[Colonol Dekker]

A viable use for diorhea.

[SadisticSid]

Wait a minute. How much energy is spent powering plasma arcs for a whole day? Are they powered by magic?

[an0n]

They're powered by 1/3rd of the energy produced by the various stuff they're doing.

Read the damn article.

[karajorma]

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?

[Nuke]

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.

[Turnsky]

ah, now the mafia has a -flawless- method of disposing of bodies 

[Colonol Dekker]

  I never thought of using it for that for a second........


Still..........

[perihelion]

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 NO_x emissions.  Must look it up.

Ok.  Yeah, it did cut NO_x 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.

[castor]

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
I just hope that this slag is a product as stable as they obviously think it is.

[Colonol Dekker]

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.

[Nuke]

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.

[karajorma]

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

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.

[Nuke]

the system is closed loop, id assume you could suck out 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.

[perihelion]

   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.

[Sandwich]

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.