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Plasma Plants Vaporize Trash While Creating Energy
Jason Sahler writes "Recently St. Lucie County in Florida announced that it has teamed up with Geoplasma to develop the United States' first plasma gasification plant. The plant will use super-hot 10,000 degree Fahrenheit plasma to effectively vaporize 1,500 tons of trash each day, which in turn spins turbines to generate 60MW of electricity — enough to power 50,000 homes!"
I am sure this will be deadly for some marine brine shrimp, or something, and will be regulated away. All sensible plans are...
Most of what we produce, most 'trash' is going to be hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. So I have to wonder, is this 'burning' it, or is it going to be producing diatomic hydrogen and oxygen? Does anyone have any experience with plasma gasification that could explain why this wouldn't produce unwanted byproducts from the gaseous components cooling down?
How much energy is used in generating that 10,000 degree plasma, hmm? Less than what it'll output by incinerating trash? I'd like to see that.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
10,000 degrees fahrenheit is around 5,600 degrees celcius, which is approximately the surface temperature of the sun.
If ever the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag were appropriate...
Great summary, let's just forget the important part:
doesn't that make the whole "generates 60MW" claim rather misleading? There's no net generation out of this system.
Ok, it removes the methane problems of landfill, but where does that carbon go?
At the risk of sounding like an American again, nice job on that one. I wish we up here in the Great White North could get on board with evidence of this kind of forward-thinking stuff. (BTW, Anonymous Coward: not all comments are from the U.S. There are plenty of people in the world that have the ability to suss out timely comments on a keyboard. Friggin' dolt.)
At the same time, I'm still pushing on One Million Acts of Green, as it's a great idea... one that I wish included fusion burning!
Hmmm... or will it, in the near future? ;-)
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
Does it mean we are going to have plasma farms? Personally, I want to have a plasma garden.
yai, though. :)
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1.2 kW per household? A hair dryer eats more than this.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
How much energy is required to run this process, and how much would come out of it? The statement about "generates enough electricity to power 50,000 homes" sounds good, but it seems like it's leaving out another important side of the equation.
"While Creating Energy" WOW! Sign me up for one of these! Possibly they could throw in a zero point drive autographed by Ponds and Fleishman? "The total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant and cannot be created," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
Ok, who else read the header as:
Plasma Plants Vaporize White Trash
This is certainly a town that needs to do something about the trash. Anyone who's ever taken Interstate 95 down to Miami knows that Florida's 4th highest mountain, just behind the Space Mountain ride at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, is the mountain of trash in St. Lucie country right along the interstate. It's more than a mountain, it's a mountain range. The smell is horrible, and most of the people who emigrate out of Port St. Lucie have extra growths and such.
I don't know if vaporizing the trash for the populace to inhale is such a good idea, but it's nice to know they're doing something with the trash rather than just collecting it.
I'd hate to be the guy who shovels it.
This page explanis the technology:
plasmawastedisposal.com
Yes, they recently announced that... Just a few couple after the first slashdot story, where they announced it:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/09/10/0026243.shtml
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
FINALLY! The Mr. Fusion is only a few years away!
No longer will I need Plutonium to generate the 3.3 Jigawatts nessecary to power my Flux Capacitor.
Do not confuse power and energy.
From working with a garbage to energy plant in Virginia, they had the ability to generate much more then the 80MW (from memory) they were generating. They had to impose the limit or they would qualify as a utility under the state guidelines, and be subject to regulation. Since the plant was privately owned, and wanted run themselves, they had to let a lot of the power go as heat.
They would regulate it some by the rate at which the garbage went in, but when it starts backing up, you have no choice but to burn it.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Their web site just screams "vaporware". In fact, the useful-scale project has been cancelled, and only a small "demonstration plant" will be built.
The real questions about this are 1) do they really get out more energy than they put in, and 2) how much processing of the exhaust gases is required? Westinghoue Plasma Corporation (which, sadly, has little to do with Westinghouse) claims that 1000 tonnes (metric?) of solid waste produces the energy equivalent of 1 (one) barrel of oil. So this isn't a big energy producer. Ordinary waste-to-energy plants do better than that, but don't burn as clean as a plasma arc.
The other problem is what comes out. Organic compounds are literally blasted apart into atoms at those temperatures, so it deals with biowaste just fine. CO2 comes out, of course. NOx, maybe. Everything heavier (metals, etc.) is supposed to come out as a "molten slag" suitable for cement aggregate. Not sure what the cement industry thinks of this. They're usually quite picky about what's allowed in cement aggregate. Some contaminants interfere with the chemistry of concrete curing and make bad concrete. It might be good for filling in swamps and such.
This process will NOT "create" energy. In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy. Spinning turbines with the gasses until it condenses is an obvious step to take, but there is a lot of legislation that can be made to supplant the need for more technology. Just take a look at Germany. You can get a hefty fine for putting a can in the bio-degradable receptacle, but those guys have one helluva disposal system.
