300 in the United States that go unregulated and unmonitored. The paper noted that the dumps contain arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium-all threats to water supplies and human health.

“Scientists say that the key to the safe disposal of coal ash is to keep it away from water,” the Times reported.

Some states try. Iowa regulators developed new rules for coal ash dumps and landfills to keep “toxic coal ash out of Iowa’s water supplies,” but lobbying pressure sunk the proposal.

Here’s the good news: The Tennessee disaster prompted the federal government to consider further regulating coal ash disposal.

And here’s the bad news: Today, authorities discovered another leak at a coal plant waste storage pond, this one in Alabama.

And here’s the bottom line: As many environmental groups have long said, catchy coal industry public relations slogans like “clean coal” and “Clean Energy Venture” can’t cover up the filthy truth forever.