Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Sandwich on September 10, 2006, 06:08:11 am
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http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71757-0.html
Read the whole article, it's quite fascinating. This paragraph especially caught my eye, however:
Sludge from the county's wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, and a material created from melted organic matter -- up to 600 tons a day -- will be hardened into slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects.
A couple of things come to mind: "Va-Poo-Rize", and "This highway's full of sh*t." :D
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How about a military use of a prototype able to shoot high-temperature thunderbolts?
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How about we stick to making the world a better place with new technology, k?
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piece of sh*t => *ZAP* => construction materials + energy.
Nice.. Sounds too good to be true, but nice :)
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Uhhh... okay...
How on earth do you generate "120 megawatts per day"???
I think whoever gave that quote might be an alcaholic, either that or the plant is expected to produce energy at a quadratic rate...
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33686MW. Thats the demand for power in the UK for the last 24 hours according to the national grid website. Now tell me its unrealistic for a plan to output 120MW in a day.
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I thought Watts were joules-per-second.
So how the **** would you get 120MW/day?
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You've got me thinking now you bastard.
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I think what they meant was that this installation is able to produce 120 MWh a day.
Physically illiterate people often get confused between Watts (Joule/second; unit of power) and kWh (with appropriate prefixes), which is an unit of energy.
120 MW power plant would produce energy quite a bit during a day; E = P*t = 120 MW * 24 h = 2880 MWh = approx. 2,9 GWh.
Shame, now it is unclear what the power of the plant actually is; if the produced energy is indeed only 120 MWh per day, the output power of the installation is only 5 MW...
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Well if it's diverting 1/3rd of it's power to having big ****ing energy weapons destroying garbage, I'd say it's simply a constant 120MW flow.
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From Wikipedia:
Nuclear power plants are base load stations, which work best when the power output is constant (although boiling water reactors can come down to half power at night). Their units range in power from about 40 MWe to over 1000 MWe. New units under construction in 2005 are typically in the range 600-1200 MWe.
I'd say it's definitely a 120MW constant.
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Nope not reading it, cause now I can't get the song, "Circle of Poo" out of my head... :lol:
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I thought Watts were joules-per-second.
They are joules-per-second.
How about we stick to making the world a better place with new technology, k?
This reminds me Michael Jackson.
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How relevant and nice. My point remains - we're talking about a technology that could solve major waste disposal problems and what do you want to do? Kill folk with it. Nice.
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The thing you're missing is that most people would consider the brutal murder of vast swathes of society and the world population to be 'making the world a better place'.
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My point remains - we're talking about a technology that could solve major waste disposal problems and what do you want to do? Kill folk with it. Nice.
That's actually a good idea. We could chuck homeless people in there! We'd be cleaning the streets of trash both literal and human! For once the homeless can really contribute something back to society after taking so, so much. :)
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How relevant and nice. My point remains - we're talking about a technology that could solve major waste disposal problems and what do you want to do? Kill folk with it. Nice.
Technology has traditionally advanced more quickly to the demands of killing people and breaking stuff then in any other direction. Although frankly battlefield application of this seems unlikely.
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That's actually a good idea. We could chuck homeless people in there! We'd be cleaning the streets of trash both literal and human! For once the homeless can really contribute something back to society after taking so, so much. :)
You're lucky the homeless probably don't have internet access, or they'd get all Derelicte on yer ass for that comment.
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You're lucky the homeless probably don't have internet access, or they'd get all Derelicte on yer ass for that comment.
All I need to do is throw a piece of meat on the ground and i'll be the last thing on their minds.
Making fun of people less fortunate than I am is fun! Wheeeeee!
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good way to dispose of a corpse :D
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A viable use for diorhea.
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Wait a minute. How much energy is spent powering plasma arcs for a whole day? Are they powered by magic?
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They're powered by 1/3rd of the energy produced by the various stuff they're doing.
Read the damn article.
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Don't buy their emissions stuff though. The waste they are incinerating (I.e standard household waste) is going to be fairly high in sulphur and nitrogen compared with coal (and especially compared with gas). Just where in hell's name is that all going to go except up the chimney as nitrogen and sulphur oxides?
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holy **** its a fusion reactor that runs on trash! mr fusion will be a reality.
the facility technically speeking is a reactor. in that it puts out more energy than it uses. and seeing that the thing will burn hotter than the sun, its likely that a small number of subatomic particles will get fused. of course thats just baseless nonsence that i just made up. its fair to assume that at such high tempratures, any complex (or not) chemicals will be either broken down or converted in to something else. no doubt chemists have already been over that. the japaneese facilities mentioned in the article were operating well below the japaneese standars, which were pretty strict.
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ah, now the mafia has a -flawless- method of disposing of bodies :p
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:nervous: I never thought of using it for that for a second........
