Senator SPONG. Is Dr. Johnston here? Doctor, we will place your statement in the record and you may proceed in your own way. (Dr. Johnston's prepared statement appears at p. 86.) STATEMENT OF DR. WILLIAM H. JOHNSTON, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS CORP. Dr. JOHNSTON. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am honored to be here today especially in this distinguished company to speak concerning waste management and waste management research. My name is William Johnston. I am a former professor of chemistry and currently president and chairman of the board of a research and development and manufacturing company which is applying fundamental or basic chemistry, physics, and mathematics to problems in air pollution control and in medical and clinical instrumentation. We have an unusual scientific staff averaging more than 20 basic research papers per staff member. During the past year we have developed inventions in plasma physics, auto exhaust monitoring, ultra low pressure measurements, and new medical instruments. In fact one of the medical instruments has been accepted as a scientific exhibit for the American Medical Association convention this month, in San Francisco. COAL GASIFICATION We also are engaged in a research program on the gasification and sulfur control in coal, which resulted from an unsolicited proposal to the National Center for Air Pollution Control last August. I would like to say a few words about this project as an example of research and development, pointing out the background, then discussing research effectiveness, since I feel that much of the future of successful application of waste management control, very urgent problems which this committee faces, rests upon increasing and improving research effectiveness. For reference I should add that before entering the small business field I worked in graduate research, teaching Ph. D. students, and prior to that time spent 5 years on the wartime research program of development of the plutonium atomic project at Chicago, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. Turing to the example, the coal gasification and sulfur removal by integral systems, this unsolicited proposal resulted from the decision of our staff to study this problem; we came up with an unsolicited idea which is shown in exhibit 2. This scheme suggests that rather than remove sulfur dioxide after burning coal we should gasify coal and remove the sulfur prior to combustion. There were six reasons for arriving at this scheme although no parts of the scheme are necessarily unique, since there is now a vast literature on coal in this area. Firstly, the processing of gases as we proposed involves handling 10 percent of the gas you have to handle if you are going to remove sulfur after first burning. HYDROGEN SULFIDE REMOVAL Secondly, the chemistry of hydrogen sulfide removal in the gasified coal is simpler and, thirdly, more easily made economically, than handling the removal of sulfur dioxide after burning. TABLE I.-Potential advantages of proposed sulfur control by coal gasification 1. The gas volume to be processed is 10 percent or less of that of the final flue gases. 2. The sulfur is present largely as hydrogen sulfide which is more readily removed chemically than the sulfur oxides. 3. More efficient thermal cycles based on gas turbines, pressurized boilers and top heat cycles are more easily integrated with these systems and may thereby help offset the cost of equipment. 4. Gas firing should allow a more efficient steam cycle than that of present coal firing practice since coal ash corrosion and not thermal resistance is the present limiting factor on super-heat and reheat temperatures in coal fired units. 5. Although utilities are naturally hesitant to enter the chemicals industry, this eventuality may be inevitable; in addition to organic chemicals from coal the proposed systems aid the recovery of sulfur as elemental sulfur which is the most useful form. Fourthly, by burning coal as gas one has less coal ash corrosion and one can work at a little higher temperature and have a somewhat more efficient steam cycle. Fifth, more efficient thermal cycles based on gas turbines and top heat cycles are more easily integrated. Finally, sulfur is only one diagnostic contaminant. There may be others that we will learn of as air pollutions are studied nationwide and worldwide. Our scheme is more readily adapted to removing other pollutants as contrasted with burning coal and then looking at the great volume of exhaust gases to remove other materials. This project began in its first phase at the end of December and we have in 4 months created a laboratory which I would like to show briefly. COAL GASIFICATION The plate I (exhibit 4) shows the laboratory for the study of coal gasification and desulfurization. In the center is the pyrolysis furnace and gas-handling equipment. On the left is a gas liquid chromatograph double column, modified from a commercial device. The rest of the equipment was designed and constructed by our staff with a few commercial components. On the right is the plasma spectograph, an invention which this staff made last spring. Behind the plasma spectrograph is a special mass spectrometer. For example, gases can be taken from the pyrolysis furnace through the gas chromatograph on the left which separates them into different chemical compounds or groups. They pass then across to the plasma spectograph on the right and by this device, which is shown in plate II (exhibit 5) more clearly, with the plasma operating in the ring in the center we can tell just what molecules are present and what the ratios of atoms in the molecules are. Now in the plate III (exhibit 6) we see the mass spectrometer more clearly. In a given run on coal we developed one-tenth of a mile of chart record if you take the chart shown and divide it and put it end to end as a single record. BASIC SCIENCE This laboratory shows the application of basic science to a very practical problem. What have we learned in this less than 5-month period? First of all, if one looks into the literature one finds that generally 95-825-68-6 |