Putnam learns specifics about waste facility

Daniel McDonald
The Union-Recorder

October 14, 2008 11:42 pm

— Putnam County residents turned out to learn more about a proposed waste disposal facility to be located off Lake Sinclair in Putnam County.
About 70 people attended a meeting Tuesday in which the Forest Lake Village Neighborhood Association invited representatives from Georgia Power — the agency proposing the waste disposal facility — to present information to area residents and Putnam County officials about the 143.5-acre facility needed to meet federal Clean Air Act guidelines for reducing Sulfur Dioxide emissions from Georgia Power’s Plant Branch facility located on Highway 441.
Local- and state-level representatives from Georgia Power gave a presentation about the waste disposal facility — why it is needed, what the plant will look like, how it will operate and the Environmental Protection Agency permitting process that must be navigated to see the facility through to fruition — and answered any and all questions levied by those in attendance during a full-house meeting that lasted just over two hours Tuesday evening.
Plant Branch Manager Mike Knowles told attendees that the private industrial solid waste facility is a part of a statewide environmental strategy aimed at reducing sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and mercury from Georgia Power’s coal combustion production facilities.
The proposed solid waste facility, or landfill, will store synthetic gypsum, the biproduct of a flue gas dessulfurization process facilitated by what is commonly referred to as “scrubbers.” Georgia Power wants to implement two scrubbers that use crushed limestone to scrub the gaseous waste now emitted into the air from the tower at the Plant Branch, eliminating up to 95 percent of the sulfur dioxide from the plant’s emissions.
The process produces synthetic gypsum, a naturally occurring substance that can be used in products such as wallboard and fertilizer. The proposed landfill will be used to store the synthetic gypsum until it can be sold for use in the products mentioned above. Georgia Power Environmental Manager Tanya Blalock told the assembled crowd that Georgia Power is actively seeking ways to market the synthetic gypsum and already has a permit with the Georgia Department of Agriculture to market it as a soil amendment and fertilizer. Georgia Power also sells the synthetic biproduct to American Gypsum, a company that produces wallboard for construction purposes.
Blalock told the audience that it was Georgia Power’s challenge to balance the economic, environmental and market factors produced in the operation of their coal-fired plants.
The proposed landfill is needed to meet federal CleanAir Act guidelines for sulfur dioxide emissions. The proposed landfill will encompass a 143.5 acre tract of land north of the plant branch that will store up to 412,500 tons of synthetic gypsum annually for 15 years if no market can be found for the synthetic gypsum. The facility would be located about 1,400 feet off of Lake Sinclair in a water supply watershed district.
Georgia Power Environmental Engineer Gary McWhorter said that earlier estimates that placed the facility 210 feet from Lake Sinclair had been revised since meeting with Putnam County Planning and Development Director Sharyn Darlington.
The project will require a use variance from the Putnam County Commission as the county’s environmental code prohibits sanitary and inert landfills within groundwater recharge districts and water resource districts. All of Putnam County is located within a water resource district, Darlington said in an interview with The Union-Recorder prior to Tuesday’s meeting.
During the meeting, Blalock said that Putnam County’s prohibition on landfills is seemingly meant to block municipal waste landfills, not solid waste landfills like the one proposed.
The Georgia Power representatives went into detail about the proposed landfill, especially the composite liner that will keep trace amounts of mercury and arsenic from entering the water table and possibly Lake Sinclair.
The landfill will use a “wet stacking” operation that will sluice the gypsum biproduct in a liquid form into drainage ponds where the water will be drained away from the gypsum through a series of perimeter ditches.
The drying gypsum will be stacked into a 120-foot-high mound between a lower lining and cover system.
The lower lining will be a minimum of five feet above the seasonal high ground water level. The synthetic gypsum will sit atop a liner composed of multiple layers including two feet of compacted clay, a 60-mil HDPE geomembrane liner, a drainage layer and a 12-inch protective layer filter. The geomembrane liner is welded together and has a life expectancy that exceeds 40 years.
The cover system is composed of a minimum of 18 inches of clayey soil and a minimum of six inches of top soil. The cover system will have a minimal grade to insure that no water pools atop the mound.
McWhorter said that receiving the approval of the Putnam County Commission is the first step in a solid-waste permitting process that could begin to see progress on the ground by late 2010. Georgia Power must have the facility operational by late 2013 to maintain the timeline of its statewide environmental strategy.
During the question and answer session following the presentation, area residents asked questions ranging from what would happen to the facility during a natural disaster to why it is being perceived that Georgia Power has been hiding plans for constructing the landfill.
One resident said that if the landfill is so safe, why has Georgia Power kept the proposal a secret until it was ready to go to the Putnam County Commission for a use-variance to allow the plant?
Although Georgia Power has been drilling wells to monitor groundwater for about a year, Knowles said that the company does not see itself as hiding the plans and went on to say that Georgia Power is relatively early in a process that could take five years start to finish.
Putnam County Commissioner Billy Webster asked about the effects on the community’s drinking water of dropping the entire 415,000-ton annual allotment of synthetic gypsum into Lake Sinclair. The representatives said that their calculations did not address a scenario such as that.
But Sinclair Water Authority Water Treatment Plant Superintendent Joseph Witcher assuaged the crowd by saying that the water treatment plant does have processes that can — with modification — address mercury and arsenic in the water supply.
As the meeting began to wind down, one vocal critic of the proposal seemed ready to turn a corner on his thoughts about the landfill when Blalock said that the synthetic gypsum biproduct was basically in the same form straight from the plant as it is when it gets marketed as fertilizer. The vocal critic said that if the gypsum could provide him with larger tomatoes and peppers he would gladly buy it for his home garden.
Following the meeting, Forest Lake Village Neighborhood Association Member Steve Gilbert told The Union-Recorder that the information meeting had answered a lot of residents’ questions and provided them with the information they needed to share informed opinions with their elected officials.
For more information on the proposed Solid Waste Disposal Facility, visit http://forestlakevillage.net.

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