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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
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.
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.
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
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
"Tropicana, made from pure garbage."
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
during the last two years, they will vaporize the plant itself
That's great, because nothing says "environmentally friendly" like spewing out miles of asphalt so that we can continue to pave the planet.