Prairie State Energy has 25 groundwater monitoring wells, 17 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between December 08, 2015 and November 14, 2019. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of arsenic, cobalt, lead, lithium, barium, beryllium, chromium, cadmium, molybdenum, thallium and radium.
Site descriptionThe Prairie State Energy Campus is a 1,600-MW power plant in Lively Grove, Illinois in Washington County, built in 2012. It has two 800-MW coal-fired units that are owned by eight different power utilities and Peabody Energy, with majority ownership belonging to the Northern Illinois Municipal Power Agency. When the second unit began operations in November 2012, Prairie became the largest US coal-fired plant built in the last 30 years. Prairie State is built on earthquake fault lines, between the Wabash seismic and New Madrid fault lines, and is adjacent to underground coal reserves it owns and is expected to fuel the facility for about thirty years. The plant disposes of ash in the Near Field Landfill, regulated by the CCR rule.
You can find the industry-reported data here. For more information about the Prairie State Energy Campus, see EIP's 2019 National Coal Ash Report.