When Walt first dreamt up his idea for Disney World, he wasn’t thinking about rides or
water parks or fireworks.
His main concern was EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a real city
of the future.
While the literal idea of Walt’s died with him, Walt Disney Productions would go on to
build his Florida resort and in the process they would still experiment with new ways
to build and maintain the property.
In the 1980s one of those experiments would be a new power plant co-funded by the US government.
It would work, but it would also manage to be a short lived failure.
In 1980 Disney and the US Department of Energy broke ground on the SWEC Plant, otherwise
known as the Solid Waste Energy Conversion Plant.
It was a fifteen and a half million dollar facility that would use a process known as
pyrolysis to convert 100 tons of garbage a day into enough hot water to service The Magic
Kingdom, EPCOT Center, and two of the resort’s hotels.
The concept itself wasn’t brand new, however this would be first ever commercial pyrolysis
plant in the United States to be used for waste.
The way the plant would work is that the collected waste would be dropped down a nine story tall
chamber that would be kept at 1700 degrees Celsius.
The heat would cause the falling waste to pryolize, which means it would be decomposed
into both volatile gases and solid residue.
Now if you were to add oxygen to the mix, you’d have all of the ingredients for fire,
but because in this case you don’t, you’re instead just left with the two.
During the process the gases would be pumped to a separate chamber while the remaining
residue would continue, falling into a pool of water to cool down.
Those gases would be mixed with oxygen so that they could burn, and the plan was for
80% of those gases to be burned off at Disney’s water boiler, which would fulfill the hot
water needs for the two theme parks and two of the resorts.
The remaining 20% of those gases would be rerouted and burned off to help keep that
nine story tall chamber hot.
Meanwhile that inorganic residue, once cooled, would be broken up into a granular form.
Disney hoped that they’d be able to sell the residue where it could be used in construction,
for instance as a part of the the creation of pavement.
It was initially estimated that the 100 tons of garbage pyrolyzed every day would save
Disney over one million gallons of oil per year, and the plant was even planned to serve
more than just Disney World.
Early on, the surrounding Orange Country agreed to ship almost half of that daily waste allotment
to the facility.
Now this entire process was not what one might traditionally imagine when they think of incinerating
garbage.
It wasn’t shoveling trash into a big fire or anything, but the process did still result
in gasses that were burned off.
However this was 1980, beyond the fact that there was less emphasis on green forms of
energy back then, there was also the more attractive appeal of using less oil.
The oil crisis in 1973 and the energy crisis of 1979 both had significant negative impacts
not only on Disney World, but across the entire country.
The price of oil over that decade rose from under $10 a barrel to nearly $40 a barrel.
So this idea of being less reliant on oil, to the tune of one million gallons a year
would be big benefit for Disney.
Now, why was the Department of Energy footing part of the bill?
Well it was a part of a initiative they were running in which they’d invest in these
new projects as part of a cost sharing program.
The idea was that the DOE would help fund the initial project, and then over time they’d
be paid back based on how much money the new plant was saving.
On top of that the Department of Energy would be watching the plant closely because for
them, this would be test run.
They were hoping this technology would prove useful in processing radioactive waste over
in Idaho Falls.
So the plan was to build a much larger version of the SWEC Plant over in Idaho in the event
this plant would be a success.
So what happened?
Well the construction ran into some delays pushing the opening of the plant back a year,
but in September of 1982 the SWEC plant began operations, and it worked.
From a technical perspective, the plant did what it was meant to do.
However as Disney and the DOE would learn, it would be more expensive than they initially planned.
According to a later study, the plant’s flaws were that it would ultimately require
more gas than originally intended to run, ended up using twice as much electricity as
they planned for, and had troubles maintaining specific temperature zones needed for the
process to work smoothly.
On top of that, it would just so happen that oil costs would begin to drop.
With the two factors put together, the plant ended up costing more to operate than it was
worth with an estimated annual cost of $730,000.
In short, it was cheaper to just buy the oil and landfill the waste.
Any other time and it might have been worth the cost just to push the boundaries of experimental
processes, but by the early 1980s Disney was not in the strongest financial situation.
The Department of Energy would end up opting for a cheaper system to deal with the Idaho
Falls issue, and so with the plant being of no benefit to either party, it was shut down
in February of 1983.
Today the concept of pyrolysis as a form of waste management still exists.
Technology has improved over the years that make it both less impactful on the environment
and more economical, but considering the core concept still involves creating and burning
gases, it’s not as popular as other, more green, methods.
The SWEC Plant was hidden away, short lived, and ultimately unsuccessful.
However in it’s few months of operation it stood as one of many examples of how Disney
tried to keep Walt’s dream of EPCOT alive, even if it was just behind the scenes.