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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."
The summary also mentions processing 3000 tons of garbage a day, and yielding 600 tons of sludge. Unless they're converting mass directly into energy, a la nuclear fission, I'd say there's about 2400 tons of apparent gas that needs to be accounted for still.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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...
I don't know anything about waste management, but if people care about recycling plastics, shouldn't they be doing that before they throw it in the trash? I think once it's in the landfill, it's "gone"; that means even if we wanted to, there's no way to harvest it out of a landfill that's remotely profitable. I mean, how much would they have to pay you to start digging through landfills for eight hours a day? And that's just the cost of mining the plastic out of the landfill.
People need to worry about recycling these materials (plastic, aluminum, paper, etc.) before they toss them into the trash. Many people (myself included) have signed up for seperate services for recycling stuff like this, and put out a recycling bin once a week with the trash.
As would the oil/coal/natural gas power plant that was burning afore mentioned fossil fuels, as well.
If we require a amount of energy and produce x amount of CO2 and y amount of trash, but have a way to reduce y without drastically increasing x, then I don't see why this is such a bad thing. If the exhaust is scrubbed, and the CO2 is nearly the same, then we've taken one little step toward a cleaner world.
Ideally, there may come a time when our cars don't produce CO2, industry produces minimal amounts, and our power plants are primarily green as well. In that case, dumping *some* CO2 into the atmosphere while reducing the amount of landfill we need for garbage is one hell of a bargain.
"So you'd need approx 96 AOL CDs per hour to run a 60W lightbulb. "
:)
Wait... let me get this straight, someone explain this to me.
I pay money for them to pick up my trash right?
They take my trash, zap it into electricity.
I have to pay for electricity.
So, I'm basically paying to have my trash back? WTF? Why can't I just install a trash plasma zapper under the sink and skip the expensive middle-man? My trash + electricity a month is $200+, I'd love to keep the money in my pocket.
"Hunny, the A/C's not working!"
"Just throw some more AOL CDs at it!"
This is better than solar power if it works! Now bring on those electric cars
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
You'd be surprised. These plants exist in other parts of the world already, so it's a proven process. Toronto's been debating building one for a while (mainly for the garbage-disposal value since we now ship our trash to Michigan) but every time the environuts hear the word "incinerator", they get their collective panties in a collective bunch. Doesn't matter that the technology is proven, clean, and a damn sight better than wasting thousands of dollars and burning fossil fuels to ship our garbage to another country. Environutism has never been about being rational.