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Vaporizing Garbage to Create Electricity
CaroKann writes "Geoplasma is planning to build a power plant in St. Lucie County, Florida that will generate electricity by vaporizing landfill trash and sewage treatment plant sludge with plasma arcs. It will be the first plant of its kind in the USA and the largest in the world. The power plant is expected to destroy 3000 tons of garbage, generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day. The plant will also supply steam to a nearby Tropicana juice plant. The landfill is expected to be depleted in about 18 years. In addition, up to 600 tons of melted, hardened sludge will be produced each day and will be sold for road construction."
Glad ol' Doc Brown had the right idea .. now when do I get one to stick ontop of the trunk of my time travelling Delorean?
RFC2119
I dunno... the idea of vaporizing trash with plasma arcs sounds like something you'd do in a 1st. person shooter ... not a recycling plant. But if this works as advertised, it's pretty cool. How much electricity does it take to run though? Seems like this would consume a lot of power!
Everyone knows the best thing to do with garbage is to attach a rocket to a large ball of it and fire it directly into space.
How will this vaporized garbage be disposed of? If it's just dumped into the atmosphere, won't it just contribute to the global warming problem or smog or make cancer rates skyrocket?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Having garbage plasma arcs listed under hardware.slashdot but I guess its the best there is. Have to wonder about how such things as emissions are handled.
Isn't there some sort of pollution that is created by vaporizing the trash? I can't imagine the process would be free of emissions. All I know is that I wouldn't want to live downwind of this place.
We'll be harvesting landfills in 100 years to get the materials (plastic stuff mostly) that our country is so busy paying China to manufacture, then buying and disposing of in said landfills. If all that fodder is vaporized for energy, we're screwed.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
With minimal impact, good usage of by products and so forth. The only problem is that if we can just zap away our inconvenient little problems (tonnes and tonnes of trash, for example), we will never do anything to curb our overzealous consumption. Doesn't sound like a sustainable idea in the grand scheme of things.
Megawatts per day? Will that power my computer? I think it uses 15kg-m/s^2.
After reading the article, which briefly mentioned small scale plants in Japan and failures in other countries like Germany, it's starting to sound a bit to good to be true.
BTW, does this mean trash powered Deloreans will be out in a few years? I won't even ask for time travel to be standard, it can be optional.
"The power plant is expected to destroy 3000 tons of garbage, generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day."
Watt is a measure of energy per second. That is, power. Saying 120 megawatts of electricity per day is nonsense. I think they meant to just say 120 megawatts.
Doesn't slashdot have editors for this kind of stuff?
Here in the Halton region, which is comprised of some suburbs just West of the Toronto metro, there has been some talk of building one of these plants (although they've tossed around the number $700 million). This is an effort to deal with the reality of garbage, not to mention that reality that Toronto has been giving the entire country a continual black-eye by shipping waste to Michigan (if I were a Michiganer, I'd be pissed to be another regions dumping ground. Even as an Ontarian, the endless row of trash hauling trucks, each leaving a wake of loose garbage, is untenable).
But despite the reality that no one wants to build dumps, and Toronto has been spending millions shipping it to an entirely different country, there are still the head-in-the-sand dreamers who would rather the issue just disappears. A prominent Toronto city bureaucrat, for instance, has poo-poohed the idea, decrying the vile idea of "burning" waste. They'd rather drive it 500 miles in transport trucks to dump it somewhere else.
Could anybody give a link to existing facilities to get actual facts about what's going on?
...or does vaporizing trash and sewage sludge sound, oh, I dunno, maybe a little bad for the environment? I mean seriosly, who knows what kinds of chemicals are in that stuff (especially the trash)?
Sigs are for the weak.
How are these plasma arcs going to be generated? I'm no physicist, but will the power needed to generate these arcs be outweighed by the energy produced from the garbage? These seems like, in essence, just burning really really hot, so how efficent can that be? Like I said, I'm not physicist. Can this really work? Is this more than just random propaganda?
I'm not "an environmentalist" but I do have increased interest in the environment these days... maybe because of the increased media coverage (undoubtedly so) or maybe my worry over how my kids will live... whatever. Independantly, I have notice the news has lately referred to global warming as "climate change." When it was considered controversial, it was "global warming" vs. denial. Off the topic though...
It was my first question, though, to wonder what the emissions are and how much of that can be contained in some way. Would it be worse than fossil fuels? How efficient is this? How much energy is returned compared to the amount used in the generation? (I assume the gain in energy is considerable since someone is spending money to make it happen and nobody does anything without profit motive right?)
