citizens for beneficial change

Sometime today or Monday the dump trucks will start filling a huge coal ash fill project in Giles County. This is what beneficial use in Virginia looks like: (use your mouse to explore the image)

As part of our new current mission CitizensForBeneficialChange has produced a short advertisement to help explain our cause. The new ad is currently the main feature of our home page. We hope this new medium will help spread our message of beneficial change to new audiences. Without further ado: 

In April, Dominion Power will begin constructing a new 585 megawatt coal combustion power plant in Wise county, Virginia. To get a quick idea on what that means in terms of coal combustion waste I put together some numbers to chew on. 

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists a 500 megawatt coal plant uses on average 1,430,000 tons of coal per year which translates into 125,000 tons of ash (not including deposits scrubbed from the stack). 125,000 tons of coal combustion waste requires a dump of 62,500 cubic yards or about the size of the Giles County Fly Ash beneficial use project every five years! 

CitizensForBeneficialChange wants to make sure that the coal waste produced by new plants like the one in Wise county is stored in a way that is environmentally sensitive and economically beneficial. 

On February 20th, John Edwards’ Senate Bill 717 (on the regulation of Coal Combustion Waste) was tabled in sub-committee. While this is certainly a blow for the state of Virginia, because it was tabled and not killed like the House version we can keep hope that the bill will be brought up again. If you have the time contact John Edwards and tell him to keep fighting to keep the bill alive!  Even if the legislation is not brought up for a vote, CitizensForBeneficialChange will be keeping the issue alive by drafting its own version of the bill for the next session. Our version is on the Current Mission page along with our current lobbying action! For updates on Senator Edwards’ bill click here.

Final DeliverablesWelcome to citizensforbeneficialchange.org! This is the virtual home for the lobbying group who is seeking to reform the way state legislators treat coal combustion waste. We are interested in creating economically and ecologically sound solutions that take into consideration the future generations that will inherit the products of our actions in the present. CitizensForBeneficialChange is frustrated with the currently vague hazard definitions that the federal government has used to classify coal combustion waste and is seeking help in state governments to help close loopholes that allow for potentially hazardous disposal of coal combustion waste.We hope you join us during this pivitol time in our history to help us right the environmental wrongs of the past and to help us develop new economic and environmentaly sane regulations for the handling and disposal of coal combustion waste.