DONE TO DEATH

First, it was no fast and faddish stunt, but a well-prepared project: Union Electric had been running a demonstration project jointly with the City of St. Louis since 1969. Since mid 1972, its Energy Recovery Project had been generating electricity from coal mixed with a daily supplement of 200 tons of city garbage.

Second, it was to be the only such project in the country owned and operated by a utility, paying its own way by processing up to 8,000 tons of wastes a day, corresponding (another first) to all the municipal wastes produced by a major metropolitan area.

Third, and perhaps most interesting, the project was to have been financed without a cent of government subsidy: The $70 million capital cost would have come from private sources, with the $11 million operating costs paid for by the heating value of the waste, dumping fees, and sale of recyclable material sorted from the wastes. It would not, like windmills and other eyewash at $4,000 per installed kilowatt, be filched from the taxpayer's pocket for the greater glory of Nader and Lovins, but was designed to be profitable.

Last April, four months before the planned start of operations, the project was abandoned. The reasons were not technological the demonstration project had worked well enough. Nor were the economics unsound. The project was killed by purely political means.

The 1976 shut down initiatives in 7 other states unsuccessfully masqueraded as safety measures, and they were annihilated by the voters. But the initiative in Missouri was more craftily disguised (AtE Jan.77): It forbade utilities to include construction work in progress in their rate base. The amendment was intended to kill nuclear power in Missouri (since nuclear plants have higher capital costs, but far lower operating costs). The amendment carried and killed not only the planned nuclear capacity, but the most advanced energy from wastes system in the country as well.

There were also additional non technological difficulties. Environmentalists in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton, for example, were perfectly willing to consume electricity and to produce garbage, but not to have it trucked to a railroad terminal in their community for shipment to the processing plant. The spirit of St. Louis has been superseded by the spirit of the Sierra Club.