Let me try to brush up on my yank-math...
3000 tons = 6,000,000 pounds
120,megawatts = 120,000,000 watts
A CDROM weighs 1/2 oz.
So you'd need approx 96 AOL CDs per hour to run a 60W lightbulb. I think I have just enough of those to get me through the end of the year...
Wouldn't that be considered incest?
This has been attempted before. I used to work in the waste industry, and one of my clients had a plan to develop this kind of technology. The problem was that, despite predictions, the waste simply did not burn hot enough. If they've managed to overcome this obstacle, this is going to be huge. The cost-effectiveness still concerns me, but government subsidies can take care of that.
this sounds like it has a lot of potential but I don't think poeple would be friendly to the idea the Tropicana juice plant would be recieving steam that was a biproduct of what the layman would essentally read as burnt trash.Even made me gag. But in all seriousness this sounds like a great idea and if all the biproducts are safe to use and this produces less pollution than fossil fuels then I am all for it. This may be the big break we need to to free our power plants from Big Oil--but the question reamins will Big Oil play fair and not try to have this programme regulated into oblivion with scare tatics? I hope not.
Energy that better AND cheaper. Amd as a Floridian I would welcome any power source to my state that would show promise of freeing ourselves from dependence on Big Oil at the municipal level.
Pagan? Geek? Check out #paganism on Freenode IRC
Since you say you do have an increased interest in the environment, I guess you'd be also interested in knowing that there are so many dead zones in the world...the majority along the US coasts - sadly.
This http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/ content/investigations/es2206/es2206page04.cfm would be an interesting read.
This will never get built. Let me explain: People near the Treasure Coast are retirees. And I don't mean in the "Oh, it's Florida...of COURSE there are retired people there" sense. I mean that many of its communities were planned and built specifically for bluehairs. Port St. Lucie, for example, is just such a community.
Now as impossible as it may seem, octogenarians are not really up on the newest technological advances. The moment you say the words "landfill trash" to these people, the NIMBY (not in my backyard) impulse will dominate, and granny and gramps will be making phone calls, changing zoning rules, voting down money, and generally just making Geoplasma's job as difficult as possible. They're retired. If you thought they didn't have the time or inclination to do these kinds of things, then you're mistaken.
I know it makes no logical sense to want to make use of modern garbage disposal technology, and yet not want it anywhere within a million miles of you, but trust me, that is the mentality. The article characterizes this as a county-wide effort. I bet not. I bet the people who are slated to have this trash burning marvel right next to them will soon be mad as hell in 3...2...1...
Similar ideas have involved injecting oxygen to incinerate waste at very high heat. Does anyone have recent info on this process?
"Okay, who is the shit-head who threw away a barrel of sodium!"
Table-ized A.I.
120 megawatts per day? So, after about 8 days, it'll be generating a gigawatt? In a year, will it be producing 43.8 gigawatts?
Probably not.
My first guess was that it's probably generating 120 megawatt-hours per day, or what those of us who know physics would call "5 megawatts".
They say that they'll use about 1/3 of the generated energy, and plan to sell the remainder back to the grid. Electricity is usually worth something like $20-$50 / MWh. If they're selling 3.3MW into the grid, they might be able to get $1600 - $4000 / day from this thing.
However, they also say that they can recoup their $425M investment in 20 years. Assuming a 4% interest rate (municipal borrowing is cheap!), they'd need to pay back a little over $2.5 million per month, or about $85,000 per day.
If the power plant is actually generating 120 megawatts, then they're looking at (80*24) megawatt-hours per day, or $38,400 - $96,000. They're also selling steam and sludge, and I don't know what the current market value of those is. Yes, I know that you pay $60 - $100 / megawatt-hour for your home electric service, but electricity on the bulk market (especially at night) is a lot cheaper.
A way to dispose of bodies without all that search-party-knee-deep-in-garbage silliness...
To stay on-topic, pie-in-the-sky stuff like this never pans out. It just doesn't. In this case, it will either use more energy than they thought, emit more pollution than they thought, require more maintenance than they thought, or produce a byproduct that they won't be able to sell. Yeah, nasty slag made from garbage and shit... I bet that the Department of Transportation will be all over that. Even if they have to bury the slag, I suppose at least it won't take up as much space as the original garbage.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There goes our last chance to find the Apollo 11 master tape.
Table-ized A.I.
I want them to harness the very mass as energy itself. No byproduct, just energy.
