The E.D. Edwards Energy Center in Bartonville along the Illinois River reduced the amount of toxins it released in the last decade, but it continues to spew dangerous chemicals and is still burning coal.

Further, according to both environmental activists and the Illinois Attorney General’s office, Edwards’ owner, Dynegy, offers little evidence that it could handle a cleanup catastrophe or even current regulations.

Dynegy in January announced its plan to cut 90 percent of emissions by 2020 and has made some progress. In 2003, the site recorded 5.5 million pounds of toxic releases, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory. By 2013 (the most recent year available), those toxic releases were down to 1.7 million pounds. Similarly, the EPA shows Edwards having generated 7.3 million pounds of waste in 2003, and 1.9 million pounds 10 years later.

Environmentalists are unimpressed, however. First, Dynegy had no choice; also Edwards continues to release considerable pollutants.

“The sulfur dioxide emissions reductions are mandatory under the Clean Air Act,” says Kady McFadden, a regional representative with the Sierra Club’s Illinois Beyond Coal Campaign which calls for the facility’s closing. “There are still many harmful pollutants emitted from the coal plant’s stacks and dumped into its ash ponds,” which store coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal.

The situation is reminiscent of the old joke: If you’re repeatedly clubbed over the head, would you prefer it to slow down or stop?

Based in Houston, Texas, Dynegy is an energy conglomerate with dozens of divisions, subsidiaries, partnerships and limited-liability corporations and 12 plants in six states in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the West, according to Dun & Bradstreet. After Edwards’ original owner, Ameren, concluded that such plants were financially draining, Dynegy – which had declared bankruptcy in 2012 – bought Edwards in 2013.

In October, Dynegy asked Illinois’ Pollution Control Board (IPCB) for an extension in complying with the state’s Multi-Pollutant Standard, enacted in 2006. Meanwhile, Edwards pollutes the air and water, and consequences can be serious. By quantity, the top chemicals disposed on-site at Edwards are hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid and hydrogen fluoride. High levels of exposure to such airborne emissions can cause irritation of the throat and lungs, leading to difficulty breathing, increased asthma symptoms, more respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular disease. Likewise, water resources could be threatened. Mercury can cause developmental damage to fetuses and children, and at higher concentrations it can harm human nervous system and organs. When mercury moves into waterways, it accumulates in plants and animals and can move up the food chain. One gram of mercury is enough to contaminate a 20-acre lake, making fish unsafe to eat. Edwards emits more than 47,400 grams of mercury annually, records show.

At a Peoria County Board meeting last month, Joyce Blumenshine of the Heart of Illinois Sierra Club told the Board that Edwards is a “disaster waiting to happen,” one that can’t rely on federal or state regulators to control.

“To date, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has failed to place limits under the plant’s water discharge permit on the amount of dangerous heavy metal pollution that the E.D. Edwards plant can send from its ash ponds into the river,” she said.

According to a report from the Central Illinois Healthy Community Alliance and the Sierra Club, “Dynegy’s proposition to buy several aging coal plants that were losing money, to delay investments in much-needed pollution controls, and to shield itself from any liability through the creation of an undercapitalized subsidiary is a risky bet at best, and a devastating verdict for nearby communities that bear the burden of persistently high pollution and delayed cleanups at worst. Dynegy’s gamble is that Illinois communities won’t mind the extra pollution while it waits out a few bad years in the energy market before it can make money for its shareholders again.”

McFadden adds, “Public health studies done by U.S. EPA found that living near a coal ash pond increases your chances of getting cancer more substantially than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

“We also should be nervous about the fact that the ash is in an unlined pit that has been accumulating ash for the last 54 years,” she continues. “Every single coal ash pit in the state of Illinois that has been tested for groundwater contamination has been found [to be] contaminating the groundwater. Finally, folks should be nervous about the potential spill that could take place. The [coal ash] pit is held back from the Illinois River by a levee. If some sort of disaster were to happen, that coal ash – millions of gallons of toxic heavy metals –would be released into our Illinois River.”

Edwards’ coal ash is dumped into an adjacent 89-acre pond that’s more than 30 feet high. It poses serious health risks, according to the U.S. EPA, which labels its hazard level as “significant,” its groundwater contamination “very high,” and potable well contamination potential as “high.”

McFadden sees movement, but not exactly progress.

“In December, U.S. EPA released a final coal ash rule,” she says. “It falls very short from what we think is necessary but is obviously a good step to have something rather than nothing. Right now, IPCB is taking a 90-day window to review the federal rule and their state rule and decide how to move forward. We think this is an important time to provide input to IPCB and ask them to keep the provisions of the state rule that are strong, and to include a piece about financial assurances and emergency management.”

The Illinois Attorney General’s office in a written comment following the IPCB’s October hearing into Dynegy’s request for an extension to follow the law, recognized the state EPA’s efforts to address “threats and contamination from coal ash,” which it notes contains 17 substances, from mercury and arsenic to lead and selenium, and to protect against “adverse effects.”

The state legislature has pledged that its policy is to “restore, protect and enhance the groundwaters of the State, as a natural and public resource.” Citing pollution “leaching into groundwater and structural failures of [pond] impoundments,” it added that operators’ advance planning for closure and post-closure care is needed to calculate corporations’ financial capability to deal with a cleanup and to align its operations with the rest of Illinois waste-generators, from landfills and coal mines to underground tanks and tires.

Most power plants are no longer public utilities, Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office continued, but are private companies that exist at the mercy of market forces and other factors. The companies are bought and sold, go through bankruptcy, and ask for relief from environmental requirements because they claim they cannot afford to comply. They close plants and spin them off into separate corporations.

“The [Pollution Control] Board should not merely accept an entity’s representations that it will be in existence and will have the resources to comply with remediation orders or closure and post-closure case of their coal ash dump sites,” the Attorney General argued.

Such exceptionalism is routine for the energy industry. Most recently, the Canadian province of Alberta moved to ease targets for cleaning up toxins from oil sands after large mine operators there missed their deadline and implied they couldn’t meet a new one either.

“As of now, the state coal ash rules only apply to active power plants,” McFadden says. “If Edwards were to close tomorrow, there would be no rules governing the closure and cleanup of the coal ash pond. Additionally, the rules do not require companies to provide financial assurances for operating these coal ash ponds. If the owner goes bankrupt, it is entirely unclear who would be on the hook.”