Agenda - 05-04-1987 - Laserfiche WebLink

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8 022 when fuels such as low-grade, high-sulfur coals are burned. This injected limestone and the substances it captures add significantly to the volume and tonnage of ash produced in combustion. University officials have predicted that when the plant's two new boilers go on line, the amount of ash leaving the plant will immediately jump by a factor of four. All other things remaining constant, this jump would increase the University's total solid waste output from 12,000 tons per year to 30,000. University engineers expect the amount of ash produced to further increase at a rate of four percent annually until the year 2009. The University has contracted with its own Institute of Environmental Studies to study ash disposal alternatives. Two major obstacles must be overcome before incineration can be considered as a major component in Orange County's solution to waste management problems: (1) Expense. Capitalizing, operating and maintaining an incineration program is costly. It makes short-term economic sense only when the costs of other alternatives are comparable. (2) Pollution. Incineration of many materials results in hazardous air pollutants and potentially hazardous ash, and controversy now surrounds the question of what materials are safe to burn and in what manner. Neither of these is likely to apply to the University's situation. The school is already planning to spend millions of dollars on state-of-the-art boilers that are, in essence, incineration units. We are asking that the designers substitute one fuel for another. Fluidized bed combustion boilers are specifically designed to reduce emissions. Materials that are known to produce hazardous emissions could be removed from the RDF stream. This "clean" RDF burned in fluidized bed combustion boilers would probably provide an inexpensive fuel that the University could burn without risking pollutive emissions. Orange County could produce a a dependable source of clean RDF but not in quantity sufficient to satisfy the power plant's energy needs. In fiscal 1986, the University's power plant burned 65,000 tons of coal at its current power plant to produce both electricity and steam. (This provided only part of electricity needed; the remainder was bought from Duke Power. ) The ability of a particular fuel to provide energy upon combustion is often discussed in terms of "heat content" and in units called "BTU's". RDF has a lower heat content than coal; nearly 1 .5 pounds of RDF must be burned to produce the same energy produced by burning a pound of coal . All other things being equal, the University would need to burn approximately 100,000 tons of clean RDF in order to match the energy- producing capabilities of the coal it burned last year. In fiscal 1986, Orange County buried approximately 85,000 tons of solid waste. Of this only a fraction, say 45,000 tons, could be used as clean RDF. From one