Professional Thoughts on the Tennessee Coal Ash Release and Cleanup Event

[Below is an op-ed piece that I sent to The Knoxville News Sentinel, 8 December 2019. The coal ash release event occurred in December 2008 when a TVA coal ash (fly ash) sludge pond in the Kingston, Tennessee area failed and sludge flowed out over a large area of land. TVA hired Jacobs Engineering to handle the extensive cleanup. As Jamie Satterfield, the News Sentinel’s excellent court/crime reporter who has been writing the News Sentinel’s long series on the coal ash spill, detailed in a series of articles, the cleanup workers were largely unprotected from the ash as they cleaned it up. Also, air filter results were inaccurate because the filters were tampered with, the workers were told the ash was so safe they could eat it, etc. This was shocking but not really surprising to people familiar with radiological work. Following the work, so many workers developed serious illnesses that the number seems statistically significant although no data has ever been presented. Further, these illnesses seemed to be fairly specific in their symptoms, as would be expected when the coal ash contained concentrated heavy metals and radioactivity (although as I note below, we would not expect to see effects of exposure to the radioactivity until more years had passed since the cleanup).

As usual, the News Sentinel did not choose to publish my piece, in fact did not even respond when I sent it in. The editor, Joel Christopher, had said in print that the News Sentinel reserved its op-ed pieces for those authors who were “experts and policymakers with direct and deep knowledge of a topic”. I thought that I might qualify as such here since I had had a long career as a radiological engineer and health physicist and was broadly trained in various aspects of safety in radiological work areas. Apparently Mr. Christopher disagreed. I sent the piece to Jamie Satterfield in an FYI manner. She said in her modest and polite way that Mr. Christopher had been unavailable (sick or busy) and would undoubtedly look at it soon. Well, if he did, he chose not to publish it.]

The fly ash controversy reminds me of when, as a radiological engineer in the mid-1980s, I was assigned to do a calculation involving fly ash.

I was working for an architect-engineer firm that did designs for power plants, including nuclear and coal-fired ones. A client wanted to put a nuclear power plant on a space-limited site that already had two coal-fired plants. The question was whether the workers on the coal-fired sites would have to wear radiation badges once the nuclear plant went into operation. So the external radiation dose to these workers from the fly ash – with its known content of radionuclides – would have to be calculated as a contribution to the site background dose.

I was given a table of radionuclides found in a representative sample of fly ash, with typical concentrations; I used a radiological source program to generate a spectrum of gamma rays. I spoke with a foreman at the coal-fired site, who confirmed that the most exposed worker would be the one in the operations monitoring tower overlooking the ash pile; he noted that a typical accumulation would be two days, but on long holiday weekends there could be four days’ worth. A study of site drawings enabled me to figure out the gamma-ray paths and model the 3-D physical layout. All of this went into a radiological dose rate program.

The results popped my eyes open: a worker who routinely spent hours per shift up in the tower would receive a large fraction of the legal annual dose limit of 100 mrem for a member of the public, which is what the coal plant workers were considered to be. Of course, conservative assumptions were used; still, even with more realistic assumptions the annual dose from the ash pile was not negligible. Further, this was only the external dose and did not include the internal dose from breathing in or ingesting radioactivity on the ash particules drifting around in the air. (That was outside the scope of the calculation since the badge would not measure external dose). Finally, it appeared that just the dose from the ash pile via both routes would significantly exceed the probable coal worker dose from the neighboring nuclear plant.

As my description above shows, it is practical to estimate external dose before work begins. The same is true of internal dose, although it is harder to calculate. TVA and Jacobs Engineering have never said they didn’t know that there were radionuclides in the fly ash; of course that has been known for a long time. In fact, I would bet that TVA, with its long experience with both coal and nuclear plants and with its many radiological professionals, has in hand both calculated and measured data on external and internal dose rates from fly ash. The Jacobs Engineering radiological safety people were likely also aware of these dose rates. So it was exceedingly cynical, not to mention unethical and immoral, for one or more Jacobs people to tell workers that they could eat the stuff. The statement might be literally true: radiation dose incurred via the ingestion route (by mouth into the stomach and intestines) was probably far less than dose incurred via the inhalation or external routes. But ignoring the latter two routes, as was done by denying protective equipment to the workers, was just criminal.

Radiological analyses do not even touch on the hazards of taking in nonradioactive but still hazardous substances in the ash, such as the heavy metals, which were the probable cause of any damage suffered by workers. I say “probable” because the health issues began relatively soon in time after most of the exposure; damage due to radioactivity has a time lapse of some years before it appears, usually in the form of some type of cancer.

What can be done now? For exposed workers and their families, there is only compensation in the form of payment of medical bills and wrongful death settlements. But for future workers, better safety coverage should be mandated. For the sake of justice, there should be aggressive investigation and prosecution of those responsible at TVA, Jacobs Engineering, and (I hate to say it) TDEC [Tennessee (State) Department of Environment and Conservation]. Jacobs should not be allowed to shirk responsibility on the grounds that TVA approved their project plans; their people were at the site and could see what the work conditions were. TVA should not be allowed to claim that they are not responsible because their contractor Jacobs Engineering covered the jobs; it was TVA’s material and TVA’s responsibility to oversee the cleanup project to make sure the job was done safely. TDEC should not be allowed to claim that they accepted the assurances of Jacobs and TVA; it is their job to provide regulatory oversight of hazard-heavy projects, in order to protect workers and the public. This project was not a quick job; it went on for a long time and so there was ample opportunity for TVA and TDEC to take their own measurements and study the work process.

For a safety professional, this whole story is disheartening. Did we learn nothing from, e.g.,  the radium dial painters case? Those who cannot learn from history – or who cynically ignore it in pursuit of profits or personal advancement – will be condemned to repeat it, but they won’t be the ones who suffer.