Oct. 22--Clean air and clean water. If you're a coal-fired power plant you can't produce both. It is an either-or situation of particular concern to Marylanders. According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources' Power Plant Research Program, the primary fuel used for electricity generation in our state is coal.

The most recent PPRP (2007) study reports that Maryland generates a larger portion of its electricity from coal than the United States as a whole. Sixty-one percent of Maryland's electricity comes from coal compared to 46 percent for the entire nation. Metaphorically, we appear to have the tallest coal-fired power plant chimney in the nation.

And that's a problem.

Many power companies, such as Allegheny Energy, have installed scrubbers to clean up their air health-hazardous, environment-assaulting emissions. By next year the Environmental Protection Agency estimates roughly one half of U.S. coal-generated electricity will come from plants employing scrubbers or scrubber-like technologies, all to trap tons of pollutants before they become airborne.

Which leaves, of course, the emissions-scrubbing wastewater generated in the process. What do they do with that?

An Oct. 13 article in The New York Times reports that regulators and environmentalists say, " ... it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater."

Removing pollutants from coal-fired smoke emissions, seems to merely reroute many of them to other dumping grounds.

Last month, the EPA wound up a multi-year study of power plant wastewater discharges. It's statement was definitive: "Wastewater discharged from coal ash ponds, air pollution control equipment, and other equipment at power plants can contaminate drinking water sources, cause fish and other wildlife to die and create other detrimental environmental effects."

Even Allegheny Energy's fact sheet about the 'scrubber' project, which it published in conjunction with installation of a $650 million "flue-gas desulfurization system" at its Hatfield's Ferry Power Station near Mason Town, Pa., alludes to this sad fact.

The brochure explained that in one year, Hatfield's scrubbers are predicted to produce "approximately 1.5 million tons of gypsum which will be sold or placed in an environmentally safe disposal area on the Hatfield's Ferry site" and eventually, "covered with topsoil and planted with suitable ground cover."

What "ground cover" might be "suitable" for burying synthetic gypsum that is, among other things, a by-product that can be sold to manufacture wallboard?

Happily, the EPA concluded the current regulations, issued in 1982, that apply to power plant wastewater discharges "have not kept pace with changes in the power industry over three decades." In addition, revisions regarding standards for water discharges from coal-fired power plants are in order. Restrictions on contaminants in wet scrubber wastewater streams also are on their list.

Hopefully, they are at the top of it.

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