How the Tennessee Valley Authority Morphed From a New Deal Miracle Into a Mega-Polluter

In the summer of 1964, Bob Steber, a veteran newspaper reporter, took a boat onto Old Hickory Lake, outside Nashville. He wanted to investigate a tip. Steber wrote a Sunday outdoors column for The Nashville Tennessean called “Headwaters ’N Tailfeathers,” which he usually filled with light stories on dove shoots, trophy bass, or whatever game was in season. His outing on Old Hickory concerned more serious matters. Anglers had complained to him that a sand-like substance—no one could say what it was—had saturated parts of the lake, ruining the bass fishing and killing catches tied to their stringers. A deposit of the stuff three to five inches thick had washed up along miles of shoreline. As Steber’s boat motored up a channel, he discovered the source of the material: three large metal drainage pipes, surrounded by a plume of floating grit. The pipes, which ran from the shore and dove deep into the water, came from the Gallatin Steam Plant, a coal-fired power station on the lake’s north bank.

The Gallatin Steam Plant was, and is, operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federally owned power company created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. At the height of the Great Depression, TVA brought electricity to the Tennessee Valley, a rural, 41,000-square-mile region that touches parts of seven states. To achieve this feat, TVA employed an army of some 40,000 workers to dam the region’s rivers, and the cheap, abundant power produced by TVA’s hydroelectric dams—29 in all—spurred industry that benefited the valley. In 1933, the year of TVA’s creation, per capita income in the region was about 45% of the national average. Within two decades of TVA’s existence, per capita income had risen to about 60% of the national average. The TVA dams “should make one prouder to be an American,” the critic Lewis Mumford wrote in The New Yorker in 1941. The folk singer Pete Seeger went further, recording a song about Roosevelt’s Southern experiment, in which he sang, “We saw democracy’s future when we built TVA” 

TVA evoked such sentiments partly because it aimed not just to electrify the valley but also to empower its people. It launched a mobile-library service that loaned tens of thousands of books. It started a ceramics laboratory. It created 13,000 demonstration farms, where it taught locals how to maximize crop yields. And, in perhaps the purest manifestation of TVA’s utopian vision for the South, it built a planned community, called Norris, which included a school, a drugstore, a library, a recreation building, and comely homes with stone chimneys and cedar shingles.

The trouble for TVA was that, after the Second World War, it needed more power than its dams could produce. In short order, it constructed 11 of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants. As these facilities came on line, TVA gradually became the country’s largest coal consumer, and one of its worst polluters. In 1970, the federal government ranked three Tennessee cities near TVA plants—Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville—as having some of the country’s worst air quality. Within three years of that news, TVA’s coal-fired facilities would be responsible for about 14% of all toxic sulfur-dioxide emissions nationwide, though its customers comprised less than 1% of the population. The coal-fired power plants that TVA built in this era included the Gallatin Steam Plant. 

Steber, after his outing in 1964, attacked TVA in his column. “A valuable stretch of fishing water is being choked to death,” he reported. The substance in the lake wasn’t sand, he noted, but coal ash, a toxic by-product of burning coal to produce electricity, discharged from the Gallatin Steam Plant. TVA responded to Steber’s reporting by swiftly removing the pipes from Old Hickory. “Bob carried a whole lot of clout,” Larry Woody, one of Steber’s former colleagues, told me. “And The Tennessean was big back then—the most influential paper in the state.” 

TVA’s general manager at the time, L.J. Van Mol, told Steber for a follow-up story that “avoiding stream pollution from the operation of our plants is paramount.” What Van Mol presumably didn’t tell Steber was that months earlier he’d received a memo from TVA’s director of health about coal ash—it was raining over the village of Paradise, Kentucky, 90 miles north of Nashville. TVA had recently built a coal-fired power plant there, and the health director warned Van Mol that fly ash—coal ash that’s light enough to “fly” through the air, like dust—emitted from the facility was having “detrimental effects” on the paint of employees’ cars. Tests had confirmed the “definite corrosive tendencies of the dampened fly ash,” the health director added. This corrosive tendency helped to explain why Paradise residents had complained that fly ash ate away at corncobs and heads of cabbage whenever it fell over their gardens. No mention of the Paradise tests appeared in any newspaper of the time, however. (I obtained the health director’s memo from the U.S. National Archives.) 

