Published: May 20, 2008 02:18 am      

TOWN OF LOCKPORT: Student project prompts town plasma research

TOWN OF LOCKPORT — Kids say the darndest things; just ask Supervisor Marc Smith. He’s taking what he learned from a bunch of middle-schoolers last fall and seeing whether they’re onto something revolutionary for greater Lockport.

Smith and a group of area municipal and business executives will travel to Connecticut in July to look over Startech Plasma Converter systems, technology that converts trash to fuel and elemental goods.

The systems, as billed, are the ultimate in recycling technology. In goes municipal, medical and industrial waste — even hazardous waste — and out comes synthetic gas, silicates and metals. Goodbye landfills, hello commodity markets.

Town officials glimpsed the future this past December, when the members of Emmet Belknap Middle School’s F.I.R.S.T. Lego Robotics team acted out a scene from a Lockport-based plasma conversion facility in 2057. As student employees “worked” in the plant, narrator Sarah Boone talked up the benefits to resource-challenged Earth and touted the real information sources that the team used to devise its presentation. This isn’t science fiction, the eighth-grader suggested confidently, it’s real now — and awaiting people to take it seriously.

Someone is. Smith met with the Belknap robotics team last week to report on the upcoming Startech visit and thank the students for their role in getting it going — including, when he asked for more information, production of a 200-page report on the specifics.

The goal of the visit, Smith said, is to explore the feasibility of a demonstration project in the town IDA park, ideally by a private operator.

Potential products of a plant include electricity, steam energy and, significantly, hydrogen. Team adviser/technology teacher Mike Lieber says there is currently no cost-effective way to produce mass amounts of hydrogen, a non-fossil fuel, and yet, eighth-grader Alex Sonker knows, China is well ahead in research and development of hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

Plasma conversion “is not fantasy at all, it’s probably one of the greatest technologies to be introduced to this country in a long time. It bears some investigating by the town,” Smith said. “At some point, I think, it’s a possibility to offer low-cost power to our residents through municipal generation.”

That’s gratifying stuff for the Belknap students, whose portrayal of a plasma conversion operation at the annual F.I.R.S.T. Lego Robotics regional competition last December won an award — for creative presentation. The judging panel, composed of engineers, liked their mini drama but dubbed the science behind it “speculative,” Lieber said. “That means they didn’t know anything about it.”

Students, on the other hand, know enough that when Smith met with them about the Startech trip, they could pepper him with forward-thinking questions: How many jobs would be created by a conversion plant? Would the plant be big enough to eliminate municipal landfilling? Who’d pay for construction and what state or federal incentives exist to help it along? What would be done with the obsidian (glassy silicate) product of plasma-zapping trash?

Smith cautioned the students that the trip does not equal a town commitment to undertake plasma conversion — “we’re at the very beginning of the discovery stage,” he said — but they’re thrilled just knowing their months of research ended up something more than an after-school time-killer.

“Most people just don’t trust anything else but oil. It’s hard getting them to take anything else seriously,” Boone said.

“They’re taking our little project and making it bigger, to try to help more people,” seventh-grader Cassidy Rohde said.

“It’s cool that they care about the same things we care about,” sixth-grader Josh Korzeniowski observed.

“Usually no one listens to kids,” seventh-grader Riley Oates added.

Convinced as they are that plasma conversion is a way of the future, the students believe the town’s inquiry team won’t come away from Startech disappointed. But if there is some aspect of the process that makes it unfeasible, seventh-grader Alexandra Paulin said, “we’d try harder to find a new way for them.”

The inquiry team will consist of Smith, a town board member, Town Attorney Dan Seaman, Lockport Industrial Development Agency Executive Director Lewis Staley, a representative of private power generator Lockport Energy Associates and Somerset Town Supervisor Rich Meyers, who’s been researching plasma conversion technology on his own and actually has already been to Startech.

Conversion is viewed as the “holy grail” of recycling and waste management, according to Meyers. In an area like Niagara County, which has more than its fair share of brownfields and waste dumps, the potential for plasma conversion-as-remediation method is striking, he said.

Currently, plasma conversion facilities are being constructed in Michigan and at Port St. Lucie, Fla., according to Smith.

The 2007-08 F.I.R.S.T. Robotics research challenge to teams was to identify best alternative energy sources. Lieber said the Belknap team picked plasma conversion as most efficient/least disruptive after ruling out better-known alternatives including wind power — the area lacks steady wind, birds are at risk and, when ice flies off the windmill rotors, so are people and property at risk, they decided — and ethanol.

Contact reporter Joyce Miles at 439-9222, ext. 6245.