The Tennessee Valley Authority has submitted a plan to state regulators to use hydraulic dredges to pull the material from the river channel, pump it to an area of the Kingston Fossil Plant site where it can dry and then move it to temporary storage on a former ash pond that was converted to a recreation field years ago.
The process could take several weeks.
Also, the TVA, responding to an enforcement order by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, has turned over hundreds of pages of documents covering decades of operation at the Kingston plant, where the spill occurred Dec. 22.
The state agency is overseeing the cleanup and considering fines for violating the Clean Water Act.
The coal ash breached an earthen wall that held back a 55-foot-tall mountain of coal-burning byproducts. Some 1.1 billion gallons of sludge was released over 300 acres, and TVA estimates as much as 2.3 million cubic yards of ash entered the river.
"This is just the beginning," TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci said Friday of the dredging plan for the Emory River.
Meanwhile, new results from state environmental testing show no evidence the fly ash has harmed air quality in the area or that levels of radioactive radium in samples exceed what is typically found in fertilizers.
"All samples contained significantly less radium than the average concentrations typically found in phosphate fertilizers," the state environmental agency said on its Web page.
