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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
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!
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...
"Okay, who is the shit-head who threw away a barrel of sodium!"
Table-ized A.I.
There goes our last chance to find the Apollo 11 master tape.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
What's obvious is that the writer didn't have a technical understanding.
Wow, I've never seen that happen. I mean, writers always completely understand the technology they are writing about. I think this is the first time I've ever read an article where the writer didn't understand what he was writing about.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Just don't use the 'smelloscope' on it.
If only we could harness the fusion potential of common household garbage, everyone knows it easily generates 1.21 gigawatts.
Um... no. I think they actually meant 120 megawatts. Because you see:
120 megawatts * 24 hours = 2880 megawatt-hours.
If the price of a megawatt-hour is about $35 dollars (we'll just use the median value of your estimate), then they are making $100 800 a day .
Multiply that by 365, and you get: $36 792 000 dollars a year.
Which means... that if they sell back 2/3 of the energy over the course of 20 years, they will make: $490 560 000 dollars (gross, in today's dollars)
Just FYI, some of us also "know physics" and can actually use Google calculator to make an estimate
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.
If it's used effectively, a plant like this could clean up whole countries. In anticipation of it's availability, Australia has built a collection site for our most environmentally damaging garbage. Once this rubbish has been fed through a white-hot plasma, our country will be much cleaner, and it's wonderful that we'll finally be benefiting from something which has long been little more than a toxic eyesore.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yeah. When it returns in a thousand years, we can just deflect it with another trash ball. Of course the world will be completly clean by then, so we'll have to make more trash in a hurry.
Technoli
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.
Well, the obvious solution then is to feed the environuts into the incinerator first.
during the last two years, they will vaporize the plant itself
Everyone knows you use a giant rubber-band slingshot.
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
Especially since there's a concerted effort in Michigan to stop the flow of Canadian trash.
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
That's great, because nothing says "environmentally friendly" like spewing out miles of asphalt so that we can continue to pave the planet.
Am I the only one thinking that this technology could also be used to solve the blue-hair problem? Would renaming the company Soylent Energy be too obvious to them?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.