TVA President Tom Kilgore said today the federal utility “will do a first-rate job of remediation of the problems caused by the spill” at the Kingston Steam Plant.

But the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee said TVA needs to do more than what it has so far to clean up more than 1.1 billion gallons of ash and muck that spilled out of the Kingston plant on Dec. 22.

“This isn’t a harmless mud,” said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Environment Committee. “Seeding the ground with grass (as TVA has done in the past five days) is not a permanent solution. This area must be cleaned up ... and we must make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

In testimony before the Senate panel in Washington D.C., Mr. Kilgore said the utility is still studying why an ash pond ruptured in Kingston after engineering studies indicated that it would secure. But for now, Mr. Kilgore said TVA’s immediate challenge is on cleaning up the 1.1 billion gallons of sludge that spilled out of the ash pond.

“We will diligently work to determine the cause of this failure, but as I have told the members of the public in that area and our employees, our focus right now is on cleaning up the spill,” he said.”We are going to be able to look our neighbors in the eye and say that TVA is doing the right thing.”

But Sen. Boxer questioned why TVA decided in 2006 against a $25 million proposal to convert to dry ash disposal at the Kingston plant.

The cost of that $25 million is going to seem like pennies compared to what it is going to cost to clean this up,” she said.

For more details, see tomorrow’s Times Free Press.