In the United States, the burning of coal for electricity generates 130 million tons of solid waste every year. Most of it is coal ash, and it contains concentrations of mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxic metals.
There are several hundred coal ash dumps across the nation, all of them unregulated. Forty-four of these coal ash dumps have been deemed to be a high hazard by the Environmental Protection Agency, but officials aren’t allowed to talk about them. Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers have decided in the interests of national security they can't make these sites known.
The United States coal ash situation is so bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told public officials that they can't publicly disclose the location of the dumps. The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States (or a storm or some other disrupting event) could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.
The recent coal ash spill in Tennessee devastated the surrounding area, was 100 times worse than the Exxon-Valdez spill, and will cost a billion dollars to clean up. That one's no longer a secret.
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