Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal fired power plant in Harriman Tennessee spilled approximately 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River and surrounding areas. From The Alliance For Appalachia

This Tennessee TVA spill is over 40-48 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, if local news accounts are correct. This is a huge environmental disaster of epic proportions; approximately 500 million gallons of nasty black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. We’re “lucky” it was sludgy and slow moving, or thousands could have died. Click here to see an amazing aerial video of the spill – the big chunks in the river are mounds of coal ash.

In this case, pictures speak a thousand words and YES I will use this as another example of why we need to decentralize and obviously for renewable energy. What a horrible shame.

Here is some more information from Scientific American

The burning concentrates the impurities in the coal, including arsenic, lead and mercury, among many other potentially toxic contaminants. Coal ash is also radioactive.

But dealing with the 129 million tons of coal ash produced in the U.S. every year is not easy. Some 25 million tons of it is dumped in old coal mines, and some companies incorporate it into cement. The rest is typically dumped in landfills or stored in large coal-ash ponds like the one that collapsed. But many environmentalists argue for only disposing of it in lined landfills, to prevent contaminants from leaching out.