Plasma Plants Vaporize Trash While Creating Energy 618
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!"
Summary, pt. 2 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
No methane, but CO2? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, it removes the methane problems of landfill, but where does that carbon go?
Nice job. (Score:2, Insightful)
At the risk of sounding like an American [slashdot.org] 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, [onemillion...fgreen.com] as it's a great idea... one that I wish included fusion burning!
Hmmm... or will it, in the near future? ;-)
seems a bit stingy (Score:5, Insightful)
1.2 kW per household? A hair dryer eats more than this.
You keep your dryers on 24/7? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not confuse power and energy.
Conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Artificial limits on power output (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad they couldn't have had a water tap run to their place and use the excess energy to make hydrogen through electrolysis. And than sell said hydrogen. I mean, if it's free energy...
Re:"While Creating Energy" (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Could work. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Your High School Physics Teacher Called (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I'd rather have 10 of these than one coal plant (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Slow down... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also works with government accountability.
Re:Environmental impact? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Summary, pt. 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Technically true... (Score:3, Insightful)
Say 100 people work at an office. Around 5-ish PM 95 of those go home and turn on the lights there.
However, although there are only 5 people left in the office, all the lights remains on. So, yes, it makes sense to me.
Even when all 100 of them go home, it's still likely that the lights will be on for another couple of hours until the cleaning crew and janitor go home too.
That said, 16:45 sounds like early to me... I'm more & more convinced I'm in the wrong business =(
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that so many people do not understand the difference between "an open mind" and "a hole in the head"?
A relevant quote I once encountered is: "You need to have an open mind to let new ideas in, but not so open that your brain falls out."
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:2, Insightful)
"Peak Soil"[1]
This is why we don't have enough planet for everyone to be a vegetarian. If you can come up with a way of growing vegetables in most of the places people raise livestock, then you'll be, well, maybe not *rich* exactly, but you'll have something worthwhile.
Of course, this all discounts the fact that you need to graze animals on arable land once in a while, otherwise it all breaks down. Oh wait...
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
This process will NOT "create" energy.
Are you seriously talking about creation of energy in the "conservation of energy" sense? In that case, my reply would be: Duh. But for the sake of the argument I'll assume you just mean that the process requires more than the 60MW those turbines generate.
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.
That's exactly what surprised me in this article. I've heard of using a plasma torch to turn toxic garbage into inert waste, which in itself would be extremely useful. But as I've always understood, it was expensive and only cost energy. Getting some energy back out of the process is great ofcourse, but I have a hard time believing that it would provide more power than it uses.
So either the article is misleading for suggesting that, or this is really truly very spectacular, and we should do this with all our trash.
But I think this just means that safely getting rid of toxic waste has just gotten a bit cheaper or more practical. Which is still immensely useful.
Re:No methane, but CO2? (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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 :)
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
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:supertoxins? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A stupid idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sunshine (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:3, Insightful)
the fact still remains that that land must be used to grow grain to feed the cattle.
Look buddy, I don't know what country you live in, but in MY AMERICA, we feed our livestock nothing but CORN. You don't get massive government subsidies for growing grain, you get that for growing corn. And even tho our livestock's digestive systems don't process corn properly, THATS OK! cause we can just give them antibiotics in every bite. And yes, this might make them fart and belch excessive amounts of greenhouse gases, but that's not a problem for us farmers in the midwest, now is it? And SURE, this might make all the cheap food in the entire nation "unhealthy", but hell, it's never been cheaper to feed your family! All thanks to corn subsidies provided by your taxes
And I bet you didn't even know that your taxes were subsidizing the entire fast food industry!
Re:Vaporware technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Not stupid at all. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
About the "scientific consensus" : for starters, that is a very ill-defined concept. Second, the scientific consensus was once that the titanic was unsinkable, that the earth was flat, and that some cool looking naked bearded guy in the clouds threw lightning at ill-behaving children.
Your post is so astoundingly wrong that I don't really even know where to begin rebutting it. You start off with a plausible (even if the numbers are completely made up) premise, but then just go on about how we can't trust anything. Not sure what your point is, but it seems to be that since there is always doubt, we shouldn't go with ideas that you disagree with. That generally seems to be the "conservative" position lately. If the science supports what you want to do, shout it from the mountain tops. If it doesn't, bury it and do what you were going to do anyway.
Re:as long as the bleading hearts don't do the sam (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:3, Insightful)
In the US (and forgive the Americentrism, please) very few cattle _are_ grazing animals. They might graze for six months at a cow-calf operation while they're still nursing, then they're shipped to feedlots and fed corn mash, which is not a natural food for cattle by any means. Nor is the waste used as a fertilizer- it's collected in huge lagoons, occasionally shipped off to landfills. The waste coming out of a feedlot cow can't be used as a USDA organic fertilizer as the cows are fed prophylactic antibiotics, and normal farmers don't want it because it's somewhat difficult to spread on the fields and expensive to ship
You're correct that humans cannot efficient digest grass and heather, though, which is why I suspect that we'll always have at least some grazing.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:3, Insightful)
Food is not the only factor. Do you know how much waste is produced by 350 million people? Imagine 10 times that. And I don't mean soda cans and candy wrappers.
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:1, Insightful)
> Still, there's a difference between releasing energy and creating it.
Absolutely right. One of them is possible.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure exactly what your saying but from what i understand your saying we should kill all other animal life because they are eating all of our fruit, vegtables and grains?
Seriously these animals will need to eat either way, why not feed them and care for them and when the time is right eat their ass(rump roast).
better ways would be to cut down on population growth and reduce the excess waste we have(in eating and throwing out food) as well as develop better ways to increase crop yeilds. Also the ability to increase the locations where we can grow crops would be benifitial.
Re:Pyrolysis may be more useful (Score:3, Insightful)
OTOH, Cattle and Pigs can eat things that we can't.
They can eat the whole plant (wheat, corn, whatever).
Most plant matter won't yield a human any nutritional value.
Humans are NOT herbivores.
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
...the only exception is radioactive elements which cannot be broken down any further without undergoing a nuclear reaction.
That would be atomic elements. Something tells me mercury, arsenic, and lead are still going to be a problem, too.