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Comment by donarb | Hacker News Reader

Burning coal creates fly ash which needs to be stored somewhere, usually large ponds near the power plant. In Tennessee in 2008 a dike ruptured and released 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry that flowed into nearby rivers that drained into the Tennessee River. No-one was injured in the initial spill, but people contracted to clean it up developed cancers from being exposed to the toxic coal ash, 300 people died within 10 years after the accident.

It is considered the largest industrial spill in US history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

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You’re off by an order of magnitude. More than 30 of the roughly 900 workers employed during the seven-year cleanup of the nation’s largest manmade environmental disaster are dead (https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2018/12/22/kingsto...)

As stated that not that unusual. At 45 a man has a 0.3285% chance of death per year at 55 that bumps to 0.7766%. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 3 deaths per year out of 900 works out to 0.3333%. So, depending on the age of workers that’s anything for fairly normal to low.

As time goes on, more workers are experiencing health effects that might be due to their years of work cleaning up the spill:

>...More than 30 cleanup workers at the December 2008 TVA Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant coal ash spill are dead and at least 200 are sick or dying — all with common ailments known to be caused by long-term exposure to arsenic, radium and the host of other toxins and metals found in the ash.

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2018/09/20/kingsto...

Worth noting that this power plant was run by an arm of the United States government.

That is only worth noting if you bring it along with a more detailed account of accident rates by government-owned facilities as compared to privately owned facilities.

Until then it's just an anecdotal bit of snark that serves a political world view without the evidence necessary to evaluate it.

Why is that worth noting? I feel like you're being intentionally ambiguous by leaving unstated implications.

Do you believe public operation had an impact on safety? Better or worse, and based on what evidence? If neither, how is your statement relevant to the discussion?

I don't know why the parent poster brought it up, but it does seem relevant to me. The government isn't going after quick profits, so you can't blame it on that. You might be able to blame profits if it had been a private corporation though.

The public and private sectors are, in principle, equally capable of incompetence; the causes tend to be somewhat different, but the outcome can be the same.

Profits play a massive factor in why governments tend to be incompetent.

What do you think taxes are? They're a wealth transfer without option from everyone else to those in the employ of government.

A whole bunch of people are profit from government expenditure, we even have a word for a special type of fraud about government expenditure: pork barelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel

But, government run operations tend he notorious for incompetence for a few reasons, others have done a better job of detailing:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=why+governments+are+notorious+...

In 2013, an ammonium nitrate storage facility exploded (1). In 2014, a leaky storage container poisoned a river in West Virginia (2).

It's instructive to consider some thought experiments/scenarios:

What if...

a) Both were run by the government. In this case you'd have people of certain political parties screaming about government incompetence, and how the best solution would be to eliminate regulations and privatize, since competition somehow guarantees better results.

b) Foreigners deliberately engineered both situations, an act of terrorism. In which case as certain administrations after 9/11, the US might pick some country that didn't have anything to do with it and go to war.

c) Private companies were responsible. This is actually the case and the collective attitude was generally "eh, shit happens, private companies just trying to run a business". Just declare bankruptcy and walk. No real changes made in either case.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos...

2 -

Your biases are showing. Issues in private businesses drives regulation all the time around the world.

Not in the US. They pony up, hire lobbyists and get off scot free or with acceptable losses to their profits.

Is a federally owned corporation (Tennessee Valley Authority) still considered an "arm" of the government?

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