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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?
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.
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
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.
It's apparently self sustaining.
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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.
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
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While I'm skeptical that this is net-energy-positive, it isn't a closed system. The trash represents an additional energy source. In fact, I think it's fair to say that if this system doesn't produce more electricity than it uses, it's a monumental waste of waste-energy. This makes sense only if they can produce more electricity (after subtracting electricity input) than a simple steam plant could from the same trash input. It really isn't all that helpful to spend more energy to produce less energy.
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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!
Self-sustaining != Self-starting
It is self sustaining in the way your car's electrical system is: It provides enough juice to start the engine, which recharges your battery and runs your radio/lights/cigarette lighter.
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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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.
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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.
Exactly! What we need to do is trap the carbon it makes and somehow dispose of it. Perhaps in some sort of landfill system.
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But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
exactly. it's unlikely that the initial electric charge will require more energy than is produced by the 1500 tons of garbage it burns each day (and presumably the plant stays on for more than a day at a time).
though i think a diesel engine is perhaps a better analogy since normal gas ICEs need an electrically-generated spark for each cycle, whereas a diesel engine uses compression-ignition thus only requires electricity for the initial compression stroke, after which point the engine is self-sustaining. so in this case the trash being vaporized is like the diesel fuel which is capable of sustaining the reaction on its own once the process is started.
in any case, this sounds like a great way to kill two birds with one stone. so long as the plasma plant doesn't generate any toxic waste or cause heat pollution it'd be a great way to get energy in practically any environment. now we just need to get more plug-in electrics on the road so that our transportation infrastructure can take advantage of cool sustainable technologies like this.
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.
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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.
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You are right, and I think that's one of the reasons they are proposing plasma (look it up...). In that state of matter, all molecules break up, including dioxin and other poisonous compounds. However, what happens when you cool down the exhaust gases will depend a lot on the construction, so you might still get dioxin (or something worse than that); I suppose this is fairly implementation-dependent. Also, I am not so sure about what happens to particulate: does the cooling process create more of it, or does the plasma state break it down?
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This will be a gas...
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 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.
If there's any "heat pollution" produced by the plant it simply means they need another turbine -- the thing is *supposed* to produce heat, much of which will be converted into electricity. There's no reason to believe the heat capture or heat->electricity conversion in this system would be any worse than other existing electrical plants.
As for "toxic waste", it's not any worse than existing incinerators or hybrid coal/waste systems, and it produces less harmful gases than any form of combustion. The primary gas outputs are carbon monoxide and hydrogen, neither of which is particularly harmful once diluted in the atmosphere.
Depending on what you put in there are some harmful output gases, like HCl (which can be removed with calcium oxide), but most of the heavier elements -- mercury, cadmium, lead -- are output in a liquid slag rather than as a gas.
> Just release the carbon into the air, so the trees can use it.
I couldn't work out if that's supposed to be funny or troll or if you're just stupid. I seriously hope it's the first one :)
It probably has something to do with the need for everything a landfill has and maintenance for the factory on top of that. They will both need to receive trash and move it around. The landfill just piles the trash up in an orderly manner and then it's done. The factory has to run the machine to vaporize the crap and then get rid of the waste material that process creates.
The vaporizing could create energy to sell, but it might not be a good margin over the cost of just running the machine, instead of the landfill getting paid to just pile shit up with little maintenance cost.
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Er, the chances of individual atoms spontaneously combining to form complex molecules is close to none existent.
So take dioxin's which are a mixture of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Heat this to 6000 Celcius and all the chemical bonds are broken apart, leaving just individual carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Let it cool down to room temperature any you will end up with a mixture of mainly CO2 and H2O, and probably some CO as well depending on how much Oxygen is available during the cooling process.
Obviously it is more complicated with additional chemical elements in the mix, but you are not going to get complex molecules forming from the cooled plasma.
In the mean time you have released the energy from complex chemical bonds which you can then extract for electrical generation.
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.
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.
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
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
Throw away the products of this process, and, now that they are "garbage", feed them back into the machine. Voila! Free energy forever.
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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.
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.
The process doesn't break down atoms (that would be fission) it only breaks the molecular bonds. All elements would be preserved for reuse.
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