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A high temperature incinerator was proposed for Victoria, Australia. The "who will think of the children" shot it down and we still have landfill. Here is a link: http://homepage.mac.com/herinst/sbeder/incinerator2.html
also google for "high temperature incinerator" +victoria
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Plsama Plants (the living kind) vaporize trash while creating energy. :D
Now stop and think about that, that's exactly what I felt like the first time I read it
Still asleep here, so my visualizing of this was:
"Plasma " ok that's the hot stuff
" plants " O, the beautiful trees, the nature... hmm, wait a second. Plasma trees? plasma grass?! What the...
" Vaporize trash " Dear freaking gawd! trash vaposizing red hot trees?!? Scorching grassy plains to vaporise trash on?
" While creating energy " They are self sustaining?! It's the end of the world! We're all gonna diiie!
Still waiting for Mr. Fusion and my flux capacitor, but this is a step in the right direction.
It seams reasonable that a technique like this could get net energy out, since it's essentially a fancy trash burner. There's plenty of energy in trash to extract.
The slag could be interesting, though. It will few full of evilness and heavy metals. It probably won't be worse than landfilling since the evilness would otherwise be dumped in the same quantities. I'd be suprised if it was useful for construction. I'd expect water based leaching etc to erode the internal structure of it pretty quickly to a point wherre it's a porus, crumbly rock. I may be wrong about that, though.
Also, it might be easier to refine the slag, since a lot of the annoying bulk waste has been removed.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The standard conversion is actually closer to 1MW per 1000 homes (1kW per home) on average. When you're running the drier or the electric stove, sure it's a lot more. But if you're just watching TV with a few lights on it is probably closer to a 400W load. The big problem happens around 4:45PM. Businesses are still open, but people have gone home and turned all the lights on. So the load usually peaks around that time. Obviously the grid has more capacity than 1kW per home, but on average this is about the average usage. What does your monthly bill say? If it is around 650-800 kW-hr then you only use about 1kW on average. (I have worked for a large utility and now work for a turbine manufacturer)
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Well it's almost free, when you heat something up to 10000 F, you can then run the hot stuff into a heat engine to recover up to 95% of the energy you put in.
Who read the plants in the title as being large green things with leaves etc ;)
I really need to ensure that prior to reading anything on /. I consume atleast 1, preferably, 2 large strong coffees.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Burning garbage creates highly toxic materials, like dioxin. So does gasifying the garbage, apparently, according to this position paper. The article doesn't address this issue.
There is a reasoned and informative opposition to this plant. By ignoring this opposition, the featured article reads like a PR piece.
Isn't that a Slaver Sunflower?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I think you're seeing this from the wrong angle. The trash is "fuel" for the turbine. Think along the lines of coal burning power plants. The coal isn't free, it's a resource that is used to create electricity. I don't see how burning trash would be that different?
The article is offline right now.. so i'm really just guessing here. But the purpose of the plant isn't just another powerplant, it's a trash removal plant as well.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Does this mean that I will be paid for my garbage, rather than me paying to have it removed? If I have to pay to have my trash removed and then pay to have electricity, I'm calling foul.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
I don't know what they do with the slag. It's not an easy problem. The ash, however, is usually very plentiful (I'm talking mountains of ash here). If it is relatively "clean" (no heavy metals) it gets spread on farmland for the phosphate content. In many cases they mix it with concrete or asphalt as a filler. It has to be of a certain type for this though; if the ash isn't right the concrete/asphalt will crumble. Also, a lot of this is subject to the rules of the state/local government. So things that are fine in some states are strictly forbidden in others (with very steep fines). I once worked for a plant that was fined over $200,000 for not covering their ash pile with a tarp/building. But in other states they just spread it onto farmland.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
still not enough to power my DeLorean's time circuits.
Did I read right? It said that it was more expensive than landfills, thats why it hasn't been tried before. I thought it was self sustaining. Produced more than it used. Hmm, how could free or profitable be more expensive than a land fill?
Yeah, the potential for exhuming heavy metals and toxins is high if you don't regulate a plant like this (which it would be). However, we love our coal power plants, and they're absolutely disgusting. It's pathetic that we're still building new ones, yet we haven't built a new power plant in over 20 years (but this is supposed to change by 2010).
Furthermore, landfill trash isn't exactly a valuable resource. I'd much rather pay a little extra and burn away trash then burn coal. Plants like this one (they don't have to use plasma) would be great for helping us transition toward more nuclear and geothermal/wind/solar power.
Has anyone done the math and compared the economic value of 60MW of electricity versus the value of the equivalent trash? I suppose you should account for sorting and recycling costs on one side, and for operating costs, plant capital costs and maintenance on both. Unfortunately I have no data on this so I cannot really argue for one alternative or the other.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Since when is vaporizing valuable resources just to generate some heat and in turn electricity a good thing?
Did I miss a breakthrough in Chemistry? Can mankind now create complex elements at will?
Products should be designed in a way and humans should behave in a way that we don't produce all that waste in the first place.
Electricity isn't our problem. We can use the sun for that.
Adding fuel to a fire != perpetual motion.
