BUS101: Introduction to Business

The Environmental Law and Policy Center has called for an independent engineering assessment of the site of the State Line Power Plant in Hammond, Ind., which has operated for 83 years directly on the edge of Lake Michigan just across the border from Chicago. ELPC executive director Howard Learner said independent assessments should be standard practice at closing coal plants, so that any needed remediation can be identified and undertaken promptly.

"The time for assessing whether there's any contamination on a site is now, not years later," he said.

Learner added that if sites are owned by or later transferred to limited liability subsidiaries or companies that end up going bankrupt, and contamination needing expensive remediation is later found, "the public could be left holding a bag with a lump of coal that has very high costs for cleanup".

There is no evidence that there are serious environmental problems posed by the sites of shuttered coal plants, and environmental leaders emphasize that it is the uncertainty, not any confirmed hazards, that most concern them. They raise the possibility of lead and other heavy metals and contaminants accumulating in the soil from the plants' air emissions over many decades; and also small-scale dumping or spilling of industrial products that may have happened over many years of operation.

Once plants are closed the sites remain subject to state and federal environmental regulation. But the owners would not continue to report releases or seek permits under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act once the plants are not active. Leaching or runoff from sites would be subject to the Clean Water Act, but there will typically be no legal requirements for monitoring, so water contamination could easily occur without being discovered. Some plants might store hazardous waste after closing, in which case they would be subject to requirements under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).

"If EPA were to discover that the mismanagement of hazardous waste at a facility posed a significant risk to human health or the environment, it can require investigation and cleanup," said EPA Region 5 spokesman Joshua Singer. "As a general rule, the current owner of the facility is responsible for contamination on its property and releases of contaminated material from its property".

Spokesmen for the power companies said they will comply with all state and federal environmental regulations regarding the sites post-closure. Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle said environmental concerns are among the factors being evaluated by a corporate team. McFarlan said remediation at the Midwest Generation plants would depend on future uses, and added, "Today, there are about 165 employees plus contractors working on the sites as they have for decades with no evidence of risk to their health and well-being as they walk around the sites, park their cars there, and go about making a living".

Learner said he thinks companies do have legal obligations to do site assessments and remediation. He and Henry Henderson, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Midwest program and a former Chicago environment commissioner, both said that ideally, elected officials, attorneys general, environmental groups and regular citizens would work together with companies to make sure that sites are dealt with responsibly.

Henderson said environmental testing could actually be important to show that coal plant sites might be less contaminated than people believe, hence facilitating their conversion to parkland or other beneficial uses.

"One of the problems with brownfield redevelopment is that people think these are Superfund sites but they're not," he said. "There is a huge amount of redevelopment happening at brownfields around the U.S., and I'm confident this can be done (at old coal plants). But that confidence is based on the idea there is a clear pathway for investigation and analysis, identifying contaminants and removing them or isolating them so they don't pose problems".