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Here's a video shot by Sandra Diaz, the national field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, of her investigation of the Christmas-time coal-ash spill in Tennessee, the biggest in US history.

From her accompanying post on Huffington:

It’s official: New coal lost its luster in 2008.

According to the Sierra Club, two dozen proposed new coal-fired power plants were defeated or abandoned this past year, "laying the groundwork to fundamentally change the way the U.S. rebuilds and repowers itself."

Global warming was a significant factor.

Investors yanked money out of the sector amid concerns that coming carbon regulation would add to already soaring costs of new coal facilities. States refused permits for failing to address CO2 pollution concerns.

The full highlights of the "year in coal" are here (pdf). They include:

It was a bad year for US carmakers, corn ethanol and EPA rollbacks. But not for wind.

For the nation's most promising clean energy source, it was another record-breaking 12 months, says the American Wind Energy Association, in its take on the industry's 2008 accomplishments.

America surged past the 20,000-megawatt installed capacity milestone in the summer months. It struck the 21,000 megawatt-mark by September's end. And it closed the year with a sprint to the finish, beating out Germany to become the largest generator of wind energy in the world.

What did the boom bring?

Coal ash deposits in the USA are now under renewed scrutiny after a giant spill just before Christmas released 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic sludge into Tennessee waterways. Water tests near the spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. The spill muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

So now a big question mark hangs over the hundreds of coal plants all across the country which store their fly ash in unlined embankments and ponds -- like the one that failed last week. Most are situated near rivers that supply water needed by the coal plants to operate.

The NY Times reported that in the US, coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year. It's the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste, and its storage and handling is unregulated. Who knew?

It is yet another measure of the high price of addiction to fossil fuels, which is not only polluting the air and warming the earth, but fouling the nation's terrestrial and aquatic environment as well. The Tennessee coal spill is a wake up call not only for the coal industry, but the oil industry as well, and not only for America but for Canada, too.

Both nations, still in pursuit of endless supplies of fossil energy, are collaborating on the exploitation of Alberta's tar sands -- one of whose byproducts will be toxic spills like the one in Tennessee, only on a massively larger scale.

A small mountain of toxic coal sludge stored in a pond near a TVA power plant in Kingston, Tennessee broke through a dike on Monday at 1 am. The sudden flow covered dozens of homes, caused a train wreck and covered more than 400 acres so far.

THE EPA has estimated the spill of the slurry to be 2.6 million cubic yards, which has muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.