It's a step in the wrong direction. It doesn't solve landfill, just shifts the dumping ground. We need to eliminate waste constructively, through increasing efficiency, reuse and recycling, advancing material science and stopping intractable waste at the source.
This will be a gas...
What came to my mind were a type of Killer Tomato plant that vaporizes waste.
One of the problems we are going to face Real Soon, is "Peak Oil". Another is funnily enough "Peak Soil"[1] and yet another is too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
A plasma turns everything into the basic element and from there to the lowest energy state, so yeah we get plenty of energy out, but it doesn't help so much with peak oil, peak earth or too much co2 in the atmosphere.
Some of the benefits of pyrolysis however:
1: Energy is produced.
2: Liquid fuels can be produced for transport.
3: Biochar/Agrichar byproducts can be used to improve agricultural soils.
The biochar byproduct can make the process carbon negative.
[1] Degradation of agricultural soils.
Deleted
I thought it sounded too good to be true...
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
If it keeps the landfills and the oceans clean... heeeuw ... heeeuw... i can't ... breeh....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I seem to recall a sci-fi/action movie where the sun's energy was used to create plasma which was then used to incinerate trash and create more energy and somehow save the planet or something, but it turned out to be a huge fraud and the creator/owner/whatever business-guy of the project was going to blow it up with the heroes stranded in it before anyone caught on that the project was a huge fraud and drain on public funds... or something like that. It's 3am and I just got up to use the bathroom... what am I doing here anyway?
I do a LOT of work on refuse disposal options, principally for the UK food industry. From the top of my head:- Use of plasma for waste disposal, this is not new, there was a french system proposed a few years ago for disposal of medical waste, looks like pathogens get a bit uncomfortable at tempertaures of several thousands of C. (this is from a New Scientist article, unable to refernce at the moment) The article references syngas, this is usually derived from anaerobic heating (>600oC) of organic matter and was used to make town gas from coal for street lighting. This can be used on food wastes (there is a huge amount in the UK) and run through the Fischer Troupe process to make petrol etc. The downsides :-
High pressure - increases capital costs geometrically with scale.
Chemical plant - NIMBYS do not like them (what a suprise. )
Process does not like water - food waste is 60% water.
Energy intensive (work out how much energy is needed to volitise teh 5 Million tonnes of food waste generated in the UK each year - its a lot).
The upsides :-
Established and proven technology.
Lots of very cheap raw material.
Use the energy content of the raw material to dry and vaporise the residue (an approx. 30% energy cost penalty - but the source is cheap)
Will consume anything organic, so mixed and contaminated food waste not a problem - will accomodate glass and metal contaminants
Best of all, as the plant scales down, there is an exponential decrease in the wall thickness needed for pipework etc. needed, so cost decreases at the same rate. You could have a pallet sized unit getting through a tonne per hour (Perdue University have done this for cleaning up waste at militry bases) for a very worthwhile cost. Note in the UK, landfill costs are now in the region of £60/tonne and rising by £8/year due to land fill tax. God help you if you have to render high risk material prior to landfill, your are then looking at a cost of about £100/tonne. A £25M t/o food plant will easily generate 2000 tonnes of food waste per year. This is significant, given most food manufacturers are operating on net margins in the very low single figures. A back of the metaphorical fag packet calculation showed that we could generate enough petrol from such sources in the UK to meet our commitment to add 5% from renewables to our petrol every year.
The plant used super-hot 10,000 degree Fahrenheit plasma to generate enough power to effectively vaporize 50,000 homes creating 1,500 tons of trash.
The real challenge is how to catch all the metals and the other dangerous ions that the are produced by the process. Letting them flow freely into the atmosphere is not OK. Electrons must be added back to the ions, elements must be recycled. The plasma plant might be a better way to start the process than using solvents or the like.
Why the caveat? It does sound great, if the toxic waste and heat pollution is manageable, and can be offset by both (a) having smaller garbage dumps, and (b) requiring less power from coal-burning facilities.
It doesn't have to be perfect, or you'd never get any new tech online. It just has to provide an improvement to the status quo.
And it avoid combustion, and therefore the dreaded greenhouse gases -- primary gas outputs are hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
Self-sustaining is not necessarily perpetual motion.
You are right. Combustion is used for partial degredation. And it is a total disaster. If the plasma approach can break this all apart AND give us energy, we can nuke our medical wastes, nasty chemical wastes, interesting chemicals such as sarin, and heck even nixon's, reagan's, and W's presidential files. Nothing will be left. Finally.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is there really a landfill problem? I'm all for reducing waste -- I really am -- but if you did the math to figure out how much space is actually needed for landfills, even on say a 500-year timescale, you'd quickly see that it's just *not* a problem.
There might well be better things we could do with our trash, and we certainly should see what can be done about producing less of it -- producing and moving all the trash is wasteful in the first place, no matter where it goes in the end -- but landfill use simply should not be high on your list of environmental concerns.
So what impact will all that vaporised rubbish have on the ionosphere?
He gets paid the big bucks because he knows nothing.