It's not possible to have "120 megawatts per day". A watt is a RATE of energy usage (joules per second, in fact). It takes 120 MW to power a million 120W light bulbs -- for 5 seconds, or 5 hours, or a day, or a year -- how long you keep that rate up, has nothing to do with how fast the actual rate is !
Perhaps the article meant "120 megawatt-hours per day", although that would be a very strange unit of measurement (not as bad as Libraries of Congress, though).
I'm sorry, but I highly doubt I'll be consuming any more Tropicana products if they're going to be made from steam of vaporized landfill waste... There's just something unsettling about that.
The map that you link to does not show the most zones on the US coast. In fact, I count more red dots just in Europe. But more to the point, what the hell does this have to do with garbage disposal in Florida?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Burning trash to produce power always sounds like such a great idea -- pure goodness and apple pie -- therefore popular with politicians and voters and slashdotters, until you actually measure the levels of heavy-metal pollutants that exit through the power plant's smoke stack. Sure, the levels are "low" (typically 1-15ppm) but heavy metals have a very nasty habit of bio-accumulating in plants, fish, and animals, especially kids, causing nerve/brain damage/lowered IQ. Unfortunately, with garbage, no matter how many regulations there are not to throw out this or that, there are always going to be things in trash which should never be burnt because they contain heavy metals in various materials. Remind me to stay away from Tropicana fruit juice.
"Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment, funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag."
Does this mean that during the last two years, St. Lucie County will be importing trash from other counties? What if those counties also build these things? Will "trash pirates" be raiding nearby landfills for material to burn?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
You should have read the summary, and the article, to find out how this type of disposal works. In effect, this technique does result in the combustion of the garbage. Instead of using a flame to ignite the waste, as in traditional methods of incineration, electricity is used. Vaporization is nothing more than extremely rapid combusion.
Anybody who refers to this technique as "burning" is absolutely correct. The only way they could be any more correct is to refer to it as "rapid burning".
Especially when burnt garbage steam has been bubbled through it.
Mmmm Tropicana garbage juice...[Homer voiceover]...
Does anyone think of Lil' Lisa's Slurry here? I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned it yet..
able to support. As an electrical engineer that deals with power systems, I have never dealt with, or heard of a power generator that is rated in Watt-hours. As a unit, watt-hours is energy consumption, not generation. This is true for nuclear reactors, steam turbines, hydro plants, your car's engine, or anything that generates power.
using like a billion joules in heat to plasma arc weld garbage that will give off 1/100th of that amount of heat and using it to power a power plant seems not only counterproductive but also impossible. Even if they're using chemical energy to create the plasma, they could just use that chemical reaction to power the plant. But if they find a way to use all the toxic carcinogenic fumes from burning plastic, rubber, and toxic metals that are created to power another plant, then we just might be in business!
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
Clearly this is ripped off from Space Quest: "use vaporizer on bin":
r izer
http://www.sq7.org/omnipedia/index.php/Trash_Vapo
Roger Wilco rolls in his digital grave!
This is just another idea to rid the world of gas to create energy. Changing World Technologies is also working to turn garbage into oil.
Those who are worried about gases being released into atmosphere. This technology is much much more then a incinerator. It breaks down the garbage into it's most basic form and broken down into elemental components. You should listen to the video at GeoPlasma . Any CO2 produced could be passed through a zirconia electrolysis cell to produce oxygen.
\
Oh, sorry, you seem to have to corner on self-righteous zealotry already.
Anyway, suffice to say, it's good that there are people getting out there and trying wild new ideas. Isn't that what made western society great in the first place? It's time for some more of that.
Supposedly the temperatures are so high that everything is reduced to a plasma. That is, there can't BE any carcingonic fumes, toxins, or anything else, because all of those things are molecular. Plasmas are totally lacking in anything resembling an atomic bond. If one had an unlimited supply of energy available, reducing things to a plasma and then seperating the components would be the ideal way of recycling while simultaneously refining vast quanities of new feedstock for industrial purposes. It's just that energy isn't unlimited. I'm pretty leery of the idea that these folk can generate energy from this process, but I'd be pretty damn glad to be proven wrong. The consequences of this project being successfull are rather significant.
Independantly, I have notice the news has lately referred to global warming as "climate change."
I think climate change is the term preferred by climate scientists because it is less likely to be abused by Republicans. Global warming is an accurate term in that the average temperature of the earth does increase, however at the scale of local climates some places get warmer while others actually get cooler. That gives the climate change deniers "evidence" to disprove global warming.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
okay, so they're going to open an incinerator - it uses a hi-tech method to burn the waste, but it's still an incinerator.
