Evaluating Power Plant Control Strategies for Air Toxics

The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) set out the new federal regulatory requirements for air toxics covering 189 listed chemical species. 1 Mfected sources fall into some 7 66 categories or sub-categories which can be combined into 18 broad industry groups, including "Fuel Combustion," "Waste Treatment and Disposal" and "Radionucleide Emitters." Thus, electric power plants, particularly coal-fired facilities, could become subject to new regulatory requirements as the air toxics provisions of the 1990 CAAA are developed. This paper reviews the status of the CAAA provisions as they affect the electric utility sector. An air toxics research program sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) then is briefly described. One element of this program -- a computer-based probabilistic assessment model -- illustrates the analytical capability being developed to aid utilities in evaluating power plant control strategies for air toxics.