All you have to do is wait until it goes hard again..!
You can't. It already has writing on it (or shit) and you can't reuse it without cleaning that off using harsh chemicals and energy.
Using trash as fuel is more interesting than using coal or oil.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
From http://biowaste.blogspot.com/2007/01/geoplasma-answers-trash-vaporization.html:
1. Question: How much energy does the plasma-arc use?
Answer: The plasma-arc facility uses approximately 40 megawatts of energy per hour. This is approximately one-quarter of the total output of hourly energy received from MSW.
2. Question: What will be the source of the plasma-arc energy?
Answer: The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. As stated previously, 40 megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.
3. Question: What does the energy source emit?
Answer: See question 5.
4. Question: Is the high heat of the plasma-arc being captured and utilized?
Answer: Because of the nature of a closed-loop system the heat will be captured and utilized both in the plasma gasification process and later in the production of steam.
5. Question: How are they going to combust the syngas to keep the emissions low?
Answer: There is no combustion during the gasification process. The Plasma-arc gasification process is a chemical reduction process that converts MSW from its original state to a glass-like aggregate solid at the bottom, and a synthetic fuel gas, also known as syngas, at the top.
Once gasification is over, the syngas is cleaned in a multi-step process, bringing it to levels near natural gas cleanliness. It is then compressed before being used as fuel for a gas turbine.
The gas turbine for this process is a modified natural gas turbine that mixes the cleaned syngas with air from the atmosphere, combusts the mixture and sends the hot gases through a turbine. The turbine spins an electric generator to produce electricity. The discharged hot gases are then passed through a heat recovery steam generator to produce more steam and to cool the hot gases. The cooler exhaust gases are then discharged into the atmosphere via a stack.
Emissions from this process are very similar to natural gas combined cycle plants which are considered to be 'clean' and are located and permitted all over the U.S., and for that matter the whole world.
This sig is intentionally left blank.
What they forget to say is that it will take a lot more than 60MW to create the plasma turbines. One doesn't get "free" energy. But I'm all in favor of vaporizing trash, as long as it doesn't harm the environment more than normal trash does.
The *real* company president could only be no other than... wait for it... Mr. Burns!
<rimshot/>
As I remember, farm raised catfish and free-range chickens get a 1:1 corn-protein to meat-protein ratio, mainly because they also eat bugs (or in China, the catfish/shrimp eat chicken poop.)
For cows, I think the number was either 8:1 or 20:1.
So yes, the poster who suggested that this is why everyone can't be a vegetarian is wrong. But I don't put it down to math. I put it down to his spouting off without having any actual facts.
Just as an aside, I might mention that this plant will likely poison the ground around it with such things as cadmium (NiCad, NimH batteries), mercury (coin batteries, thermometers... hospitals burn these up all the time), lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals.
The real shame is that a lot of these heavy metals actually should be classified, like gold, as precious metals. Right now when we are in deflation (with a specter of possibly hyperinflation once the credit bubble has burst), those metals are one of the few things that will maintain value.
I'd think that a few chemists who sat down and found a way to properly reclaim the lithium and other metals, could make a killing by collecting and sorting the waste, and then disposing of the non-toxic waste in standard ways, while mining the waste for all it's worth. The earlier you sort it, the higher your profits will be. Sorting a NimH from a NiCad will save a lot of extra effort and energy on the back end.
Then, as you identify more wastes (and the typical condition that it arrives in), then you can figure out a way to profit from that, too.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Please -- oh,please! -- let there be some horrible fart joke attached to this!
I found a BIOwaste blog which very helpfully posted some more detailed and informative technical answers from the CEO of Geoplasma. Here's the meat:
1. Question: How much energy does the plasma-arc use?
Answer: The plasma-arc facility uses approximately 40 megawatts of energy per hour. This is approximately one-quarter of the total output of hourly energy received from MSW.
2. Question: What will be the source of the plasma-arc energy?
Answer: The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. As stated previously, 40 megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.
3. Question: What does the energy source emit?
Answer: See question 5.
4. Question: Is the high heat of the plasma-arc being captured and utilized?
Answer: Because of the nature of a closed-loop system the heat will be captured and utilized both in the plasma gasification process and later in the production of steam.
5. Question: How are they going to combust the syngas to keep the emissions low?
Answer: There is no combustion during the gasification process. The Plasma-arc gasification process is a chemical reduction process that converts MSW from its original state to a glass-like aggregate solid at the bottom, and a synthetic fuel gas, also known as syngas, at the top.
Once gasification is over, the syngas is cleaned in a multi-step process, bringing it to levels near natural gas cleanliness. It is then compressed before being used as fuel for a gas turbine.
The gas turbine for this process is a modified natural gas turbine that mixes the cleaned syngas with air from the atmosphere, combusts the mixture and sends the hot gases through a turbine. The turbine spins an electric generator to produce electricity. The discharged hot gases are then passed through a heat recovery steam generator to produce more steam and to cool the hot gases. The cooler exhaust gases are then discharged into the atmosphere via a stack.