The document reveals that TVA, which today provides electricity to some 10 million people, and which long ago abandoned most of its other programs besides power production, has known for at least six decades that the coal ash it generates can cause significant harm. And yet it has repeatedly downplayed, if not outright lied about, its dangers, to the public’s detriment. 

Now environmentalists and some progressive lawmakers are urging TVA to clean up its pollution and decarbonize quickly. They worry that if TVA doesn’t, it could severely hamper the U.S.’s efforts to meet its national climate goals, intended to help the planet avoid the most dire climate-change scenarios and slow the world’s dangerously rapid warming.

Coal ash is a sooty confetti of toxins: arsenic, mercury, silica, radium. Each year, U.S. power companies generate about 75 million tons of the stuff. About half of this ash is recycled to make concrete and other industrial materials, while the rest has typically been dumped into unlined earthen pits, known as holding ponds.

Shortly before Christmas 2008, a coal-ash pond, six stories tall and covering 84 acres, collapsed at a TVA power plant in rural Kingston, Tennessee. When it did, a billion gallons of coal-ash sludge—enough toxic material to fill the Empire State Building four times over—rushed out, covering 300 acres and damaging almost 30 homes. The fiasco is now considered one of the largest industrial disasters in U.S. history.  

TVA spent six years and more than a billion dollars cleaning up the mess, insisting all the while that the coal ash posed no significant threat to public health. (In 2009, TVA admitted to members of Congress that it downplayed the risks of coal ash in information it had released to the media following the disaster.) And, since the ash purportedly carried no real danger, most of the 900 men and women who took jobs to help clean up the site did not receive dust masks or other respiratory protection, though many asked for it. Hundreds of these cleanup workers fell ill, then filed lawsuits. 

At the outset of the cleanup, TVA had hired a firm called Jacobs Engineering to help oversee site safety. “TVA didn’t want to be in charge of the site, because of possible lawsuits and safety issues,” one former TVA employee told me. In 2018, a federal jury ruled that Jacobs Engineering had failed to provide the workers with adequate protective gear and exposed them to coal ash in concentrations likely capable of causing lung cancer, skin cancer, leukemia, and coronary artery disease, among other illnesses. During a four-week trial, multiple witnesses testified that, had TVA and Jacobs provided the workers with respiratory protection, it would have likely caused costly project delays, since the workers would have needed to take more breaks to avoid overheating in the equipment.

More than 50 people who worked at the Kingston site have now died, according to The Knoxville News Sentinel. “To TVA and Jacobs, these men’s lives were not worth even one penny,” said Janie Clark, whose husband, Ansol, drove trucks at Kingston. He died in 2021, after he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a rare form of blood cancer. “TVA killed my husband, and I truly believe that,” another widow, Lena Isley, told me shortly after her husband died, at age 45, in 2019. In 2023, Jacobs Engineering (now named Jacobs Solutions) agreed to pay some 220 cleanup workers a total of $77.5 million to settle the lawsuits brought against it, according to multiple sources who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. (Jacobs and TVA have denied any wrongdoing regarding the Kingston cleanup. A lawyer for Jacobs said that the company worked with TVA and other federal agencies “around-the-clock for six years to restore the environment” at Kingston and abided by safety standards; it also contends that the workers were not exposed to unacceptably high concentrations of coal ash.)

There are almost 750 coal-ash holding ponds or landfills in the U.S. like the one that collapsed in Kingston. Most of these holding ponds are earthen pits, with no liner to prevent the coal ash’s toxins from leaching into the groundwater. As a result, each year these dumpsites contaminate some 4,000 miles of rivers, compromising the drinking water of nearly three million Americans.

