The Environmental Protection Agency won a signigicant victory in its battle to require stack gas scrubbers as the primary strategy for the control of sulfur oxides under the Clean Air Act¹ with the recent Sixth Circuit decision in Big Rivers Electric Corp. v. EPA.² The court in Big Rivers held that a power company that burns high sulfur fuel must provide for permanent emission controls (i.e., scrubbers) or show that such controls are unavailable. In the court's view, alternate control devices such as tall stacks or switching to low sulfur fuel during air pollution episodes, do not, by themselves, meet the requirements of the statute without such a showing.

Sulfur oxides, one of the six pollutants for which air quality standards were set under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, are generated largely by fossilfuel power plants throughout the nation. There are essentially two methods for dealing with these emissions. The first, and the means preferred by EPA, is removal of sulfur oxides from the gas in the stack before it is released into the atmosphere. This removal is accomplished by mechanical and chemical devices known as stack gas desulfurization systems, or "scrubbers." These devices are relatively novel, and have experienced certain developmental and operational problems, but their performance record has improved significantly over the past year. Scrubbers are also quite expensive. TVA, with one of America's largest generating capabilities, has estimated that annual cost of installing scrubbers on its 12 coal burning plants to be $150 to $200 million as opposed to $17 million for one alternative, intermittent controls.³