Still.......... ;7
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They've talked about using something similar for cars for several years now. I think that it was called a plasmatron or plasma fuel reformer. They idea was to take any standard fuel (gasoline, diesel, LPG, possibly more exotic fuels eventually) and run it through a plasma arc. The resultant fuel would be high temperature H2-rich gas with a bit CO (since there is some oxygen in the fuel itself) with relatively few impurities. Once this H2-rich gas is combusted with air, the resultant emissions were a heck of a lot cleaner than your typical engine. HC emissions and soot emissions were virtually eliminated. I can't remember off the top of my head what happened to NOx emissions. Must look it up.
Ok. Yeah, it did cut NOx emissions by almost 90% on a diesel engine, but I'm not really sure how. Might be that the temperature at combustion does not get as high since all the C-C bonds and C-H bonds are already broken. ... More likely it's that, with all the HC and soot garbage completely combusted to CO2, you can use the same type of catalytic converters that work on gasoline engines.
Kara's right, though. The sulfur is going to play holy hell with any kind of emissions protection they have. Any catalytic exhaust processors will be poisoned by it. There's a reason the US finally cracked down on the sulfur content on diesel fuels. They'd have to come up with some way to get the sulfur out of the fuel stream before it gets to the combustion chamber. (Maybe the "slag" they refer to?)
In the end, I'm still highly skeptical that this is a good idea. Even if it is all they claim it to be (doubtful), consider how much CO2 that is going to be releasing. That's just one county. What happens if the process starts getting universally adopted? (shakes head) I'll give them points for clever thinking, but I don't think combustion is the answer for anything anymore. The further away we get from dependance on combustion the happier I'll be.
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Don't buy their emissions stuff though. The waste they are incinerating (I.e standard household waste) is going to be fairly high in sulphur and nitrogen compared with coal (and especially compared with gas). Just where in hell's name is that all going to go except up the chimney as nitrogen and sulphur oxides?
In the produced "slag"? No idea how that could be though.. You're the chemist here :D
I just hope that this slag is a product as stable as they obviously think it is.
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Slag has many commercial uses, and is rarely thrown away. It is often reprocessed to separate any other metals that it may contain. The remnants of this recovery can be used in railroad track ballast, and as fertilizer. It has been used as a road metal and as a cheap and durable means of roughening sloping faces of seawalls in order to progressively arrest the movement of waves.
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think of it this way, you can either polute the ground with landfills or the air withc combustion. buyring it produces no energy. burning it straight off would really crank out some bad exaust. but theyre using a closed system. this way they condence some of the otherwise harmfull exaust into solid waste. it also seems they have a means to seporate the exaust gasses, if there using methane from the exaust to power the thing.
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Landfill pollution doesn't tend to fall from the sky as acid rain though.
In the produced "slag"? No idea how that could be though.. You're the chemist here :D
I'm not seeing how though. The main point of this whole plant is that it uses a much hotter flame to result in more oxidation than standard waste incinerators. That's going to result in more sulphur oxides not less. I'm intrigued as to how they're dealing with that.
It's probably that sort of question that is leading others to question how well this plant will work.
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the system is closed loop, id assume you could suck out alot of oxygen and replace it with something inert, like argon, would this not reduce oxidization? not that it would make much difference. the article claims that the only emmissions will be generated by burning the flammable gasses to create power, anything else supposidly comes out as slag. they could bind up most ofthe hazardous compounds chemically using additives. none the less you have to understand the system in full to make a more accurate judgment on wether it will work or not.
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:wtf: The system is not a closed loop any more than the engine of your car is a closed loop. This plant is not sucking on its own exhaust. It has a (massive) flux of fuel (garbage) in and an equally massive flux of products out. Some of the output is slag. Some of the output is electricity. Some of it is steam. Some of it is carbon dioxide. Some of it is probably very nasty oxides of sulfur, nitrogen, and a few other things. Keep in mind here people, there are a lot of guys out there who do not follow the rules for disposing of hazardous household waste. There's all kinds of nasty **** in pesticides etc. that's going to get burned as well. Certain relatively rare non-metallic elements are going to be very difficult to trap in a "slag" and are likely to go up the smoke stack. Some of those are highly toxic even in low concentrations. We're not burning a pristine fuel like gasoline or even diesel!
(puff puff) Ok. That said, I do not understand enough of the detailed workings of the plant to say what they are claiming is impossible, yet. My skepticism is growing by the minute, though. If anyone has found any good articles on this, please post links.
@Kara, I do not think the idea is to increase the oxidation temperature. If they are doing what I think they are, the plasma arc is a fuel reforming step which would be done as much in the absence of oxygen as possible. The combustion would come afterwards, once the "fuel" is mostly a hydrogen-rich gas and a lot of the metals and heavier elements have been removed as "slag." I still don't see how they'd get rid of the sulfur though, as you say. The nitrogen they'll have to introduce themselves when they mix in air to burn unless they plan to use manufactured oxygen in which case efficiency --> 0.
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Landfill pollution doesn't tend to fall from the sky as acid rain though.
No, it tends to emerge from the ground in fruits and veggies.