Things are afoot on the incinerator front - it looked like the thing was done and dusted but some people never say die. Starting any minute now, new members of the House will be asking questions as to why TTS and Deputy De Faye signed a contract for a new incinerator, which is likely to cost us at least £120 million, when alternatives exist that are much smaller, cleaner, much cheaper, more flexible and which could be in place much earlier.
Click this link for a montage showing TTS's planned incinerator from Havre des Pas pool
I have been quoted only 52 weeks from start to finish to install a thermal pyrolysis/gasification system (which includes a front end separation-of-recyclables plant) at a cost of only - wait for it!! - around £30 million - in sterling!!
TTS's planned incinerator wouldn't be functional for at least 3 years during which the existing incinerator at Bellozanne will continue to pollute the neighbourhood in a way that everyone agrees is unacceptable.
Being modular, the alternative systems I favour do not suffer from the maintenance and reliability problems that forced the States, with a gun to their head, to vote for a huge all-or-nothing incinerator. A system which would probably be the right size for Jersey has 16 individual tubes (or streams) so catastrophic break down is virtually impossible and maintenance is easy because only a fraction of the plant can be shut down, as opposed to the proposed two stream incinerator... if TTS's second stream breaks down while the first is down for maintenance it would be a real problem in just the same way that if one is running a taxi service with a couple of large coaches and both are down at the same time, you no longer have a business - if you have a fleet of 16 taxis then it is effectively impossible for total breakdown and planned maintenance is far easier too as only 1/16 of the fleet has to be down at any one time. The "proven reliability" issue which turned the heads of too many of the old House simply does not apply to the alternative technology.
If waste drops in future, the main part of our favoured plant can actually be sold back to the manufacturers as they are relatively portable. The tubes can also replace the clinical waste plant and act as biofuel generators and create biochar (terra preta) and other fancy tricks. If waste increases it would be easy to add extra modules at very little extra cost. As this system is almost a no-brainer, we have to speculate that the previous States Assembly had less than no brains - negatively intelligent!
1 comment:
I was speaking to Phil Rondel before the elections and he favoured a modular design; what possessed the idiots in the States to sign something so close to an election defeats me; I can think of no rational reason apart from wanting to "get it in quick before the next lot raise nasty questions", which struck me then as totally weasly. I was struck how Bush liased with Obama, so as not to pass legislation which would be rescinded by the new President, which would make the whole business seem a farce. With all the wittering about statesmanship, it would have been nice for our lot to do likewise.
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