Kanpur, May 8: The increasing demand for power has found a new victim in agricultural land as the fly ash emitted by the coal-based power plants turn hectare upon hectare of fertile fields in the state into wasteland.
Residents of over 50 villages near the Panki thermal power plant along Pandu river now face the brunt of this unbridled pollution, triggered by the draining of ash slurry from the plant’s chimneys into the river.
According to reports, the plant uses around 3,000 tonnes of coal and churns out 40 tonnes of fly ash every day. Rakesh Jaiswal of Eco-Friends told Newsline that the waste is dumped in a fly ash pond spread over two square kilometres. The result? “The slurry overflows from the pond and gets into the river,” Jaiswal said. This, even as an ambitious project for safe disposal of fly ash is awaiting sanction from the Centre, he added.
Harping on an immediate need to address this environmental catastrophe in the making, Ram Jee Srivastava, Joint Director at the Ministry of Environment, said the need of the hour is to find effective ways to reclaim and rehabilitate such ash ponds. According to him, power sector norms mean one MW of thermal power requires one to 10 acres of land to dispose off ash for 30 years. “This means if fly ash is dumped in open land, or in the river, for long, a major part of agricultural land would turn into ash ponds, or fallow land,” he Srivastava.
According to Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) reports, thermal power stations annually consume about 208 million tonnes of coal and produce 80 million tonnes of ash — 80 per cent being fly ash, and the rest bottom ash.
Experts said besides being an environmental threat, high ash-laden coal also plummets a power plant’s performance and skyrockets the cost of disposal.
A green power plan
A study undertaken by the Kanpur-based Forest Research Institute (FRI) at the area around Panki thermal power station shows planting “suitable” species of trees on ash ponds is a twin solution to the quandary: it increases productivity as well provides forest cover to fallow lands.
Srivastava said after studying physio-chemical properties of fly ash, the FRI research team found a massive 73.2 per cent of it is fine sand, which weakens the capacity to hold water. Fly ash, he said, “is almost devoid of nitrogen and lacks some essential micro-nutrients.”
The solution: trees like Babool, Sesum, Gulmohar and Eucalyptus among others were planted in ash ponds after suitable soil treatment. Babool and sesum can address the problem of nitrogen, Srivastava said, “and showed good results.”
He said besides providing windbreaks and shelter belts, trees planted on ash dump sites also helped reduce dispersion of ash in nearby localities. The afforestation process also helped reduce air pollution and increased fertility of the wastelands, Srivastava said.
