As the Southern Environmental Law Center announced its historic settlement Jan. 2, 2020 with Duke Energy and the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality to clean up coal ash at six North Carolina sites, Duke’s Asheville Steam Plant at Lake Julian is in the midst of a permitting request to build an industrial landfill on the plant site.

The settlement, arranged on behalf of Appalachian Voices, MountainTrue, Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, Sierra Club and other environmental nonprofits, becomes the largest coal ash cleanup in America to date, according to DJ Gerken, program director with the SELC, based in Asheville.

The settlement applies to six Duke Energy coal ash sites still burning coal, except for Asheville.

The Asheville Steam Electric Plant on Lake Julian was not included in the settlement because cleanup had already been ordered by the Coal Ash Management Act of 2014. This legislation came in the wake of a massive spill that year at a coal ash pit at a Duke Energy facility on the Dan River in eastern North Carolina, which leaked 39,000 tons of toxic waste into the river, coating the river bottom with the sludge for 70 miles downstream.

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