Emissions from this process are very similar to natural gas combined cycle plants which are considered to be âcleanâ(TM) and are located and permitted all over the U.S., and for that matter the whole world.
Conventional incinerator plants produce a lot of ash and nasty combustion byproducts, like benzene, toluene, etc. This is a result of the incomplete combustion of the trash. Even well controlled, high temperature incinerators have this problem with the stack gases.
Plasma systems reduce everything down to elemental composition. All of the toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) get broken down to C, H, N and O. This can be done in a variety of ways, many of them more effective and energy efficient than you might think.
The point of plasma reduction is not that it's going to magically be a net energy producer, but that it's a much cleaner way to recover some energy while you are destroying trash. This would be particularly appropriate for difficult to recycle materials, such as stubborn plastics, components with trace heavy metals, things with toxic coatings, etc.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Also, the process generates Carbon Dioxide.
your basic garbage has a high water content, up to 60%.
There is no way to come out ahead energy-wise if you're going to heat the water to 10,000 degrees. There isn't enough energy in the trash to do so.
Now perhaps a careful preliminary drying using waste heat might help, but that adds more cost and complexity.
Normally, I find un-defined acronyms annoying, but this time I found it REALLY annoying. So in the interests of keeping the annoyance level to a minimum, I spent ten seconds on Google so other people won't have to. . .
Municipal Solid Waste.
You're welcome.
-FL
I wonder at what temperature it's required to "dispose" of some people.
How often will you need to water this plant?
What kind of fertilizer will this plant require?
Yes, next time you are at the drive-thru, don't ask for a cup, just let them pour your Coca Cola into your cupped hands, you dick.
It's not too hard to imagine a world where disposable cups are simply not used. Lots of restaurants use glass and clay-ware and employ dishwashers. Drive thrus are a silly hobbit notion which are only 'essential' because other silly hobbit notions make them so. But hey, if you want to buy a coffee and take it away, why not bring your own mug? Lots of people have travel mugs. It would only take a subtle shift in behavior patterns to do away with disposable cups. Our current systems are by no means chipped in stone, and many of them would sound no more ridiculous to an outsider than the idea of carrying your own mug with you when you travel.
As such, the poster had a valid thought and he isn't a 'dick'. There are lots of ways to reduce waste and everybody knows it. This does not, of course, mean that a plasma waste disposal system can't be useful. There will always be some waste.
-FL
I haven't read TFA or even the summary -- the headline itself was so alarming I had to post right away.
"Plasma plants vaporize trash" sounds like a great idea on the surface, but anybody who thinks the growth and spreading of these plants can be controlled once they are introduced into the wild is way too optimistic and trusting -- perhaps fatally so. This is exactly the sort of dangerous research Jeremy Rifkin has been warning about all these years. Yet nobody will pay attention to the dangers Monsanto et al expose us to until one day their monsterous genetic creations will start VAPORIZING PEOPLE!!!!
While your reasoning is sound, the emissions studies quoted suggest that the process doesn't work entirely as advertised. The original piece does read like PR fluff. I have to wonder if the technology is suitably refined, but no independent studies are apparently available.
Still. . , plasma-blasting garbage into basic atoms sure sounds like a good idea which should work, given proper development.
-FL
Does this mean my new TV is going to cost more?
I rememebr seeing this technology in the late 90s!
garbage packs a lot of energy and in the plasma plants it was converted into heat -> energy with a decent efficiency (~50%)
Back then the resulting carbon+oxygen+hydrogen could be reocmbined to come out as methanol+water+CO2 which was perfectly clean but the problem was the amount of Nitrogen and Sulphur in food.
Not only does star trek affect production of technology but also now sim city with its "waste-to-energy" devices. Someone will probably state that sim city just had an exclusive preview of the blue prints, but the timing is also interesting to me since it is fairly close to the availability of the device in the timeline of the game.
Remember that trash-to-energy converter that could replace landfills at extreme cost? This is the real world version.
Wow! And I thought Venus Fly-traps were amazing.
Who knew there were plants that could withstand 10,000 degrees, let alone vaporize material! Do these plants grow in ordinary soil or are they limited to highly specialized environments? I'm guessing you wouldn't want to keep one in a pot around the house. You'd never know when the furniture would just go missing!
...the energy to 'heat' the plasma itself requires more energy than will be generated by the vaporization. This is not new PR tactic. The environmental merits of corn ethanol are equally dubious.
This is a great idea, but if we moved towards burning ALL of our trash, then archaeologists won't have anything to dig up in 10,000 years. :-)
Throw away the products of this process, and, now that they are "garbage", feed them back into the machine. Voila! Free energy forever.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Carbon has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.
666 - The number of the beast. There you have it. Carbon is pure evil indeed.
Except, of course, this isn't an incinerator. It's only outputs are syngas, slag, and heat.
I absolutely understand environmentalists objecting to incinerators. All you're doing is taking all that carbon, much of which we've pulled from the ground where it was comfortably sequestered, and liberating it so you can dump it into the atmosphere. Definitely *not* my idea of a trash solution.
