Duke Energy, the biggest utility company in the country, has closed half its coal plants in North Carolina in the last three years, blowing up one after another, as the company switches to natural gas. Left behind are toxic coal ash ponds and basins that are leaking coal ash into bodies of water including Dan River and Cape Fear. Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good admitted that after a drainage pipe under a coal ash pond collapsed in February: “We released nearly 30,000 to 39,000 tons of ash into the River.” But environmentalists like the one interviewed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes (Sunday, December 7, 7pm on CBS), says it’s not just about collapsed pipes – Duke Energy is leaking waste “24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
The big question now is what to do with 100 million tons of old coal ash stored at sites all over North Carolina. Duke Energy CEO Good is trying to see the drainage pipe accident as an opportunity “to raise our standards even higher.”
