In May, Coal Tattoo covered the release of a once-secret U.S. EPA report that examined the risks of living near a coal-fired power plant ash dump. I wrote at the time:

Every year, coal-fired power plants dump nearly 100 million tons of various wastes — fly ash, bottom ash, and scrubber sludge — into landfills and impoundments. Can living near one of these dumps increase your risk of getting cancer?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency thinks so. But under the Bush administration, the agency didn’t want you to know that. Now, the Obama EPA has released a previously secret study that found residents near these coal-ash dumps have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated with arsenic.

I also explained:

Now, the risk numbers — dealing with additional health risks for folks who rely on well water and live near where coal-ash dumps contaminated groundwater — were for the most part released two years ago, when EPA published an August 2007 Risk Assessment study. But what’s new here is that essentially the same information was available to EPA nearly five years earlier in this October 2002 report — but the Bush EPA never gave the information to the public. In March, the Obama EPA quietly posted the document on an agency rulemaking Web site. (It’s also important to note that the August 2007 report itself didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved from reporters like me, even after the TVA disaster).

Apparently, the CBS show 60 Minutes asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson about this report during an interview for their piece on coal ash, which was broadcast back in early October.  The questions prompted Jackson to ask the EPA Office of Inspector General to look into allegations that agency officials took part in a “cover up” of this coal-ash risk assessment.

The IG report, available here,  concludes that the risk data was not published in 2002 because of an “oversight.” The report says:

We did not find evidence of criminal or improper activities causing delays during this rulemaking process.

And:

We concluded that there is no evidence of any effort to improperly suppress the release of scientific information during the rulemaking process.

But, the report notes that another key document, a 2005 “sensitivity analysis”  meant to validate the risk assessment numbers, has still not been made public. The IG said that EPA is “addressing errors” in that document and is finalizing it. It will be reviewed then by the White House Office of Management and Budget and then made public, the IG report said.

Also buried in the IG report is an interesting bit of news. It’s in footnote 14 on page 7:

We identified a potential issue related to EPA’s promotion of beneficial use through its Coal Combustion partnership and have referred the question [of] how EPA established a reasonable determination for these endorsements to the appropriate OIG office for evaluation.

This appears to refer to another issue previously covered in Coal Tattoo here, that is EPA’s program to promote the use of coal-fired power plant waste for various consumer, agricultural and industrial uses — without actually checking to make sure doing so is safe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Coal ash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.