The Kingston disaster was such a calamity that it led to the EPA’s first national coal-ash disposal rules in 2015. These rules required power companies to monitor their active coal-ash landfills and to clean up any contamination. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA has gone further. Early in 2024, it closed a loophole that had exempted hundreds of inactive coal-ash ponds from the EPA’s prior coal-ash rules. Under the new rules, TVA and other power companies will have to clean up many, if not most, of their inactive coal-ash ponds and transfer the ash to lined landfills. 

One potential snag is Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House. Under President Trump, the EPA rolled back parts of its coal-ash rules before they could take effect. The Biden administration reversed many of the rollbacks when it came into power, but another Trump term could spell further delays, or policy changes.

Thanks to the Clean Air Act and other regulations, TVA burns far less coal, and produces far less coal ash, today than it did in the past. But it’s still one of the country’s largest consumers of the fossil fuel, and it produces almost no solar and wind energy. As a consequence, its power grid has a higher carbon-emissions rate than grids of similar sizes in California, New York, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. TVA, though largely autonomous, is subject to Congressional oversight, and the president nominates its board of directors and can fire members at will. In August of 2023, 10 Democratic lawmakers, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, sent a letter to TVA leadership, urging the agency to work toward producing “100% clean energy” by 2035.

In 2022, TVA’s CEO, Jeffrey Lyash, said that achieving “a carbon-free energy future” is a priority, and TVA has stated that it intends to shut down the last of its coal-fired power plants and add some solar capacity to its system by 2035. Nonetheless, it expects to burn fossil fuels, namely natural gas, until at least 2050, and it’s currently spending $15 billion over three years to build new natural-gas facilities at the sites of two of its four remaining coal-fired power stations. (Natural gas releases roughly half as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as coal.) TVA has planned a total of nine gas plants since 2020, as part of one of the largest natural-gas build-outs in the U.S. 

TVA maintains that its natural-gas plants are intended to supplement new renewable-energy sources and that these new plants will generate power only as needed, not 24 hours a day. Still, environmental groups, frustrated that TVA isn’t moving away from fossil fuels altogether, are urging President Biden to direct TVA’s nine-member board to halt TVA’s natural-gas expansion and to invest more in clean-energy generation. And they want Kamala Harris to do the same if elected. “The board has a huge rule in providing oversight of the utility, and they have not been doing that,” Bri Knisley, of the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices, told me. “We’re in this critical moment,” she went on, “where the mistakes that were made in the past could be made again at a greater scale”—if TVA expands its fossil-fuel portfolio—“and communities here deserve to have their needs, and the needs of the environment, intentionally prioritized.” 

Bob Steber developed similar feelings when it came to TVA. After he reported on the coal ash in Old Hickory Lake in 1964, he continued to cover the agency closely. He had joined The Nashville Tennessean in 1937, just as TVA was transforming the Southeast into the nation’s energy lab with its hydroelectric dams, and he clearly cherished the lakes it created. In one column, he recalled listening to a speech given by TVA’s director of health—the same man who’d written the memo about coal ash’s “corrosive tendencies”—in which he boasted about the cleanliness of TVA’s lakes. “He didn’t know what he was talking about,” Steber wrote of the director. TVA viewed itself as a model for proving that power production and nature could “live together amicably on a national scale,” Steber went on, but TVA fell woefully short of that goal. He criticized it for being deceptive about its pollution, and he urged it not to despoil the ecosystem as it tried to coax industry to the valley. He betrayed little optimism that TVA would listen to him or anyone else.

In another column, he warned readers that, in many respects, the future of the lands and lakes they loved depended on whether they could contain and control TVA, an agency that had been created to save them—to bring them out of the darkness—and from which they now needed rescue.

This essay is drawn from “Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe” © 2024 by Jared Sullivan. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.