Initial Plant Scherer groundwater tests find little uranium

Well water test results in the vicinity of Plant Scherer in Monroe County showed levels of uranium that are within safe drinking water limits, Georgia Power announced Thursday.

The company is majority owner of Plant Scherer, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the country.

Some residents of Juliette, where the plant is located, have found radioactive uranium poisoning in their well water and have questioned whether the plant might be at least partially responsible.

Other neighbors have expressed concern about the health effects of the plant and its large coal ash pond, leading state public health officials to promise a “scoping process” this summer to clarify what is known about the potential health effects.

At the beginning of last week, Georgia Power took four water samples from different parts of its property and a sample from the Dames Ferry public recreation area and asked the state Environmental Protection Division and the University of Georgia laboratory to test them, said Georgia Power spokesman Mark Williams. He said the company wanted to assure the public that drinking water in the area is safe.

The UGA test results showed that all samples contained a “negligible” amount of uranium.

Georgia Power supplied a copy of EPD test results, which showed that the samples were within safe drinking water limits for heavy metals. Kevin Chambers, the EPD’s communications director, confirmed those results.

Georgia Power isn’t the only one that has been sampling area water recently. The University of Georgia School of Ecology, as part of an interdisciplinary program, is testing about a dozen water samples from residential wells near Plant Scherer, said Seth Gunning, a conservation organizer for the Sierra Club of Georgia. The club helped arrange the testing.

Preliminary test results indicate few problems in the groundwater, although isolated samples had elevated levels of some heavy metals, Gunning said.

Most of the tests were taken from homes along Luther Smith Road and homes on the northeast side of Ga. 87, he said.

More recent reviews of Georgia Power’s own groundwater flow maps, however, “look to us more like if there was leaching from the ash pond, the folks most impacted would be at the southeast corner of Lake Juliette, around Christian Road and Old Dames Ferry,” Gunning said.

Old Dames Ferry Road is one of the areas where a cluster of residents have had elevated uranium in their well water.

Gunning said the Sierra Club and UGA are trying to work out funding for conducting additional water tests in that area.

“I feel like from continuing to talk to community members, it seems like a lot more work needs to be done in order to determine whether Plant Scherer is contributing to the high rates of disease and health problems that seem to be obvious around Plant Scherer,” Gunning said.

UGA graduate students, who took initial samples almost a month ago, recently took new samples from some wells closest to the ash pond where initial tests showed high lead levels, Gunning said. They were trying to clarify whether the contamination was coming from groundwater or pipes.

When those results are back next week, UGA will return individual test results to residents along with a summary of the scope of the research and what the results mean, Gunning said.

UGA also conducted some surface water and particulate matter testing in the neighborhoods and will share those results with residents, too.

Officials from the UGA cooperative extension service have said that the uranium contamination found in some Juliette wells results from naturally occurring uranium in the bedrock beneath the Piedmont region.

But without many wells in the state having been tested for uranium outside Monroe County, it’s hard to clarify what the background level of uranium is, and some residents and environmental groups have questioned whether the ash pond might not be contributing. Coal ash contains varying levels of uranium, and the decades-old coal ash pond at Scherer is unlined, as most such ponds are.

Neither federal nor state regulations require regular groundwater testing around the pond.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been considering for several years whether to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste, a proposal that most power companies stringently oppose. The U.S. Geological Survey has stated that coal ash radioactivity is not great enough to affect human health.

To contact writer S. Heather Duncan, call 744-4225.

This story was originally published April 26, 2012 at 10:32 PM with the headline "Initial Plant Scherer groundwater tests find little uranium ."