I hope they've got an efficient waste gas management/scrubbing system, otherwise the same thing'll happen there as it happened near me. The local municipal incinerator was closed because any vegetables grown locally contained toxic levels of poisonous waste, including nastily high levels of cadmium.
oh well.
--
It's only a matter of time until there's a deficit in garbage since energy will be so accessible. People will scramble to create more waste to power their high-powered goods, and global warming will turn into HotAssPlanet.
I'm guessing the most optimistic person in the world wrote that. First they aren't generating much power, the waste steam is a huge maintenance hassle as steam pipes either need to be made of stainless steel or something else that isn't going to rust. Second, after building it they are going to discover that they need to spend millions every year on scrubbers just to keep themselves below the EPA limits on the pollution, heavy metals and other nasty stuff from getting into the air. After doing that they will find out that their garbage fees go up astronomically as a result of the number of shutdowns due to violating said EPA standards because half the residents are throwing away toxic materials in the trash (you can ask people not to throw mercury, batteries and toxic chemicals away but they will still do it) and as a result of the damage said materials do to the scrubbers, incinerator and geration systems. And finally they will be paying to dispose of the hazerdous sludge that contains the remainder of the heavy metals and other toxic chemicals (take two household chemicals toss in a plasma arc and what will you get? millions of cominations of nasty nasty substances that can't be predicted or accounted for) that weren't belched out of the smoke stack. And if they think for a minute any roadway designer or contractor is going to use that stuff without being mandated by law they need to lay off the crack.
The fact is that you don't build roads with materials that have unknown and extremely variable properties. 50 years ago they might have used the sludge in road construction (because they didn't know better) but not now, the chemical properties could be destructive/corrosive to the roadway, cause hazardous contamination in runoff and dust, and it could range from hard durable rock like material to a bad bit of clay. We don't build roads out of trash, unless someone is paying for you to take that trash, and it's a guaranteed uniform and chemically neutral substance, like glass. But this is what happens when you let the marketing department write your article.
Our county made the mistake of building an incinerator 20 years ago, it was the worst mistake they ever made and became the biggest money suction device that has kept the county broke for the length of the factility. I bet the total cost over 20 years not including interest was double the estimated price and it would have been cheaper to ship the garbage to China at the prices being paid per ton to incinerate the garbage.
If we have such a surplus in energy, we can offset global warming with global air conditioning.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Their other products are chump change:
Quarried rock goes for about $3.75/ton. Of the 9000 tons of garbage they burn, they end up with 600 tons of slag, worth about $2000/day.
Steam is worth about $10/1000 lb. The 80000 lbs of steam they'll sell to Tropicana is worth about $800/day.
They don't mention it, but they are probably able to collect tipping fees from the sewage folks and, once this landfill is gone, dumping fees for future garbage.
Still, the bottom line is electricity. If their efficiencies are off or if the market for electricity gets cheap, they may have a hard time amortizing $425 million in debt, even at favorable bond rates. $425 Million at 4.5% over 30 years would require about $2 million/month to service. Their $126K/day income gives them a gross of $3.8 million/month. Enough to service the debt and have about $1.8 million/month for salaries and other recurring costs. It might fly. But if they rack up significant maintenance costs that amount to a significant fraction of their total $425 million plant cost over the 30-year lifetime, it probably won't.
> In addition, up to 600 tons of melted, hardened sludge will be produced each day and will be sold for road construction.
I read elsewhere that their first project is a new highway to Hershey, PA.
. . .
Alcoa is the first plant (started in 2005) to be able to recycle the aluminium and plastic in a Tetra-Pak. They do this by vaporizing this mix of aluminium and plastic in a plasma jet oven.
There was a program about it on the Discovery Channel.
Now, Alcoa doesn't make any electricity, but they focussed on recycling. Perhaps this is just the form of this technology focussing on electricity production.
News article about the Alcoa recycling plant.
Manuals are your last resort only
Maybe all of Roland's article submissions can by routed to this place, after all they're mostly hot air...
In addition, up to 600 tons of melted, hardened sludge will be produced each day and will be sold for road construction.
So we're going to see some new "recirculate-mode-only" roads in the near future, eh?
