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!"

Comments

Conservation of energy

[Hojima]

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.

Re:Conservation of energy

[Joce640k]

Are you saying there's no energy in garbage? I have a box of matches here that says you're wrong.

The theory behind it is this: If you can take the garbage molecules apart and put them back together in a lower energy configuration then you get to keep the profit.

Re:Conservation of energy

[khing]

See, I really don't think that the point of this exercise is to create lots and lots of energy, but rather a way to dispose of garbage without making use of lots and lots of land, and as an added bonus, puts some power back into the grid as well.

These are the kind of energy the world has to seriously consider. Something that solves one problem (reducing the amount of rubbish that ends up in landfills), while also producing useful energy.

Re:Your High School Physics Teacher Called

[tibman]

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.

Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful

[adminstring]

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.