A little known federal agency, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry [ATSDR, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] charged with protecting public health from environmental contaminants, is the latest subject of hearings for its failure to protect the public from the possible hazards of burning waste coal.
Scientific integrity was suppressed and compromised during an Administration that bowed to business, industry, lobbyists and wealthy campaign donors.
The hazards to health and the environment posed by Dirty Coal and burning dirty coal waste are included in an ISS article [excerpts below, but a definite must read in its entirety]:
[Dr. Ronald Hoffman, a blood cancer expert and professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York] was part of a team of researchers who recently discovered a statistically significant cluster of a relatively rare blood cancer [polycythemia vera] in Pennsylvania -- and the possibility that it could be linked to the burning of waste coal.
[Said Hoffman]....we questioned if there was some outside constituency who ATSDR was responding to that made them act like they just wanted this whole matter to go away."
[ATSDR] Agency officials made repeated requests that he not exhibit his maps suggesting a geographic relationship between the polycythemia vera cases and pollution sources [map shown in original article]
[Hoffman's study] includes the community where multiple cases of the cancer were identified along one road.This cluster happens to be located within a few miles of seven waste-coal-burning power plants. It's also located near several Superfund toxic waste sites. But the suspicion that the waste-coal plants are playing a special role in the cluster is heightened by the fact that an independent analysis of state cancer registry data found that two other populous Pennsylvania counties with dramatically elevated rates of polycythemia vera are also located near waste-coal-burning power plants.
Because these toxic waste dumps are often located on lands long abandoned by the mining companies, cleaning them up often falls to the government -- and it can be an expensive proposition. In Pennsylvania, for example, the average per-acre reclamation cost for coal refuse piles is as high as $40,000.
So when a technology came along in the 1980s that offered a cheap way of dealing with the waste, government officials across the coalfields rushed to embrace it. The technology -- known as "fluidized bed combustion" -- allows the waste coal to be burned for power.
According to the Energy Justice Network, there are now 18 FBC plants nationwide using waste coal as a primary fuel. Pennsylvania has the most with 14, followed by West Virginia with three and Utah with one. There are another 13 plants nationwide burning waste coal as a secondary fuel -- four in Virginia, three each in Alabama and South Carolina, two in Pennsylvania, and one in Mississippi. And there are plans for as many as 17 more plants that burn waste coal in states including Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Some of these facilities also burn other wastes including fuel oil and tires.
Plants using FBC technology operate at lower temperatures and oxygen levels than conventional coal-fired power plants. They also use limestone to capture sulfur during combustion in order to reduce sulfur oxide pollution.
But this technology presents serious environmental drawbacks. Lower temperatures and oxygen levels, low-quality fuels and limestone injection have all been found to contribute to increased emissions of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), toxic compounds known to cause genetic mutations and cancer.
[In 2006, Pennsylvania Department of Health]...Conducted at the request of local residents concerned about unusual patterns of cancer, the assessment found that two of the counties had unusually elevated rates of polycythemia vera, a relatively rare malignancy marked by the overproduction of red blood cells.
ATSDR site
ISS
It sounds like major housecleaning is overdue at ATSDR to restore scientific integrity not beholden to Dirty Coal. It seems like these scientists have forgotten their charge.
Let's not forget that Massachusetts' residents are not immune to the hazards posed by Dirty Coal: Dirty Coal: Time To Kick Ash!
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