They said it would cost $425 million to build. With oil at $66/barrel, that works out to roughly 6.4 million barrels of oil just to build the thing. Now, how much energy is in the landfill, and is it much more than what's in 6.4 million barrels? I'm not sure about the price of natural gas, much less the energy content of the thing; but if I were living in that jurisdiction, I'd really want to know more. You've gotta figure that cost overruns could easily push this to half a billion dollars.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"The power plant is expected to destroy 3000 tons of garbage, generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day. The plant will also supply steam to a nearby Tropicana juice plant[*]. The landfill is expected to be depleted in about 18 years. In addition, up to 600 tons of melted, hardened sludge will be produced each day and will be sold for road construction."
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, right here about twice a week. It is expected that this post will convince up to 91.3% of readers that this project is bullshit designed to capture votes for local politicians. In addition, about 42 tons of melted, hardened cynicism will be produced from this post.
*Note to self: don't drink Tropicana juice unless you have developed a taste for "essence of garbage".
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Right now the shipping to and from china is so one way skewed that they just dump containers here in the US-it costs them less to make a new one in china and fill it up with consumer crap than to ship the old one back for the refilling with walmart stuffing. For real. Now maybe shipping the trash back there inside the containers might change that-don't know.
I would prefer much stronger recycling laws, all the way to how stuff is built-mandate that it is easy to take apart again for recycling, just start to try and eliminate "trash" as some product. I know I am tired of paying for it, I look at my trash compared to what I buy-it's half the bulk! Packaging and whatnot is 50% of the actual mass it appears for day to day normal stuff, groceries, etc. Nuts! You know that has got to add up significantly over the year straight out of your wallet.
TFA says that the plant will generate 120MW. The poster made the (common, moronic) error of writing 120MW per day.
Open Energy Project
Everyone knows you use a giant rubber-band slingshot.
Like we actually need a legitimate excuse for planned obsolence.
You can put fancy guidance equipment in a rocket, but how do you make sure the slinged trash ends up in the center of the sun? It would be a nightmare to calculate.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Why does my nascent understanding of physics and chemistry tell me this must be impossible? How can there be SO much more energy in trash than in this sludge waste product that it can actually power a power plant AND develop megawatts of power?
+++ATH0
This is garbage today, but in another 30-40 years will be an invaluable resource. In fact, we should consider the idea of importing certain stuff from other countries. Here in Colorado, we are taking dried sewage from NYC to use as fertilizer on our fields. Of course, we have tests that get run on each batch (radiation, chemicals, etc), but it is mostly clean (They have turned back some batches as having various chemicals that was obviously being illegally dumped by some chemical company).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Welcome our garbage vaporizing overlords
In mother russia garbage vaporizes you!
Steven king dead by garbage vaporizing at age 55
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
Simcity had them first!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I should've put this as the subject for my original post. Oh well. Hopefully you'll find it interesting anyway.
Excellent! We'll finally be able to tie up Batman and put him on a conveyor belt that leads to a Wayne Enterprises plasma vapourization chamber.
http://outcampaign.org/
That's great, because nothing says "environmentally friendly" like spewing out miles of asphalt so that we can continue to pave the planet.
I see the remark that people are counting the chemical components of the reactions, but what if there is no "lost" factor?
... and the quantities of gas remain. Let's presume it's CO2-plus-enrichers. For the people nervous about greenhouse gases, is it possible to capture the CO2 and and ship it to industries who use CO2?
... and what if there is a market for just this brand of weird stuff? (Pest Control?)
We gain modest amounts of electricity, the hardened material becomes road filling,
That leaves the "weird stuff"
The results become:
Wipe out landfills, electricity, road packing, CO2 vending, steam, Exotic Stuff, ending trash shipments across borders, and some new creative back end result I haven't thought of yet. Isn't that a slam dunk?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In our local (Southeastern US) landfill, the tipping fee is $10.51/ton. At 3,000 tons / day, your looking at an extra 960k/month in revenue.
I know of a coal plant that supplies a soda bottling company with, uh, air pollution.
The "effervescence of sparkling water" used to decaffeinate your coffee would more honestly be called "coal power plant exhaust". Soon it could be "burned garbage".
I've seen fish with "purified wood smoke" on the label, meaning carbon monoxide. It's done for meat too. If you can come up with a nice term for carbon monoxide generated by burning garbage, you have a career in marketing.
Here's what's on my /. page right under this article summary:
:-)
Ask Slashdot: Cheap Bulk Eraser for Hard Disks? 70 of 90 comments
I suggest that the plasma arc would make a dandy bulk disk eraser... with no worries about forensic data recovery - ever!
