La Jolla Firm Wants to Burn Toxic Wastes

A high-technology research firm intends shortly to begin burning a wide variety of hazardous wastes in an experimental incinerator in the hills above La Jolla. The firm wants to test a technology it hopes to market as a partial answer to the nationwide toxic-waste problem.

Officials at GA Technologies, 10955 John Jay Hopkins Drive, expect there will be public hearings this fall on their application to step up testing of the incinerator, which they developed for energy production and hope to apply to hazardous-waste disposal.

“We’re not trying to invent a bigger mousetrap,” George L. Wessman, director of the program, told reporters Wednesday. “We’re trying to take a mousetrap that has been used and apply it to a different field.”

The incinerator, called a circulating bed combustor, would burn industrial and other types of waste at temperatures up to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. Company officials say tests done with the La Jolla unit show that it meets federal air pollution standards.

They say their incinerator is more thorough, more simple and, therefore, more reliable than the better-known burners promoted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA wants disposal of liquid toxic wastes switched from landfills to burning by the late 1980s.

“We think it is a simple piece of equipment and, as such, leads to high reliability,” Wessman said of the incinerator, which company officials expect will meet some opposition at the hearings. “The chemistry that is going on in there is quite complex.”

In a telephone interview, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board confirmed that his office monitored tests on the La Jolla unit last spring and found that it destroyed 99.99% or more of the toxic chemical compounds burned.

Bill Sessa said his office found the technology “the most flexible” of those it studied--effective at varying temperatures and over different periods of burning time. However, he said the required 99.99% destruction rate was achieved only when the incinerator was operating at 1400 to 1600 degrees.

“We think this technology holds promise, provided that it’s operated within certain limitations,” Sessa said. “This isn’t the type of technology that we would likely allow to be used at temperatures lower than those at which the waste burns off efficiently.”

GA, a 30-year-old research and development firm involved in, among other things, developing a commercial nuclear fusion power reactor, developed the circulating bed combustor out of efforts to recycle used nuclear fuel.

It has already applied the technology to energy generation--for example, burning coal to produce steam. Now GA has begun a $1-million-a-year marketing campaign to sell the same system for commercial and military use in hazardous-waste disposal and cleanup.

Derrell T. Young, the GA official supervising the tests, said the wastes swirl through a combustor vessel at high temperatures along with limestone to absorb chlorine and sulfur. Oxygen and carbon dioxide emerge from the stack, and inert ash and salt collect as waste.

Young said the amount of ash depends on the combustibility of the hazardous waste--for example, whether it contained noncombustible heavy metals. As an example, he said 20, 55-gallon drums of liquid waste might produce one drum of ash and salt wastes.

Those would go into a municipal landfill or a landfill for toxic wastes, depending on what they contained. But they would be solid, rather than liquid, and would not leach into the groundwater, Young said.

The only air pollution control equipment on the unit would be a “baghouse”--a kind of vacuum cleaner to trap particles. The limestone also controls pollution by trapping chlorine and sulfur, Young said.

GA has sold one experimental incinerator so far, Wessman said. He said a unit that could clean up a five-acre dump site with contaminated soil would cost $2.5 million to $3 million. Processing the soil would cost $100 to $200 a cubic yard.

GA has tested the unit in La Jolla for about a year, getting individual permits for each test. The wastes tested include wastes from the chemical, petrochemical and aluminum industries, and soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Now GA has applied for a generic permit that would enable it to test a variety of wastes for customers interested in ordering incinerators. Young said the La Jolla unit is capable of burning two or three 55-gallon drums of waste a day.

A spokesman for EPA in San Francisco could not say Wednesday when the hearings might be scheduled. GA officials said they applied for the permit this summer and are answering some of EPA’s questions. They predicted hearings would be held in San Diego this fall.