Georgetown is a borough in western Beaver County, Pennsylvania, United States, along the Ohio River. The population was 208 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Little Blue Run Lake, the U.S.'s largest coal slurry waste impound, is located next to the town.
In mining, tailings or tails are the materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of an ore. Tailings are different from overburden, which is the waste rock or other material that overlies an ore or mineral body and is displaced during mining without being processed.
Fly ash, flue ash, coal ash, or pulverised fuel ash – plurale tantum: coal combustion residuals (CCRs) – is a coal combustion product that is composed of the particulates that are driven out of coal-fired boilers together with the flue gases. Ash that falls to the bottom of the boiler's combustion chamber is called bottom ash. In modern coal-fired power plants, fly ash is generally captured by electrostatic precipitators or other particle filtration equipment before the flue gases reach the chimneys. Together with bottom ash removed from the bottom of the boiler, it is known as coal ash.
A fossil fuel power station is a thermal power station which burns a fossil fuel, such as coal or natural gas, to produce electricity. Fossil fuel power stations have machinery to convert the heat energy of combustion into mechanical energy, which then operates an electrical generator. The prime mover may be a steam turbine, a gas turbine or, in small plants, a reciprocating gas engine. All plants use the energy extracted from the expansion of a hot gas, either steam or combustion gases. Although different energy conversion methods exist, all thermal power station conversion methods have their efficiency limited by the Carnot efficiency and therefore produce waste heat.
FirstEnergy Corp is an electric utility headquartered in Akron, Ohio. It was established when Ohio Edison merged with Centerior Energy in 1997. Its subsidiaries and affiliates are involved in the distribution, transmission, and generation of electricity, as well as energy management and other energy-related services. Its ten electric utility operating companies comprise one of the United States' largest investor-owned utilities, based on serving 6 million customers within a 65,000-square-mile (170,000 km2) area of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. Its generation subsidiaries control more than 16,000 megawatts of capacity, and its distribution lines span over 194,000 miles. In 2018, FirstEnergy ranked 219 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest public corporations in the United States by revenue.
Soil contamination, soil pollution, or land pollution as a part of land degradation is caused by the presence of xenobiotic (human-made) chemicals or other alteration in the natural soil environment. It is typically caused by industrial activity, agricultural chemicals or improper disposal of waste. The most common chemicals involved are petroleum hydrocarbons, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, solvents, pesticides, lead, and other heavy metals. Contamination is correlated with the degree of industrialization and intensity of chemical substance. The concern over soil contamination stems primarily from health risks, from direct contact with the contaminated soil, vapour from the contaminants, or from secondary contamination of water supplies within and underlying the soil. Mapping of contaminated soil sites and the resulting cleanups are time-consuming and expensive tasks, and require expertise in geology, hydrology, chemistry, computer modeling, and GIS in Environmental Contamination, as well as an appreciation of the history of industrial chemistry.
Blackwater is a form of pollution produced in coal preparation. In its purification, coal is crushed in a coal preparation plant and then separated and transported as a coal slurry, From the slurry, incombustible materials are removed and the coal can be sized. After the recovery of the coal particles from this slurry, the remaining water is black, contains very fine particles of coal. This blackwater cannot be processed in a water treatment plant.
The Martin County coal slurry spill was a mining accident that occurred after midnight on October 11, 2000, when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment owned by Massey Energy in Martin County, Kentucky, broke into an abandoned underground mine below. The slurry came out of the mine openings, sending an estimated 306 million US gallons of slurry down two tributaries of the Tug Fork River. By morning, Wolf Creek was oozing with the black waste; on Coldwater Fork, a 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) stream became a 100-yard (91 m) expanse of thick slurry.
A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide there are over 2,400 coal-fired power stations, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a third of the world's electricity, but cause many illnesses and the most early deaths, mainly from air pollution.
The health and environmental impact of the coal industry includes issues such as land use, waste management, water and air pollution, caused by the coal mining, processing and the use of its products. In addition to atmospheric pollution, coal burning produces hundreds of millions of tons of solid waste products annually, including fly ash, bottom ash, and flue-gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.
The Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill was an environmental and industrial disaster that occurred on Monday December 22, 2008, when a dike ruptured at a coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 billion US gallons of coal fly ash slurry. The coal-fired power plant, located across the Clinch River from the city of Kingston, used a series of ponds to store and dewater the fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion. The spill released a slurry of fly ash and water, which traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, onto the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of the surrounding land. The spill damaged multiple homes and flowed into nearby waterways including the Emory River and Clinch River, both tributaries of the Tennessee River. It was the largest industrial spill in United States history.
An ash pond, also called a coal ash basin or surface impoundment, is an engineered structure used at coal-fired power stations for the disposal of two types of coal combustion products: bottom ash and fly ash. The pond is used as a landfill to prevent the release of ash into the atmosphere. Although the use of ash ponds in combination with air pollution controls decreases the amount of airborne pollutants, the structures pose serious health risks for the surrounding environment.
Water pollution in the United States is a growing problem that became critical in the 19th century with the development of mechanized agriculture, mining, and industry, although laws and regulations introduced in the late 20th century have improved water quality in many water bodies. Extensive industrialization and rapid urban growth exacerbated water pollution as a lack of regulation allowed for discharges of sewage, toxic chemicals, nutrients and other pollutants into surface water.
The Fayette State Correctional Institution is a 2,000 bed maximum-security prison located in a remote section of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. The prison is located southeast of Pittsburgh and was built to replace two institutions to make the Commonwealth's prison system more energy-efficient. It is the only prison in the Commonwealth where Pennsylvania license plates are manufactured, holding that distinction since 2003.
Coal ash, also known as coal combustion residuals (CCRs), is the mineral residue that remains from burning coal. Exposure to coal ash and to the toxic substances it contains may pose a health risk to workers in coal-fired power plants and residents living near coal ash disposal sites.
Environmental issues in Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, include long term and ongoing environmental impact from human activity, and specific incidents of environmental harm such as environmental disasters related to mining. A mountainous area with significant coal deposits, many environmental issues in the region are related to coal and gas extraction. Some extraction practices, particularly surface mining, have met significant resistance locally and at times have received international attention.
In February 2014, an Eden, North Carolina facility owned by Duke Energy spilled 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. The company later pled guilty to criminal negligence in their handling of coal ash at Eden and elsewhere and paid fines of over $5 million. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since been responsible for overseeing cleanup of the waste. EPA and Duke Energy signed an administrative order for the site cleanup.
Bruce Mansfield Power Plant was a 2.49-gigawatt, coal power plant located in Shippingport, Pennsylvania in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The plant was operated by FirstEnergy. It began operations in 1976 and was shut down in November 2019.
Coal refuse is the material left over from coal mining, usually as tailings piles or spoil tips. For every tonne of hard coal generated by mining, 400 kilograms of waste material remains, which includes some lost coal that is partially economically recoverable. Coal refuse is distinct from the byproducts of burning coal, such as fly ash.
