(NEWSLANC Editor: This seems to be an informative article from December, 2009. But it may be a puff piece on behalf of the Harrisburg Incinerator Authority. Without legitimate engineering and feasibility reports, we simply cannot rely on what we are told by project proponents. Does the citizenry want to spend another $200 million, the same price as the Convention Center Project, on a project that has not been professionally evaluated for environmental and fiscal purposes by disinterested experts? Shame on those who keep the citizenry in the dark and the public officials and newspapers who will not call for proper research.)
ELECTRIC POWER MAGAZINE – 2009: After decades of struggling with serious air contamination issues and large financial losses, this Pennsylvania waste-to-energy facility, which was built in 1972, was in need of an extreme makeover. In the wake of an unsuccessful $84 million retrofit attempt in 2005, the faltering facility’s last hope lay with a Covanta project team that took over its operation in 2007. After almost two years of hard work, the facility is now producing up to 17 MW while achieving its environmental compliance goals and earning substantial revenues.
These days, the Harrisburg Resource Recovery Facility (HRRF), which is the oldest operating waste-to-energy (WTE) facility in the U.S., is a picture of success. It has three combustion units, each rated at 266.6 tons of municipal waste per day with the ability to generate 85,092 lb per hour of steam at 630 psig and 760F (Figure 1). Currently, the steam is used to generate electricity for plant load usage and for export.
For many years, however, the facility was considered a polluting pariah by Harrisburg locals, who complained about the dark plumes laden with dioxin and other toxic substances emitted by the plant, which drifted over the nearby Susquehanna River and the entire city, according to published reports in theSunday Patriot-News, the Harrisburg newspaper. The local newspaper also reported that many Harrisburg citizens objected to the heavy financial costs they had to bear through increased property taxes levied as a result of ineffective management of the municipally owned facility…
In addition to ferrous recovery from the residue generated during the combustion process, Covanta has supported The Harrisburg Authority’s efforts to reduce the existing ash monofill volume by excavating and recovering previously buried metals. Prior to Covanta’s operation of the facility and upgrade of the ferrous removal system, metal extraction was inefficient, according to Klecko. Consequently, significant quantities of recyclable metals that had been buried in the ash monofill were unearthed during a year-long recovery project.… (more)