They've been doing this in Hawaii for years... check this out: http://www.honoluluhpower.com/
I can't fault you for this, because the story blurb got it wrong in the first place. You don't generate "megawatts per day." But assuming that the most sane disambiguation of the story blurb's numbers is correct (namely, that it burns 3,000 tons of garbage per day and generates 120 megawatts of power), it comes out to 96 AOL CDs per day to run a 60W bulb. Reducing the magnitudes a bit and simplifying, the story blurb claims 3,000 tons = 120 megawatt-days, or 6 pounds = 120 watt-days.
(96 AOL CDs / 1 day) x (0.5 oz. / 1 AOL CD) x (1 lb. / 16 oz.) x (120 watt-days / 6 lb.)
(96 x 0.5 x 120) / (16 x 6) watts = 60W
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management
8 &q=Plasma%20Gasification
= Plasma+Gasification+japan&btnG=Search
Plasma Gasification.
http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
Japan plant
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q
Don't drive through Florida in twenty years, the roads will be really shitty.
Not counting the actual materials themselves, it actually uses less energy make more plastic than it does to recycle it. The only exception to this is aluminum.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Soylent Orange is waste.
You cannot produce "megawatts per day". That's non-sensical. You can produce N megawatts at any time, or M megawatt hours per day.
Of course it will work.
Before it wasn't hot enough because it was too small. But if we make a bigger, even more expensive one, I'm sure it will be better. Just like road congestion.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
"Vaporising" garbage... Like many other burning processes (if it really is such a one), wouldn't that require large amounts of oxygent and expell obscene amounts of CO2? In which case we are shooting the environment in the foot...
But then again... maybe Coal plants are just as bad as this...
As a unit, watt-hours is energy consumption, not generation.
As a non-EE, I think this statement is silly. A watt-hour is a unit of energy, whether you are counting what you use or what you make.
I'll see your septic tank and generator... and I'll raise you a solar panel array, one for power, one for hot water, and a trash incinerator, which also does the hot water.
Being self sufficient is great - although it really bugs me I still have to pay the standard rates for rubbish collection and the usual surcharges for wastewater.
Watt means power (J/s) so it's wrong to say that it generates x watts per day. Instead, one can just say that it generates 120 megawatts of electricity. In one day, it will generate x*24*3600s joules of energy.
A: Currently only around 40% of heavy metals is scrubbed out of flue gas - even if new technology in the future gets up to 90%, the remaining 10% that escapes is still dangerously toxic spew.more details here (40%)
That's like saying I was driving 100km per hour per day.
Either its "generating 120 megawatts" or "generating 2880 megawatt-hours per day" (120MW * 24 hours), if you like redundancies, or I suppose you could convert it to joules or something.
Megawatts is *power* -- energy per unit time. Adding "per day" to that is redundant.
I seem to detect a distinct misunderstanding with how this technology works. Solid waste material is fed into a plasma arc chamber where there is very little oxygen present. The waste is converted into 2 separate streams. The gaseous stream is made mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the liquid stream is made up mostly of non combustables (ash). The gas is piped to a rather normal looking furnace and burned in a fashion similar to natural gas. The liquids pass over a heat exchanger to cool them down and allow them to solidify. The energy used to create the plasma arc is mostly recovered. The reason that this is more efficient than just incinerating the trash directly is because of the difference in excess air requirements. Gaseous fuels require about 5-10% above stoichiometric ratio of air to fuel. Incinerating trash in a retort style furnace requires 100-150% excess air. That is a huge volume of air that is being heated for no good reason.
Mod parent funny :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Heavy metals problem is not that easy to address
> global warming offset with global air conditioning
Unfortunately, air conditioning works by moving heat around, from say inside your house to outside. So unless we install a giant heat pump in geosync orbit...
...now I am a real sickie.
Er, well, no, actually.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021213.html
We have heard this time and time again, but until we see the plant up and running and being able to produce what it promises, it does not mean anything
Ok, so instead of drinking the trash with it leaking into our water source we get to breath the trash after it is burned. Humm.. I wonder which will kill me first...
Obama = Socialism.
St Lucie County is a backwoods, redneck little county whose moronic governing officials quarrel in that way one finds primarily in small towns. If there is any chance for this magic trash->power black box to be either a scam or some sort of boondoggle, it would be likely to happen there.
Recall that most trash incinerators create rather toxic fly ash containing, among other things, lead and mercury that was in the garbage. No plasma arc, however hot, will destroy that stuff. The best you can do with any incineration process is make it into moderately-toxic bricks or sludge or powder. You'll still have to filter the gaseous effluent (not an easy, clean or totally successful task), and you'll still have a pile of toxic crud to dispose of...
