Bob, I concur with your assessment of energy sources.
Multiple solutions to energy generation are needed, both to reduce carbon dependence and to increase resilience to supply problems. ie LPG supply fails but solar, biomas and hydro still works
However, high level radioactives (gamma emitters especially) have to stay out of the waste stream.
I think alpha emitters might be OK as these can be less radioactive than granite.

Good article ... but not sure if it really works. Besides all the new technologies that we believe we need to invent, there are also some easier methods ... IF we are willing to go for it. What if every homeowner would have a reversable electricity meter and would be allowed to connect solar panels to it. The surplus of electricity which would be generated during the day could be given back to the utility company (at the same cost as what we would pay for it) via the reversable meter. It is proven technology, simple to implement and "only" requires the willingness of the utility company to allow for a reversable meter.

Diet Soda? It was a can of Miller beer.

I have the same comment as before (which is on my blog linked above). Basically, I'll believe all this when I see it. Until then, it's a miracle cure that politicians can use to get in office and keep us peasants from panicing.

New ideas with great potential are always welcomed.

Please keep them coming.

It sounds good, but what is the investment cost of this 100 ton/day plant?

Solar Energy is free, does not produce waste products - only electricity. Why don't we use it now for all our energy needs?

The interest charge on the investment cost is more than it would cost to produce the same energy from oil.

I fear the Day Cycle may be in the same category.

This single biggest consumer of electrickery in my household is the swimming pool pump...a little while ago, I researched replacing that with a solar panel and a 12V powered pump - for all I care, the pump can run whenever the sun is shining!
Of course, all the retailers were only interested in selling the whole household package with a reversable electricity meter, and no-one was interested in my little project....
Pity.
Would have been nice to save approx 20% of my power bill for very very little work and virtually no investment (my existing pump is about to die, so the only cost would have been the panels!!).
Now, if everybody with a swimming pool did this, that would make a significant difference to the City Grid!!!

What's great about this solution is that we -have- to find a way to get rid of our trash anyhow, so doing something useful with it is a definite positive. Any cleaner return on investment on waste management is better than simply burying it, no matter how inefficient it is compared to other energy generation solutions.


I can't wait until Mr. Fusion can convert my "used raw materials" into powering my home off the grid. Hey, Mr. Fusion, here's another diaper - I want to play in the hologames tonight!

Because solar power doesn't rid us of garbage, it's toxic to make the pv panels and they take up land, land which could be growing food to feed people.

This idea isn't new and as for the plasma furnaces we need to stop burning the hydrocarbons, we NEED THEM and they're energy intensive to make, green houses gasses or not, all those life saving plastics are more important than motor fuel, plastic bags going into the furnace is a waste of already good long chain hydrocarbons.

And our municipal recycling plant generates about $2.5m/year in net profit.

Pool pump: time of use meters make the deal work. Doesn't work for a 1-1 1/2 HP (plus a 20% margin) solar grid unless you store the energy ... in batteries (10 yr life) or push back to the grid.

Inertia and risk: I worked in an early effort to produce a high temp incinerator (Cincinnati), it was a farce. Not the technology, but the level of skills needed to run it exceeded the capabilities of the "operators".

Driving a truck, hard wheel bulldozer and pumping crud from the polyethelene lined "dump" is mature and can be done by any fool (and that is who will run them, the marginally educated in our society). So plan your technology to be run by a fool because eventually it will be (paraphrasing Warren Buffet).

Though I agree with the concept, I unfortunately don't know enough about the science to understand why it would not work. I studied electrical engineering, not physics. Having said that, all solutions seem to point toward molecular and even atomic technology and recycling. Everything I read seems to also point back to water and other feedstocks for hydrogen. I recently watched a video demonstrating a water fueled plasma torch on YouTube. The inventor also claims to be able to power his car with the same electrolysis technology. The other day I watched another video of a water powered car in Osaka, Japan, though critics were skeptical about their claims.

The Day Cycle is an eco-system which is an eloquent solution for municipalities and tax payers. Ten years from now I wonder where we will be in terms of energy. If our recent bets on ethanol are any measure of our scientific prowess, then we are really in trouble.

would be great if works! but, as usual, if you promise too much, nothing ever comes out of it. better to start small, just start a 'simple' garbage incinerator and later start selling 'surplus' gas. it could be good business even at small scale, and from then on it's 'just' good managing to make it grow until you're more into the energy industry than garbage disposal service.

Check out another company offering the same solution:

http://www.startech.net/

Just remember one of the great truths: There ain't no free lunch.

You know what they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Both this and the Syngas story are remarkably short on details. I looked into syngas some more and could find little technical information.

To me both of these sound like investor scam of the week, without some more technical details. In a similar vein various forms of perpetual motion machines have been proposed, even recently, and the only real details are in how to invest in them to get them past the last few technical hurdles. Since plasma furnaces are already in operation, it surprising that they haven't already seen useful fuels coming out the other end.

