Is There A Decoplex In Your Future?

Many a town has so many problems today it takes a man of suicidal bent to serve as mayor. Just to mention a few headaches, the town needs a new sewage treatment plant, a new garbage disposal facility, more electric power and better recreation areas suitable for such activities as boating and fishing.

All of these things take money, and the town budget is already shaky. Furthermore, the local economy badly needs an infusion of new payrolls to remain healthy.

The mayor knows also that if he is fortunate enough to find the money for some of the new facilities, he still faces a big problem - everybody wants the new services, but nobody wants the installations next door. A frequent result is protest, delay and community stagnation.

The mayor's headache is not unique. All over the country, government officials, industry executives and taxpayers are getting increasingly frustrated by a seeming impasse. One group protests against stream pollution while another fights the new sewage treatment plant needed to abate the pollution. Another band of environmental activists works to block the new power plant while still another demands more and better public recreation areas.

Few seem to be aware that these differences might be resolved by assembling the units that each wants into a combination that all could accept. The new combination is Decoplex, a development/ecology/complex.

Decoplex is our coined word for describing a planned area which combines at one site two or more interdependent units which contribute to such vital community objectives as waste processing and/or energy production, environmental protection and economic development.

The strategy of Decoplex is to turn adversity to advantage. It involves taking some of the least attractive facilities and making them assets in the community - a silk purse from a sow's ear.

For example, an electric generating plant may require a large reservoir for cooling water. The same reservoir may serve as a recreation facility for boating and fishing. Through proper planning, two community needs may be met simultaneously.

The idea of combined uses is not new. Many reservoirs built for power plants today serve multiple purposes throughout the country. In recent years, scientists and economists have begun to look more intensively and more urgently at a wide range of additional possibilities.

Much attention is being given today to combinations involving waste treatment facilities. Sewage plants - once regarded as a necessary evil at best - are now viewed as key units for combinations involving intensified agriculture, chemicals production, fish culture and many other operations. The lowly garbage dump now looms as a source of many materials, plus fuel for the boilers in the electric generating plant.

It is too early to suggest what components will be found in the more successful Decoplexes. However, it appears that the basic elements will be the waste unit (solid and/or liquid waste collector, treatment plant and/or spin-off operations); the energy unit (converting solar, fossil and/or nuclear energy to electricity and/or heat); and a reservoir unit.

Discovery of optimum combinations will be a challenge.The prospects for Decoplex are exciting, but the required research and planning is truly formidable.

Involved in the effort is a new economy, a new technology, a new planning discipline and a new bureaucracy!

Much is already being invested in economic and engineering studies of individual components of the Decoplex. A number of firms are also probing various combinations of elements. At this point, it is suspected that the area planning and public-private venture planning are relatively slow in emergence.

Certainly, more money has been expended to date in study of the nuclear power plant and related components. AEC and other organizations and institutions have been active in the field for many years. Several years ago, Oak Ridge scientists began working on a nuclear-agricultural combination which they termed "Nuplex" (one form of Decoplex). Researchers at Texas A&M are pursuing the idea for Texas locations.

Elsewhere, University of Rhode Island workers have proposed a nuclear power plant combined with a sewage treatment facility on Narragansett Bay. Waste heat from the power plant would be used to activate the sewage plant and to furnish heat to a new town to be built around the new lake.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Arizona have proposed a "solar power farm," which would use a large land area for trapping heat from the sun - the energy to be stored in molten chemicals for deliver to a power plant. Numerous other ideas are being explored actively by both private and public groups.

Decoplex designers may also draw on some of the experience in the petrochemical industry, where sophisticated combinations of plants have long been a way of life. A material which for one unit is troublesome effluent becomes the vital source material for the unit across the fence. Both the engineering techniques for swapping materials and the legal and financial methods for handling the trades may be helpful in structuring the Decoplex combinations.

Decoplex may in the short term make life more complicated for those responsible for planning and locating new facilities. Major changes in program and strategy may be necessary.

However, the concept should, within a few years, provide a new solution to some old problems and, at the same time, open significant new opportunities. Like the mayor, the planner may find new satisfaction and a happier constituency.

(From a report by McKinley Conway which appeared in the May 1972 issue of Industrial Development).

Chart A illustrates some of the Decoplex ideas and combinations possible. Obviously, what is feasible in one situation may not be in another. Variables include the type and amount of wastes available, type and cost of energy, climate, terrain, political structure and a host of market factors.

Chart B suggests the opportunity for Decoplex on airport site. Elements include generating plant (G), sewage treatment plant (S), waste recovery industries (W), treatment lagoons (L), industrial sites (I), airport terminal (T), airport base facilities (A), office developments (O), and hotels (H). All units within the airport perimeter have taxiways to afford fly-in feature. The site occupies 5,000 to 50,000 acres, depending on size of airport and the metro area it serves.