As a nuclear physicist of my acquaintance has said in reference to nuclear waste disposal, uranium eventually decays, but arsenic is forever.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I can't help but wonder if the sludge couldn't be separated while in its liquid state? The idea is that while the trash is in a liquid state, one could filter the various base elements to 'waiting pools?' Most likely the cost of filtering would choke the national debt; But what a challenge to be able to do it, and cheaply.
I think I read about this idea in Science Illistrated a few years ago.
ATTFA, it only produces 0.12 gigawatts a day!!
It would take at least 10 of these plants to power a single shot into the future.. I wonder how many AOL CDs that is..
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What is the outcome of trying to vaporize nuclear waste? What issues would need to be considered and addressed? Consider this picking the ./ community's collective brain on the matter (pun not intended)
It'd sure be nice. Perfect recycling is one of the things that futurists totally love. To have it now... it'll definitely make the industrial/consumer age much more sustainable. It might turn out to be possible to gentrify the entire planet.
This isn't fusion. It's just plasma. In a plasma that nuclei are all still intact, but the electrons are free. So all atomic bonds disappear. Once you let it cool, the electrons reassociate themselves with nuclei, and you have atoms again.
God knows what this has to do with the story, but... I commute in to work through central London on my little 125cc every day, and the other morning rode behind a DeLorean in the traffic down Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes fans...) turning into Marylebone Road.
I drew up beside it at the lights - they have these weird window slots *inside* the windows. The thing looked really strange - like it was rusting very gently from inside or something. I didn't see the driver's face, but he had a tattoo on his arm that looked like it said "Fart Face." He drove off before I could get a closer look.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Sounds like a great idea but I'm still a bit skeptical about the composition of the byproducts. Contaminants like mercury don't simply go away, I assume they will be bound into the sludge portion of the byproduct, which is likely to be quite high given the fact that they are re-processing sewage.
What about the Dioxins from vapourised plastics, A plasma arc produces an incredible heat but Dioxins are also very resistant to being broken down in this way.
Sulphur? How is this kept out of the exhaust gases?
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
As a recently former resident of the nearby area, based on what I'm seeing in the comments, I offer the following...
u cie,+Fl&ie=UTF8&z=16&ll=27.57646,-80.484982&spn=0. 012458,0.027122&t=h&om=1
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1. If you want hills in Florida, you live near Lakeland or Tallahassee. A 30-40 foot high trash mound off of I-95 is quite visible. Furthermore, if I have my geography right, I've found it on Google Maps, and the last time I was on Indrio Rd (3 years ago), it wasn't that populated.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Port+St+L
2. In 2004, St. Lucie county voted as purple for Kerry as Orlando did: in an otherwise red region outside the Gold Coast. Furthermore, they have been home for years now to probably the raunchiest radio station in the state: the Orlando stations are tamer than these guys. Here's the question: will the progressives go for this project above senior and parental NIMBYs?
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
http://www.wzzr.com/main.html
3. St Lucie, Palm Bay, and other former GDC communities in the state are sucking in families for relatively cheap land rates, replacing elderly with youth via introduction and die-off. How that will affect future demographics, politics, etc, is up for debate.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Whooooosh!
Technology tips and tricks.
The Americans prefer to call it the International Space Station or ISS Alpha.
Just so you're appropriately unsettled by reality; the last glass of water you drank contained water derived from the last urination Caesar took before he was assassinated. This was something previously discussed on slashdot if my memory serves me properly.
So if you're upset by drinking re-used water, you are just blissfully unaware of how recycled everything already is.
-theed.
Relate 'plasma arcs' to 'Tropicana Orange Juice'. Can be played with any industrial process and any consumer foodstuff. http://rcbullock.blogspot.com/2006/09/six-degrees- of-kevin-bacon-but-with.html
http://theroblog.com
Wouldnt this spew tons of toxins into the air since you are burning garbage? Why not just keep burning coal?
and maybe the "plasma arcs" are something new,but http://esm.versar.com/PPRP/powerplants-new/bresco. htm is one of more than a dozen similar plants in the US. This particular plant in Baltimore Md started operating in 1984 and can generate 56 MW.
Incidentally, 6 inches of lead is sufficient to stop almost all radiation, except neutrinos which are too low-energy to affect anything in any significant way whatsoever. Neutron radiation will go through lead, but get stopped pretty quickly by air or water. When scientists talk about radiation that requires a light-year of lead to block, they're talking about neutrinos. Nothing else (except maybe dark matter) even comes close.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to explain all this, since it seems fairly evident that you're trolling and playing stupid (for some reason), but if at least one person learns something from this, it ought to be worthwhile.