And what's with this article that first says Carbon monoxide, a toxic gas, then later carbon dioxide? Which is it?

As to solar panels being free, that's new one on my. I was always under the impression, having sold them, that they are fairly expensive. As to getting some to run a pool pump, its easy enough they are on the market now, you can just buy one and hook it up. I highly doubt that our energy problems are going to be solved by going solar on pool pumps.

Have we even broken the net gain barrier on solar panels, or do they still use more energy to make then you get out of them

Also it's always a good time to point out that all of our energy sources are solar, without exception.

attempting to come to santa cruz, ca:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9527345

Startech are not the only game in town, and plants have been trying to get off the ground for years. They just don't add up where dumping is cheap. Perhaps the Day's additions will make it more economical for high volume useage. And despite seemlingly destroying everything that goes in, it isn't clear whether in practice gas and slag left over aren't toxic or can be contained. Believe it or not the wikipedia article on plasma arc disposal is quite good.

attempting to come to santa cruz, ca:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9527345

"I recently watched a video demonstrating a water fueled plasma torch on YouTube. The inventor also claims to be able to power his car with the same electrolysis technology. The other day I watched another video of a water powered car in Osaka, Japan, though critics were skeptical about their claims. "

Two more investment scams. At least the electrolycis guy admits, when asked, that his system uses more energy than it outputs, and that it always will.

The water powered car I'm sure is a mis-translation. It's a fuel cell car. It's not fed with water. Fuel cells don't work with water as their energy source, water does not have enough energy in it to power anything like that.

Unless they've mastered transmutation you'll have to remove toxic elements (mercury and heavy metals) as well as radioisotopes. Or does this all somehow get amalgamated into the slag?

This is already being done in Florida. Here's a article at the University of Notre Dame web site that discusses it:

http://www.nd.edu/~mpadber2/FYC_home_files/Page447.htm

there is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible and wrong - H.L. Mencken, Wikipedia. I fear the devil is in the details.

Solar does not have to take up land used for farming. It can use land that is not viable for food crops. It can also use rooftops, which are plentiful and mostly under-utilized. Imagine if a sizable minority of houses in cities with a lot of sun like Phoenix, LA, Miami, or Houston had a solar water heater and a solar electric generation unit. The only problem is that decentralized power does not make utility companies any money. But solutions like solar, day power or Swift Fuel could dramatically expand our options and options like this could dramatically allow us to change our reliance on coal, gas and petroleum to generate electric power and generate new micro businesses focusing on providing service and support for these new technologies. If only we had a Government that was seriously exploring these ideas.

If PV Solar power is such a great producer of energy.

Why don't PV plants use solar panels (which they can get cheaper than anyone) to power their production plants?

I rather like thermal depolymerization myself. Nix recycling; grind it all up and depolymerize it. Melt off the glass and metals and turn everything else into fuel.

Google the term...

I'd have believed it until they added water to get more hydrogen. Water is hydrogen ash. It's not nice to violate the second law. Also, how do they prevent the hydrogen and oxygen from recombining into water? Mind you, distilled water and a small net energy gain would be great. But what about the CO and CO2 great stuff if you can sequester it in algae, but otherwise a net carbon increase.

Has anyone mentioned that the slag scrap will contain plenty of non-safe non-useful hard to recover things? Just because something is an element doesn't mean it's safe. And given the strange mix and high heat with rapid cooling the slag is going to form strange new compounds in the slag which might also be dangerous

Is this
similar?

Actually, that's Jigawatts, not Gigawatts, needed to initiate time travel. It was something of a joke from the movie...

Regardless, using a plasma furnace to reduce trash to atoms won't destroy nuclear materials mixed into the waste stream... but rather just make it harder to isolate and properly store it. And the plan does nothing to address the growing shortages of resources that you propose to burn for fuel. It may seem like a bargain to gain energy from largely recyclable waste, but the cost of replacing those recoverable resources with fresh paper, metals, and plastics would likely cost more in energy, not less, than what is being burned. One can't just look at a single gain and launch into a victory squeal. It's the overall picture that counts.

Plasma arc gasification may also be the key to using our vast reserves of oil shale and coal in an environmentally friendly way. I personally would love to see the day when the oil reserves of the Middle East become a cheap, commodity raw material for manufacturing because we generate clean electrical power by alternative means from burning dead dinosaurs.

All carbonaceous material including trees when they fall emit CO2 by way of a slow fungal metabolisation. If they did not then when you walked in the forest it should be clogged to beyond the tops of the trees with woody matter. So there is no necessity to recover the CO2 if you burn any cellulosic material. It breaks down in the landfill if you bury it and some recover the gas and burn it. Thus you see its even Stephen.

