The Prophet of Garbage
Joseph Longo's Plasma Converter turns our most vile and toxic trash into clean energy—and promises to make a relic of the landfill
" To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration facility. “There’s no flame or fire inside. It’s just electricity,” Lynch assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they’ve named the Plasma Converter stands in the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly any type of waste—from dirty diapers to chemical weapons—by annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself. Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of stainless steel and filled with a stable gas—either pure nitrogen or, as in this case, ordinary air—a 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma. Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or “syngas”—a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen."
"Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200˚F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid. “Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the facility,” Longo says."
__________________
"Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." 3 John 1:11 http://www.myspace.com/kmilltx
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...cbccdrcrd.html
Click the link to read the whole article. It is a nice read on something that may help eliminate landfills and also provide energy.
The Prophet of Garbage
Joseph Longo's Plasma Converter turns our most vile and toxic trash into clean energy—and promises to make a relic of the landfill
" To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration facility. “There’s no flame or fire inside. It’s just electricity,” Lynch assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they’ve named the Plasma Converter stands in the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly any type of waste—from dirty diapers to chemical weapons—by annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself. Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of stainless steel and filled with a stable gas—either pure nitrogen or, as in this case, ordinary air—a 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma. Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or “syngas”—a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen."
"Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200˚F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid. “Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the facility,” Longo says."
That sh1t is fuccin incredible. They should be building huge ones like right now. Dude is going to cake up. It doesn't supply energy though. It just destroys the waste and makes a glass like biproduct. It isn't fusion you title lying ass nicca.
“We’ll get all our garbage to disappear, and our landfill will be gone in 20 years,” he tells me. The best part: Geoplasma is footing the entire bill. “We’ll generate 160 megawatts a day from the garbage,” Hillestad says, “but we’ll consume only 40 megawatts to run the plant. We’ll sell the net energy to the local power grid.” Sales from excess electricity might allow Geoplasma to break even in 20 years.
" In New York, Carmen Cognetta, an attorney with the city council’s infrastructure division, is evaluating how plasma gasification could help offset some of the city’s exorbitant waste costs. “All the landfalls around New York have closed, incinerators are banned, and we are trucking our trash to Virginia and Pennsylvania,” he explains. “That is costing the city $400 million a year. We could put seven or eight of these converters in the city, and that would be enough.” The syngas from the converters, Cognetta says, could be tapped for hydrogen gas to power buses or police cars. But the decision-making bureaucracy can be slow, and it is hamstrung by the politically well-connected waste-disposal industry. “Many landfill operators are used to getting a million dollars a month out of debris,” says U.S. Energy’s Paul Marazzo. “They don’t want a converter to happen because they’ll lose their revenue.”
Meanwhile, Victor Sziky, the president of Sicmar International, an investment firm based in Panama, is working with the Panamanian government to set up at least 10 Startech systems there. “The garbage problem here is exploding in conjunction with growth,” says Sziky, who lives in Panama City. “We have obsolete incinerators, and landfills that are polluting groundwater and drinking water. We’ve had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis A and B directly attributed to the waste in landfills. There are a lot of people in a small country, and there’s no infrastructure to deal with it.” The project will be capable of destroying 200 tons of trash a day at each location, enough to handle all the garbage for the municipalities involved—and, says Sziky, to produce up to 40 percent of their electrical demand.
Panama’s syngas will probably be converted to hydrogen and sold to industrial suppliers. The current market for hydrogen is at least $50 billion worldwide, a figure that is expected to grow by 5 to 10 percent annually, according to the National Hydrogen Association, an industry and research consortium. Analysts at Fuji-Keizai USA, a market-research firm for emerging technologies, predict that the domestic market will hit $1.6 billion by 2010, up from $800 million in 2005. The Department of Energy’s Patrick Davis says that when the long-awaited hydrogen-powered vehicles finally arrive, the demand for hydrogen will soar. But he also notes that to have an effect on global warming, it’s critical that hydrogen come from clean sources."
" That’s one more idea that’s old news to Longo, who, as usual, is 10 steps ahead of the game, already embedded in a future where fossil fuels are artifacts of a bygone era. For the past several years, he has been developing the Starcell, a filtration mechanism that slaps onto the back end of his converter and quickly refines syngas into hydrogen. As he says, “We are the disruptive technology.” Longo has been working in garbage for 40 years, making his fortune by literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is, it turns out, the perfect vantage point for finding new ways to turn what to most of us is just garbage into arguably the most valuable thing in the world: clean energy."
__________________
"Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." 3 John 1:11 http://www.myspace.com/kmilltx
__________________
"Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." 3 John 1:11 http://www.myspace.com/kmilltx
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Energy from garbage?
