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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."
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.
sadly the delorean could never actually reach 85 miles per hour because it was such a heavy car.
Well most of that will be water vapor. I think this is great and worth trying. I do think that my opinion of this counts a lot more than most of the people posting on slashdot.
I happen to live in Port Saint Lucie, FL. If this meet the emissions standards which the small plants in Japan do then it will beat the daylights out of an other coal fired plant and get ride of that huge landfill.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"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?
Perhaps Tropicana is piping in water, and the heat from the burning trash is turning it into steam, which gets piped back to Tropicana where it is used (for what? pasteurization?) and then returns to the trash plant again. The water/steam never leaves its pipe... it neither touches the OJ or the trash. It only gets heat from the trash and delivers it to the OJ. Sort of like the water in a nuclear power plant that powers the turbines never leaves its pipes.
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.
Simcity had them first!
The curb weight of a DeLorean is no more than 2750 lbs fueled up, which is a fair sight better than most sports cars manage... It was re-engineered by a Lotus engineer, Colin Chapman, who happened to be founder of Lotus, after a new manufacturing process failed. And if you argue that Lotus dosen't know how to produce light cars, you're just plain dumb.
That's thermal depolymerization. There are two plants right now, the larger one at the Butterball Turkey Plant in Carthage, MO, which is fed turkey offal. It had been shut down on several occasions due to complaints about odors coming from the plant, some of which were of dubious accuracy, but those concerns have been addresses now. The major end-product is roughly the equivalent of lightweight heating oil or diesel fuel, with some water, methane (which is used to power the process), carbon black, and minerals as additional byproduct. There was also an issue of cost of the petroleum product (about $80 per barrel) until Congress approved TDP for a $1 per gallon tax credit as a biofuel source.
However, TDP needs to be tweaked for each installation: what works for turkey offal will probably not work as well for sewage or tires. However, the final byproduct is arguably more useful than simply providing electricity, as it can be shipped up to New England for heating, used in transport, or (I think) further refined to extract other useful products. What you gain in flexibility of end-products, you lose in flexibility of initial installation.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
actually it is possible, a rate of a rate is acceleration, or in terms of power generation, a steady increase in power generation, every day you'd be producing 120 MW more than teh day before.
Similar plants working with high temperature gas burners are commonplace in continental EU (UK is an exemption on anal not-invented here basis). Frankly, I am not sure what advantage do you get from plasma.
When I studied in Moscow as a kid they built one plant like this right in front of the school doors. It was built into a hill so once it was finished all you could see were the doors, a small chimney stack and the admin block. As a result of it being in the hill the chimney stack was also not very obvious either. It was sticking above ground by a mere 10m or so where it emerged from the hill side. It handled the garbage for several 50-60-es high rise blocks providing them with central heating and hot water in the process and possibly some minor electricity surplus into the grid. It was serving possibly around 20-40000 inhabitants if not more.
The thing which people bitching about these do not realise is how clean they are. There was no smell, no fumes, no vapours. On top of that it was build into wasteland which was so steep that it has stayed unused since times forgotten (definitely from before WW2).
Compared to the horrors of landfill which I am observing in the UK every time I have to take my alternative route to work (due to congestion or accidents) - absolute win-win. While I tend to support greenies this is an issue on which I do not agree with them.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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
P urpleAmericaPosterAll50.gif
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.