We simply cannot allow this technology to proceed if it means that we will have a future shortage of golf courses!!!!
Wanted: A better sig than this one. I have neither the wit nor motivation...
I'm putting dibs on it showing up in a James Bond movie first but what others would be possible? X-Men 4? Just imagining being dumped from a conveyor and falling into a cupola in which arm-thick lightning bolts are crazily zapping back and forth is scary. I thought gassification in Japan was using supercritical water though, could be wrong. I know at the Aichi World Expo they had a state of the art cogeneration facility. Curious why this new one is "a better way" according to TFA's quote.
Many answers to Energy and Improved Human Health are on this page and in the links. Flying cars, Space Tourism/Vacations, your own apartment home on the Moon equipped with a Fountain of Youth Temperature Oscillation Health System > http://www.prleap.com/pr/32066 . This circulatory pumping health system makes for healthy Space Travel, health maintenance for our new Space Cruises Vacation Industry.
You can accelerate the growth of your Moon-based greenhouse vegetable garden by positioning an oxygen separator to draw the poisonous oxygen away from the mini-greenhouse and into your apartment. Think symbiotic. That max's out the vegetation growth {food supply} + Home Oxygen Supply.
Maxing out your computer cooling system {no more fan noise} and your body is accomplished by setting up the Fountain of Youth air conditioner to COOL the room where the computer is set up & running. The heat pulled away from you and the computer is transferred into the other half of the room *** THAT YOU HAVE TO WALK THROUGH TO GET TO THE REFRIGERATOR & BATHROOM ***. So every time you take a break perhaps 5 minutes each hour you have to walk out of a Cold Room through a blast of Sahara-level Heat, then back through the Heated Room to get into the computer area again and the Cold.
Each time you do that you add a few hours/days/weeks to your life plus increases your physical quality of life 24/7 by eliminating many of the circulatory system negatives of sitting sedentary hours on end at a computer terminal {this "temperature oscillating effect" applied to your body has added benefit of getting your Mom off your back for not exercising. Hint: add a rebounder to the heated room}.
The tighter oxygen molecules packing the Cold computer area increases brain oxygenation, raises IQ, staves off Alzheimer's & Parkinson's Diseases. You will also find that INCREASED SHIVERING exercises the deep muscles of your body, increasing your shot put/discuss distances, pole vaulting & Spring Training won't be so rough on you.
Conjugal visitation time will be much improved as Oxygen Molecule Packing + Circulatory Training = Viagra Effect.
Moving through alternating Cold-Hot area has much the same affect as swimming as in fact that's what you're doing, swimming through different temperature fluids {air}.
Placing your home's electric water heater in the Sahara Desert Room Saves 95+% off water heater element runtimes with a reduced water heating energy expenditure {$35 a month electric bill reduction}. All this Energy Synergy utilizes a combination of +body heat +computer heat +AC compressor heat +trash plasma zapper heat = Energy Saving Synergy Heat Source System. It isn't "free energy" just smart energy. Anyway, the bottom line is by using all the HEAT energies generated by your body, computer, Fountain of Youth and Trash Zapper systems you have paid for your hot water heater expense, or cut each by half, an example of circular energy.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Have Aerosmith write a song for it, and we got ourselves a movie.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I know this is a joke, but there is truth to it as well. With a surplus of energy we would be able to install more exhaust scrubbers and not worry about the decrease in efficiency that comes along with it. We would be able to invest more in hydrogen fuel cells because we could use the energy to create the hydrogen. And we would be able to clean our carbon sinks in the environment and create new projects to trap carbon from the atmosphere.
I welcome your complete inability to provide a cogent rebuttal to even just one of my points.
Your lack of words speak much louder than anything you ever could have written. They clearly state how you are unable to back up your points with evidence, thus meaning that your ideas are flawed and incorrect.
My liberal friend, when we are discussing serious matters like this, we can't just rely on our emotions. We have to use clear, rational thought. We have to consider the consequences from all different angles. Basically, we have to act in a mature fashion. I know many liberals struggle with that; they prefer to have their emotions take over, to the point of making outrageous and factually incorrect outbursts. I see you are no different from the typical liberal.
Possibly but that depends upon how the city sets it up. Look at it this way, you pay taxes to the city to collect garbage. That garbage may then be sold by the city to a production company. In that event the money paid for it may be used to fund the garbage collection reducing taxes. In that event you may not need to pay twice which would make sense because this is turning it into a resource.