But this technology is absolutely clean. Of course, eventually you have to do something with the syngas, but the plant itself emits no pollution.
Most dogs will double up just fine as garbage disposal. My sister has a very hard time keeping random stuff on the floor out of her dogs, they'll just gobble anything up then go outside and either vomit it back up or crap out, diarrhoea style. Then they'll come back in for seconds.
This is despite the perfectly full bowls of dog food she keeps out for them!
Nick
There was an article about a garbage-eating plant in one issue of Popular Science a year or two back. They basically generate burnable gas and a black, glassy slag out of the trash - any compound that isn't radioactive will be rendered pretty harmless by the process. Apparently there's also some industrial use for the slag.
Into the atmosphere? Good plan!
I wonder if Obamarx plans to bankrupt them as well as coal plant operators?
I'm not saying I know anything about anything, but isn't vaporizing garbage bad? Aren't we losing precious elements in the process?
Clearly garbage isn't "good", but what about all the zinc or copper or whatever that may be in that garbage. Isn't this process destroying it forever?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Yeah, this looks like it's a cogeneration incinerator. But if they'd push the temperature up enough to separate the stuff into molecules and atoms, they could make an industrial mass chromatograph. Separate the trash into its constituent atoms. A tube for the hydrogen, buckets for iron and lead... and a frequently-changed bucket for uranium. If it collects enough uranium for a nuclear power plant, the process might create more energy than it consumes.
Slashdotted... mirror here: Plasma Plants Will Vaporize Trash While Generating Energy
Your post advocates a
.)
[ ] physical [ ] legislative [ ] market-based [ ] chemical
approach to waste management. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws
[x] it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics
[ ] it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
[x] catalysts are NOT magic
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
[x] the energy needed to accomplish your simple tranformation
[x] it requires more non-renewable energy inputs than the renewable energy produced by it.
[ ] It requires immediate cooperation from the entire world all at once.
[ ] People will cheat.
[ ] It requires the population to act contrary to self-interest.
[x] Extensive existing infrastructure.
[ ] Problems storing power.
[ ] Inefficient power transport systems.
[ ] Variable weather.
[x] Rich and powerful industries and lobby groups who stand to lose money.
[ ] Politicians who know nothing about science.
[ ] It uses Nuclear power, and that scares a large number of people who don't get the science behind it.
[x] It uses science, and that scares a large number of people who don't get the science behind it.
In summary:
[ ] Nice try, but it won't actually work.
[x] You're a scammer trying to blind investers with psuedoscience.
[ ] You're completely nuts.
I believe these kinds of incinerators have been use in Japan for quite a while.
"Conventional" low temperature incinerators result in incomplete combustion, which can release a lot of ash and toxic chemicals. Raise the temperature higher to where things turn from noxious gases to plasma, and there's a good chance that your end products will be simpler, safer primary molecules.
Recapturing some of the energy as the exhaust cools down is a good practice.
Somewhat similar rules apply to building a good campfire. When you're just starting the fire, the combustion is incomplete and you end up with lots of smoke and flying embers. Once you get a good fire going, the core glows red hot and releases less open flame and smoke as the wood burns more efficiently and completely.
No, this won't be.
But if it were indeed threatening an entire species with extinction, people like you would be insisting that an entire species should be extincted so we can run a plasma trash disposal for a dozen years. Without even caring what that disappearing link in the foodchain would do to other species, including ultimately humans.
You people have been running the world with your shortsighted "who cares" attitude for long enough that over a third of Earth's species have gone extinct during the Industrial Age - the biggest dieoff in hundreds of millions of years. Human extinction is now possible in several ways resulting from a too-fragile ecology we depend on, and all kinds of benefits to humans are now lost as we've thrown out that bulk of Earth's biological diversity we grew up with.
When a garbage disposal plant does threaten a species with extinction, even one that you don't know anything about, regulating it is sensible. Because nature laughs last, and extinct species can include humans, down Earth's ultimate garbage disposal.
--
make install -not war
And tell me that this doesn't contribute to Global Warming how?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Is the ratio of trash gasification per day versus the amount of trash generated by the populace per day. Will the plant burn all the trash before we can replace it? Will this create another boom of a disposable economy and waste generation?
I know, that seems horribly inefficient. But remember, this process uses an electric arc to make the plasma. That requires a very large energy input. I'm impressed they can even reach energy breakeven. Breakeven is enough, though, because it makes the process independent of outside energy costs.
To the good people at Geoplasma, we send the following message:
HURRY UP!
Thank you.
This is why I no longer recycle paper, plastic, or glass. All they hydrocarbons in the trash get turned into syngas and burned. All the useful elements are highly concentrated in the slag, which can then be processed. We just need to build a lot of these and mine our way through old landfills, shoveling the ancient trash into the gaping maw of the plasma gasifier.
The purpose of the plasma is to maintain a certain temperature profile since the fuel (trash) has irregular burning characteristics.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Will this new plant accept politicians? I think there's a lot of wasted energy there...
