Wateree Station has 42 groundwater monitoring wells, 17 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between April 20, 2010 and August 28, 2019. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of arsenic, cobalt, lithium, radium, sulfate, molybdenum, cadmium, beryllium and lead.
Site descriptionSouth Carolina Electric & Gas Company's Wateree Station is a 772 MW coal-fired plant located near Eastover, South Carolina, along the Wateree River. It began operating in the early 1970sand is planned for retirement in 2028. The facility burns around 1,800,000 tons of coal and produces an average of 175,000 tons of ash every year. The facility operates two 80-acre ash ponds and a lined dry ash landfill. The ash ponds previously received both bottom and coal ash. Since 2013, ash generated at Wateree has been either disposed of in an on-site dry ash landfill or sold to the cement industry. Due to consistently high levels of arsenic detected in groundwater wells on-site, the owners of the station entered into a legal settlement with the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation and agreed to remove all coal ash from the ponds and place it in lined landfills away from the Wateree River by 2020. Wateree Generating Station’s FGD Wastewater Pond, Ash Pond, and Landfill are regulated under the CCR rule. You can find the industry-reported data here. For more information on Wateree Generating Station, see EIP’s 2019 National Coal Ash Report.