Sierra Club

EPA Changes to Kentucky Coal Mine Permit Protect Water Quality and the Environment

We don’t normally use this space for information about areas outside of the South Carolina / North Carolina / Georgia area, but we thought that the last paragraph where the EPA’s estimation of the environmental impact of Coal Mining and energy production was particularly telling.

(ATLANTA – July 23, 2010) - Today, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a Clean Water Act (CWA) permit to Czar Coal Corporation for the Scaffold Lick Branch Coarse Refuse Storage Site project in eastern Kentucky.

PLEASE DOWNLOAD AND SIGN THE PETITION! This petition has already been signed by over 1,000 South Carolinians, most of them in the area around the plant. Please download, distribute to your friends and coworkers, and then send to our Sierra Club office. Your contact information will be kept completely confidential! We will compile a list of the names and towns before presenting the petition to our Governor, the General Assembly, and Santee Cooper’s Board of Directors.

HISTORY There was a time in South Carolina’s history when utilities like Santee Cooper could expect very little resistance to building dirty coal plants in our state. As a consequence we have twelve of them, our own “dirty dozen.” And every year we citizens export $740 million in order to import the coal to feed them.

Santee Cooper argues they are building a “clean coal” plant at the Kingsburg “energy campus.” That’s a bit like offering smokers a cleaner cigarette. This plant will emit 3,500 tons of ozone-forming nitrous oxide, 7,500 tons of soot-forming sulfur dioxide, 900 tons of lung-damaging particulate matter, and over 100 pounds of toxic mercury each year, every year, for the next 50 years.

Even by the low standards of the coal industry, this will be an old-fashioned, outdated plant using an eighteenth-century energy source that we have to import from elsewhere.

A diverse coalition of citizens, from college students to their professors, from fishermen to physicians, and from business owners to retirees, is offering an alternative: why not invest first in cleaner and cheaper homegrown sources, like efficiency and renewables? Two studies by Santee Cooper’s own largest customer, the South Carolina Electric Cooperatives, showed we could generate 1700 megawatts of electricity through efficiency and renewable in-state sources like biomass. That’s 400 megawatts more than the dirty Kingsburg plant.

Dirty coal is not the answer! Our state can do better. Please sign the petition!