No matter what is proposed the Simple Green True Believers in MMGW will always naysay. Theirs is an anticapitalist agenda. Luckily the plebs have the mind of a crowd and when gas strikes 6 (per gallone) we'll start to drill drill drill! ...and I can not wait to see them cry. My atheistic heart rejoices at the idea of smashing their idiotic stinking idol. It is as though they believed all the ideas that came into their mind while smoking pot.

Yah I saw its face...now I'm a denier I couldn't buyer er if I tried..... ( sung to the Monkeys song "Then I Saw Her face )

Questions:

1. "a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms."

If that's what the furnace does, then where do the molecular byproducts come from?

2. How many tons of CO2 will this eliminate, annually?

3. Even radioactive materials are single atoms, in which case the furnace won't eliminate those. So harmful metals are still an issue. What happens to them?

4. Don't forget the existing trash in landfills, in addition to what comes in each year. That represents the deposits of the last few decades.

5. When speculators are allowed to drive the price of oil up by 60% and the US goes after crazy ideas like fuel from corn, don't you see the writing on the wall? This idea will go nowhere. The US energy system is controlled and regulated by people that don't want solutions.

I tried last week, without success, to leave a comment. I hope this fares better. Just a quick question: Have you ever looked into HYDROGEN FUSION ENERGY?

Are Americans really still burying their waste in landfills? I wasn't aware of it, and it surprises me.

In my part of Europe, trash is indeed burned, and the energy is re-used. But as far as I know, the energy this produces is not huge. We still use a lot of fuel and electricity from nuclear and hydro-electric plants.

I have no idea whether the technology used in the current recycling plants here has anything to do with plasma, but the fact that some of the output of these plants ends up in concrete sounds very familiar.

Maybe other commenters will know more. Is there really something very new and much better in this plasma idea than what is currently done in many parts of Europe?

This solution looks like - another useful tool; a part of the answers. But not THE answer.

The basic issue is - too many humans, consuming too much - all studiously ignoring that they live on a world of finite resources.

Until there is a global planned economy, with consumption balancing (re)supply, we remain in trouble.

Snag is, we are wedded to capitalism. Which is great for finite and well-understood issues promoting one group or country; the micro-scale.

But at macro-scale, capitalism is chaotic and uncontrolled; unlikely to fix these issues. There is not enough macro-scale / global insight.

Result: too much partisanism and competition (thus waste and hoarding of useful methods) built in, at a time when constructive co-operation is needed.

Only insight + planning can get us out of our various messes. A new approach is needed. GPL?

WRONG, Bob.

It does not matter How Hot you burn elements, they stick around. (unless you are talking about fission/fusion temperatures)

So, heavy metals burned will still be heavy metals in the fuel.

Let's see a chemical analysis of the Day Cycle output, when heavy metals go in.

Excerpt from 'What is the Primary Fundamental Right?'
"In the current government controlled education model even the dumbing down of the population has its benefits with more second rate scientists using more research grant money to do more second rate research. Finding cures is not profitable. Looking for cures is profitable with a Socialist government in power, as most scientists researching the disadvantages of global warming probably would know. The CO2 theory of global warming now produces over US$2 billion a year of tax payers money to pay the many otherwise unfunded second rate scientists.

It's probably fairly well known in some medical circles that crib/cot death is possibly caused by the tongue acting as a valve in the process of 'diving reflex'. This reflex is used by sea mammals when deep diving to protect the animal from high pressured water entering the body cavity when they open their mouths to catch prey and is activated by pressure and cold on the facial trigeminal nerves. This possibly explains why the tongue is the strongest muscle in a mammal's body. Unfortunately it appears that the SIDS child is suffocated by their own tongue which then relaxes leaving no evidence except the body of a suffocated child. So SIDS could be classed as a cold air drowning.

Over the years many parents have been found guilty of the murder of their child because of the evidence of suffocation. If the child survives a SIDS encounter then it's possible there will be brain damage similar to cerebral dysgenesis which is usually a symptom of Autism. Apparently the incidence of SIDS has been reduced by putting the child down on its back a practice that might also help reduce ASD. The amount of government funded research grants allotted and money received by fund raisers like 'Red Nose Day' charities is probably a nice little earner for the select few still supposedly busy looking for the cause of SIDS. "
http://www.primaryfundamentalright.org/index.php?pageName=pfrWhatIs

From "Seeking Alpha"
"Startech Environmental: More Hot Air than Profit"
Good technology burden by mediocre management, a very good but sobbering read.

Bob, I'm surprised that you did not take the time to think out what you wrote.

OK, if the plasma is 'optimized' to produce CO, then getting that CO into CO2 means taking oxygen OUT of the air. Net loss oxygen.

