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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!"
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.
Do not confuse power and energy.
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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I have some doubts about it producing more energy than it uses, but it could because it is not an isolated system - you keep adding trash
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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.
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That's fine, but what about when you reach the end of the process and the atoms/molecules start to cool down? Unless you separate them out, they're going to start to react.
If you count landfill products as free fuel, then you're generating something. You're turning something that is unwanted into something valuable.
If you collect solar energy, you're not creating energy. You're turning those photons into something more useful than heat and reflected solar radiation.
I think a lot of people commenting on this article have a weird definition of generator/generation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you want more vegetables, there are plenty of scientific ways to make that happen on any quality of land, not necessarily requiring soil. You can grow tomatoes in hydroponic greenhouses in the desert like this company does, for example.
The reality is that we don't have enough planet for everyone to be a meat-eater, at least not in the American sense. For every 100 pounds of grain protein you give to cattle as feed, you only get back 10 pounds of protein as meat. So although American cattle typically spend their lives in a feedlot rather than on arable land, the fact still remains that that land must be used to grow grain to feed the cattle. We could support roughly 10 times more people with the same amount of arable land if everyone was vegetarian.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
This is why we don't have enough planet for everyone to be a vegetarian.
uhhh... math fail.
very few of the animals you eat are grazing animals. exceedingly few. the amount of land it takes to graze an animal is huge. These cows are many hundreds of pounds, they need many more times that in feed. I would bet that very fiew of you could find anything in your markets that is not from an industrial (even organic industrial) farm. Whole foods doesn't have local farm food.
The animals are eating vegetation (the lucky ones) and are converting that into something you eat. that is a lossy process. the closer to the source (the sun) you are in the food chain, the more efficient.
I don't recall the exact numbers but the theory is along these lines. Sun shines energy, plants collect this energy and some local molecules and arrange this into a food like substance. This food substance now has (lets say) 20% of the energy that was put into making it available. Now we can eat that or we can let cow-creature eat it. Cow-creature converts it into a fabulously juicy steak for me. Negating any processing/picking/butching/carting/etc the sum of cow-creatures meat has approximately (again, lets say) 20% of the energy that it has consumed available to me in that yummy slab of flesh.
That leaves me getting about 4% of the initially available energy (100*.2*.2) whereas I could have gotten 20% had I eaten the damn carrot (or more likely, corn).
Like I say, numbers are off but no matter what numbers you substitute, you are never going to get out even the same amount of energy that went into making your animal.
As to your land argument, not only do you need space for the animals to live but you have to grow X% more food (and use X% more land) to feed them to get the same amount of food you would have needed.
hey, i like meat but it is not environmentally friendly.
We have way more arable land than we do water to irrigate it. It takes 50x as much fresh water to grow a pound of beef as a pound of rice or soy beans. The fresh water constraint will bind long, long before we ever run out of places to grow or graze--in fact it's already being reached in the developing world. In your terms, we could stretch this planet a lot further as vegetarians than as omnivores.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.