Simply Unfair

Doubts About Preferential Treatment??

Any of you guys out there have any siblings? Any of you that are saying yes have those kinds of siblings?  Those kinds of siblings that truly get away with murder and parents seem to just let them off with a slap on the wrist.  Truly infuriating just because you remember that times when you tried to get away with murder and nearly got murdered. If you couldn't tell, I've been there and preferential treatment is horrible. It can really just get under your skin. I could make my post about this along, but the true goal was to hopefully rile you guys up to. Get you all in the right type of mood for the upcoming example of preferential treatment. I don't know at what point it stops being called preferential treatment and gets the label of corruption, but either way I'll get down to it.

So this post was inspired by a post by my blogger-friend NukeStudentLife. In this post, they talked about similar unfairness in regard to a catastrophe that occurred in 2015 in California in the form of a natural gas leak. This was a great disaster yet it seems to not have been covered thoroughly on the news. Not many people knew about it. I sure didn't. Yet the world knows about Three Mile Island and Fukushima and such. Many detest nuclear power for these events despite the "true evil" that is lurking under their nose. This one-sidedness is unfair. So I decided I'd look up another incident that is also fairly recent and I'll possibly take a post or two to explore it. I'd be surprised if you guys have heard about it and comment if you have. Today we're talking about the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant Slurry Spill (long name...maybe that's why it didn't get coverage as news reporters couldn't handle the mouthful).

So were going to quickly mention that BP Oil spill not too long ago. Do you remember it? It happened in 2010. It continued for months. It was a major catastrophe and was listed as the largest spill that happened in US waters. Deepwater Horizon. Well that catastrophe dumped some 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  I remember this being on the news for months. So why haven't we heard of  the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant Slurry Spill? Well, it only spilled 5.4 million cubic yards of liquid fly ash (coal waste) into the surrounding environment. Not too bad right? Well google is great with conversions as 5.4 million cubic yards equals about 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge.  Still wondering why we haven't heard of it? Me too. It was not before our time and it's not currently on the news. This happened in 2008, about 2 years before the supposed "worst accident" in US waters. Yet somehow it didn't get the media coverage it deserved. Coal power was allowed to keep its reputation somewhat clean despite this massive calamity. 

A brief summary is that a dike (had to look up the actual dictionary definition of this and its basically a dam, either natural or artificial) burst causing this massive release and spill into the nearby Emory and Clinch rivers. Of course, it also coated another 300 acres of land with the toxic wave of sludge, snapping trees and even destroying some houses. Many more houses were damaged and properties ruined. Luckily there were no casualties. TVA got slammed (not really, more like poked) with a meh minor 11.5 million dollar fine. They then at least bought up the properties pledging to return them to their original state or better. This is why that earlier fine was rather minor, as the repair has been proceeding for the past six years. It's only now that TVA has said that these properties are up to standard and ready for resale. The repair process has cost about 1.1 billion dollars.

 I really think the public might need to worry more about the coal and gas plants being built in striking distance to them. This fly ash is also the dangerous ash that I mentioned in my earlier post that is not only toxic but can be just as radioactive if not more than anything a nuclear power plant releases. On top of that, it could wind up as a wave crashing into your front door.  Go Nuclear. Maybe another post later about some aftermath.

Thanks

Cited:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/22/coal-ash-spill/4143995/
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/may/10/reclaiming-kingston/303447/