Coal-Fired Power Generation Facilities and Toxic Mercury

A New York Times editorial today highlights the problem of "ground level pollutants" such as mercury caused by coal-fired power generation facilities: (link...)

Fish advisories in Watts Bar Reservoir were prompted, in large part, by concerns that mercury was moving up the food chain from benthic organisms to catfish and other bottom feeding fish and waterfowl. As it bio-accumulates in the top of the food chain, it can reach lethal levels. We are at the very top of most, if not all food chains, as humans eat everything imaginable from plant, fish, fowl, mammal, reptile, and amphibian. This may be why all of nature fears a hungry human, but I digress.

It is a well established fact that methyl-mercury, what mercury becomes when it interacts with the environment, causes neurological and brain developmental damage. We already have a critical situation due to DOE mercury spills into surface and ground waters at the Oak Ridge facility. Add Kingston Fossil emissions, and we are in a mercury hot spot.

Children and young adults that were born and raised in the Kingston area would definitely constitute a high risk population, which begs the question; is the mental acuity of our younger citizens seriously impaired? If so, how can they be expected to deal with this legacy mess we are turning over to them?

Living and teaching Earth friendly sustainable agricultural practices.

Do you want to know what it is like to grow up in this environment right across the lake from Kingston Coal Fire Plant on Emory River Rd.? I started living near the Coal Fire Plant when I was 7 years old with my parents. So 53 years of my life was spent within one quarter mile of the plant on the water front.

Well, here is what you are leaving to your children. First of all after about 20 years or sooner, fatigue sets in and then headaches, (lots of headaches), respiratory problems, broncitis, asthma, and then after 7 more years, high blood pressure comes along. And none of this ever goes away. It never goes away. After that crying a lot starts happening and you don't know why you cry so much, and over such little things. Two years after that paranoia sets in, and you think that someone is trying to kill you. Everyone starts thinking you are crazy, because you cry so much. About 5 more years after that you start putting on weight and can't get if off, because you are too tired to exercise any longer and the toxins are getting stored into the fat tissue, so your body won't let go of the fat because it needs it for the storage of the toxins. You keep getting sicker and sicker. Then the blisters start coming every once in a while. You wonder what the blisters are from and why they hurt so much. They look like a chemical burn. They hurt like a burn, and it takes about 1 month for them to heal. You think that you are allergic to everything. It never gets better. You feel so bad you want to die sometimes. (When my two younger brothers and younger sister left my parents home, they did not build homes on the lake near Kingston Coal Fire Plant like I did, and to this day they don't even come close to being sick like me.)

Just think about it, I was a little seven year old girl who lived less than a quarter mile from Kingston Coal Fire Plant, and now I am sixty. Then the spill happened last December and I wanted to die after that, because I got so sick I couldn't hardly stay out of bed. I was too sick and fatigued to stay up. What kind of life is that?? My whole body hurt, and my eyes burned all the time, and my head hurt all the time. The blisters started coming on my skin a lot more often, because everything that I touched, that apparently had the ash on it, hurt me. I had to move away and leave the home that I loved. It was my paradise place where I thought that I would live at until I died.

So that is what you are leaving to your children. It is a horrible future to hand down to any child.

You indeed moved across from the plant at a difficult time in our path to learning of the dangers of coal fired plants. Kingston steam plant had only been on line a few years. It was still operating with its centrifugal fly ash separators. They didn't work very well. In the sixties, they were replaced with the first electrostatic precipitators and what they pulled out of the air went in the ash pond. You may have seen the dikes being built, the ones that held the slime. TVA kept the ash wet, soaking it under as much as four feet of water, to try to keep it out of the air. Just as they denied the ash dust storms after the spill, they failed to prevent the ash from flying in the wind. Just as they used a Dept. of Transportation description of fly ash to deny it could be less than ten microns (micro meters), their own drill samples showed as much half of it to be 2.5 micron and below. It's a real shame that TVA's denials of the hazards of coal fly ash have caused you so much grief. May time flush TVA's toxins and lies from your body and soul.

One of the questions I asked our County Commission on Monday night was "what kind of legacy did they want to leave for our children and grandchildren"?
Are we going to leave them with the impression that money is more important than human life? What we do now concerning this disaster and what we do about the proposed landfill will prove what kind of people we have in Roane County. It is time we showed our youth that we care more about them than we do the mighty dollar. I ask all of you, "Please Help"?

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

To date, the failure to expand Medicaid / TennCare has cost the State of Tennessee ? in lost federal funding.

Mercury is one of the worst long-term toxins

They Will End Up Like Me

I am so sorry to read of your painful experiences

One of the questions

Comment viewing options

Eco warriors and politics

Science and stuff

Discussing

Lost Medicaid Funding

Sponsors

Brother Websites

Other RoaneViews blogs