"Nothing will be left"? Plasma will destroy all molecules, but you are still left with the raw elements, some of which are fairly toxic. You aren't going to get hot enough to cause significant nuclear reactions.
Another positive byproduct of eliminating corn subsidies is that people will stop wasting time making vehicles run on ethanol from corn that took as much petroleum to produce than the ethanol can displace.... google "ethanol subsidies" for some figures on this.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
You all fail at physics.
This is not nuclear fusion.
This is not nuclear fission.
There is nothing nuclear going on at all.
There is no energy "created".
There is plenty of chemical energy *released*.
This is nothing more and nothing less than a very very hot garbage incinerator and electrical generator with the word "plasma" stuck in there to impress people.
It has the same problems as a garbage incinerator: certain atoms are going to be toxic no matter what molecules they're part of. Mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic are common in garbage, and like pretty much the entire bottom right of the Periodic Table, will kill people and ruin the environment if you let them go out a smokestack in any form whatsoever.
Seems to me that the relevant question, environmentally, is this:
Is it better to turn all the carbon in your trash into CO2 and release it now, or to put your trash in a landfill and have some of the carbon be released in the form of methane later?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Here's something I ran across by accident while creating a wedding present for my friend "Scum":
1. Take an ordinary was table candle, contained in a glass holder.
2. Light it, and wait for the wax to start melting.
3. Add paper bit to function as "extra wicks" until the top is melted.
4. Start throwing random bits of garbage into it.
5. Transfer the contraption to a metal container before the glass shatters - which you really should have done before step 2.
Here's what happens:
After step 3, there is no longer any "wick". A heavy white gas floats above the wicks, and that's what's burning. After step 4, the heat is no longer just boiling away the wax, but also boiling away the garbage. Any flammable gas from the garbage is all that's burning, not the solids.
Why this strikes me as similar:
It's a bit like doing fractional distillation, turning solids in to gasses and boiling them off. The difference is that you're using only the heat generated by the vaporized solids to vaporize further solids.
Why this is really freakin' dangerous:
Candle wax is paraffin, and really really tough to extinguish. It doesn't need a hell of a lot of oxygen to continue burning - so trying to put it out by say putting a plate over the top may not work as once you remove the plate the smallest flame around the imperfect seal is light it right back up. You also don't want to throw water on it - the water will boil spitting flaming crap everywhere, and the mixture won't go out. If you throw the whole thing in water (as I tried when I realized all this) - it will kind of explode. One of these things (which I called a "Sludge Candle") in a tuna tin, when tossed into a sink full of water, created a shaft of flames about 3 feet in diameter that extended to the ceiling. It also, as you can imagine, really freaking hot. Do this with a glass candle holder and the glass with crack as I mentioned, and it's not really easy to get near to by that point.. Oh yeah - not all the gases from the garbage will be flammable either; and those ones will just kind of float around the dorm room until they cool down and solidify on every available surface including your lungs. If you really wanted to use this as a recycling approach, you'd distill those gases instead of course.
Still though, it's pretty neat if you have no regard for safety, property, or being formally banned from campus for seven years.
An easier and safer way of seeing this is to simply blow out a candle that's been burning for a bit - and light it by touching a flame to the white smoke rising from the wick rather than having to touch the wick itself.
No doubt there are people who know something about chemistry on here who can tell me why this is an even dumber idea that it already seems. That's cool - my fascination with things like this ended when I turned my hand into a John Merrick Hand Puppet for about a month right before my piano recital. Who knew butane was *heavier* than air? Butane, apparently. Point taken. Nothing but nice safe LCD candles for me these days :-)
Seriously, don't do this. That plasma thing sounds much more promising.
Surprised no one out of all the comments have stated that this is going to make solving murder cases all the harder.
I mean, we're in the U.S. after all, eventually the criminals will be running the machinery.
Reducing waste volume by ~90% may not be a full solution, but it's a damn good start.
This kind of energy generation is silly, it discourages people from reducing their waste stream (by creating demand for garbage). Yeah, real smart to vaporize all the re-usable stuff. Hopefully why that's short-sighted is self-apparent to the smarter-than-average folks here. And how efficient is this (maintaining that plasma can't be energy-cheap)? Way to spin stupid technology tricks!
... what happenes to the exhaust gasses from the vaporized trash? What's in the gasses?
What, you think when you burn something, it magically vanishes without a trace? Don't we already have this problem with garbage incinerators? I mean, the exhaust from those is sometimes ultra toxic crap that gets pumped into the atmosphere, or left as toxic ash.
Economic or commercial viability requires a solution that would produce more energy than it takes to run. It also means something almost safe enough to run in your backyard - this type of project has OHS and EHS issues that red flag various regulatory bodies and agencies. In a nutshell, if its dangerous (super hot, toxic, high pressure) it likely not economically viable...
There are other solutions affect the problem of waste in more environmentally friendly ways.
If it is organic starchy/sugary, is can be brewed into alcohol.
If it is celluloisic, it can be burned.
