TVA Coal Ash Clean-Up Costs Go Up, Up, Up; TVA Credibility Goes Down, Down, Down

It wasn't too long ago that an East Tennessee blogger observed that the Tennessee Valley Authority "unwisely and clumsily" downplayed the Kingston ash spill of December 2008.

The latest escalating cost projections indicate just how unwise and clumsy TVA was:

The Tennessee Valley Authority has raised its top estimate for cleaning up a massive ash spill at a Tennessee coal-fired power plant to nearly $1 billion and acknowledged the recovery could take several years ....

The new estimates for the cleanup of the Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash disaster are $150 million higher than previous forecasts. They lift TVA's predicted range to $675 million to $975 million.

About 5.4 million cubic yards of fly ash and sludge breached a storage pond Dec. 22 at the Kingston plant. The toxic-laden material flooded the Emory River and a lakeside neighborhood, covering about 300 acres and damaging about two dozen homes.

Four months after the disaster, TVA said it still doesn't know what went wrong or "the extent of the (environmental) damage or the remedies that will be required for restoration."

Another unknown is how much this will cost the 8.7 million consumers served by TVA distributors in Tennessee and parts of six other states.

Take note that TVA is still refusing to step up and take responsibility by saying what went wrong (they originally blamed it on rain) or by acknowledging the damage to the local environment. The more things change the more TVA stays the same.