If it is organic fatty/oily, it can be mixed with a catalyst for biobutanol/biodiesel.
If it is plastic, it be reverted to oil via catalytic cracking.
Only the latter isn't a backyard solution (but I'm trying to build one anyway.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
... will be this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
if it ever comes to light - pun intended.
Seriously though, with photovoltaic cells like this
http://www.nanosolar.com/
and high-density, ultra low internal resistance storage like eestor is purporting, we may indeed be able to forego fossil fuels for all but material synthesis (plastics, solvents, etc).
Watch these guys. Nanosolar is the real deal. Keep an eye on Zenn auto and eestor because once we start plasma burning our trash, we'll need a place to put the energy so we can draw heavily at 16:45 every day.
I used to work for a large utility too.
Vortran out
Plasma at 10,000 degrees isn't just found laying around anywhere. It will take a LOT of energy just to create and maintain (and contain) that plasma.
I don't believe you'll get more energy OUT than you have to put IN. But I could be wrong.
Okay, I am not a scientist, but, ah, this seems like it could be a really nifty --funerary-- method too.
People keep on talking about the Mafia potential of it, sure. But to the dying environmentally conscious, this would have none of the land use/chemical leech problems of graveyards, or the toxic byproducts of incineration.
Plasma could be marketed as "sun," and it's sure cheaper to throw 200 or so pounds into this thing than to launch it into the sun.
Of course, I rather doubt people would want to have Dad shovelled in with the trash however, and there's regulatory nonsense... but conceptually, I like it.
1.21 Gigawatts.
Here's an article from Popular Science in 2007: The Prophet of Garbage
One of the main benefits of this process is that nothing needs to be sorted; however this leaves me wondering if this will ultimately trap valuable elements (e.g. gold and copper) in the slag, such that it is ultimately more expensive to retrieve them from the slag than from landfill mining should that ever become necessary.
Strewth. This is why I like vegetarians. They are so environmentally friendly (unlike beef), not to mention delicious when grilled medium rare and dressed with extra virgin olive oil.
I followed the link, and didn't find any info on that. Anybody know or have a guess?
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
"enough to power 50,000 homes" or half of a plasma gasification plant.
Things don't get 10,000 degree by themselves, it takes energy and lots of it. I doubt they break even on the energy equation.
10,000 degree Fahrenheit
It's not that hard, pop-pickers, and it's groovy:
Centigrade to Farenheit,
This is what we do,
Multiply by nine fifths,
And add on 32.
The inverse, I will leave as an exercise to the reader. The true scientists will give the answer in Kelvin.
Stick Men
I think what Hojima was trying to say is if we were to recycle the waste stream more conventionally (rather than plasmating, electrofying, and gassificating it, sic) it would be more efficient. The root problem is not that we want to efficiently dispose of our waste, the root problem is we want to efficiently refine and reuse the raw materials we need to create new products.
Take aluminum cans for example. If we run them through plasma gassification, we might get back half the energy used in creating them if we are lucky. But if we were to recycle them for new aluminum products, the recycling process uses something like 1/20th the power that would be required to produce new replacement aluminum. It's much more efficient to recycle aluminum rather than plasma gassify it for electricity and syngas.
This doesn't even take into account the fact some day we will basically run out of affordable ores and fossil fuels used to create many products like metal and plastic. We really should look at recycling everything we can that is not renewable. Every commodity might have a different efficiency point on whether it is worthwhile to recycle or plasma gassify.
I can't believe how unbelievably fucking stupid your post is. You utter, utter dumbass.
Seriously these animals will need to eat either way
You think there will be the same amount of cattle if the incentive to breed & rear them is taken away?
Again - you're a complete fucking numpty.
The plasma can be run through a powerful magnetic and electric field configuration which will allow individual elements and their isotopes to be separated for recycling. In theory you can clean up any waste, no mater how contaminated, in this technology. The key is to recover all of the heat generated by breakdown of the atomic bonds in the waste stream, then use that heat efficiently to drive electrical power generators.
Soylent Green would help, but it would hardly be sufficient to keep up with the demand. A person only dies once, and at that time would yield only let's say a maximum of 100 lbs of human meat. Divided by a 75-year lifespan, that would only amount to 1.3 pounds of human meat per consuming person per year, assuming a stable population. If the population is growing, there would be more living people to eat the meat than there would be people dying to provide the meat, so the amount of human meat per year would be lower than that.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
In your analysis, you make the incorrect assumption that I was proposing to recycle only 75-year-old bodies. I was, in fact, thinking of starting with all politicians and then moving on to the lawyers. After that, I figure recycling entire Middle Eastern population, Texas and maybe China would also help.
Also, remember that every person eaten would no longer consume meat, increasing the amount available for the rest of the population. Since you're such a wiz with the numbers, I'll let you solve the ODE for the break-even point. :)
If the described turbines generate more power than the heating arc uses in a given amount of time, this could be a viable energy source. If not, It may only serve as a safe, low-energy disposal method (if generated power is sent back into the grid)...but that's not bad for a worst-case scenario.