If you then feed the CO2 to algae (which won't breathe 100% of it, so we have some net CO2 released into the air), and make biofuel out of the algae, and you THEN burn the biofuel in your truck, furnace, car, plane, or what have you, ALL that CO2, converted by the algae into carbohydrates and in distilling into gas, ethanol, methanol, or biodiesel, goes into the atmosphere.

So this doesn't reduce the GHG, it adds to them, in and of itself. The 'burning' is only going through a couple of extra steps.

The syngas also will be pumping CO2 into the atmosphere when it is burned.

Against this GHG, we have to balance the CO2 and other GHG's that burning coal, gas, diesel would have created. I don't have enough information on whether we would end up with just as much global warming as we now have, or less.

There is an additional problem here, and that is loss of minerals and other natural resources. What goes into the plasma arc does not come out -- copper, lead, gold, iron, potassium, etc.

One day, the landfills will probably be mined by those in desperate need of those metals and other elements. Destroying them now, only means in future we will have less, or else we must expend massive amounts of energy transforming elements ... something nobody really knows how to do yet.

Let's be specific.

There is sufficient land available for landfills that could contain hundreds of years of material at our current rate of disposal. There is no land available with neighbors willing to live next to a landfill.

@ D Steele: "I fear the devil is in the details."

So you´ve been a student of Prof Joska as well? ;)

@ SidViscous

"If PV Solar power is such a great producer of energy.
Why don't PV plants use solar panels (which they can get cheaper than anyone) to power their production plants?"

You, dear Sir, are an idiot.

The biggest waste we have in this country is the potential for biodiesel for diesel engines. We can thank California for cranking down the emissions to the point very few manufacturers want to produce diesel cars. VW went an entire year w/o a diesel Jetta because of the change in CA emissions laws, which drove up the prices for used diesel Jettas by thousands of dollars. CA's short term thinking is that they will only burn petro diesel.

If the Feds would give small-time biodiesel makers the tax and regulations breaks and allow them to manufacture biodiesel for others, we would see $1/gallon BD for anyone who wanted it with 99% less emissions, while allowing the manufacturers a small profit and less used vegetable oil in our landfills, and the fuel costs associated with getting it to the landfills.

This is crazy. I know personally of three gentlemen who got serious about BD and just couldn't make it work outside of their own vehicles because of the associated laws, taxes, permits and regulations. In fact, I don't know why the trucking industry isn't considering pooling their resources and making biodiesel themselves. They must be getting killed right now when diesel fuel is almost $5/gal. This would also reduce our dependence on petro diesel and drive down demand for oil, thereby making gasoline cheaper for the rest of us. Sure there are engine and temperature considerations, but they have all been solved by the hobbyists. Scan the Internet for biodiesel and the market is flooded with kits.

The fact is the Feds just aren't serious about alternative fuels.

As a couple of people have already pointed out, passing plutonium through one of these devices is not going to stop it from being plutonium. This process cannot solve the problem of radioactive waste. Breaking up toxic molecules into harmless atoms is one thing, but rendering radioactive waste harmless is another. So you have overstated the potential usefulness of plasma furnaces to that extent. Unfortunately.

Could be useful, CO could be used to build more complex molecules. A simpler, complementary technology would be fermenting sewage for methane before treatment, than on to become fertilizer, or fed to the plasma furnace. Global warming?, not as anthopogenic as some would have you believe. There are bigger fish to fry in this imperfect world than a futile attempt to achieve climate stasis.

I think that this is a wonderful idea and should be implimented forthwith. With the greatest respect to Mr Harness (above), while it may well be futile to attempt to reverse global warming, it seems plain daft to contribute to it nonethless. So, I think that any kind of CO2 emiting fuel should be as limited in its use as possible.

I believe that innovation should be in the direction of electric batteries and motors to make hybrid vehicles able to meet the power demands of the haulage industry. The haulage industry in turn should be moved to rail as far as possible. Solar power for houses (has anyone noticed how much the sun actually SHINES in the USA?? - why are solar panels not mandated for every house?)

There is a lot to do. These inventors need every support as do inventors like them.

Looks like the army is already trying to perfect this:

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,163802,00.html

I find this one very interesting (Genetically altered bacteria that excretes crude as waste)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece

While we all hope crude will come back down to it's original level, I kind of hope it stays up there so that our "mad scientists" will come up with an alternative...like they did with fibre optics when copper was perceived as almost depleted.

Looks like the army is already trying to perfect this:

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,163802,00.html

I find this one very interesting (Genetically altered bacteria that excretes crude as waste)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece

While we all hope crude will come back down to it's original level, I kind of hope it stays up there so that our "mad scientists" will come up with an alternative...like they did with fibre optics when copper was perceived as almost depleted.

I definitely agree with what Tim Harness has said.
Despite the drawbacks, the plasma furness can become part of a family of interrelated processes that feed one another, however imperfectly. No free lunch but a net gain in efficient use of energy sources from what we are doing now. Japanese government is already working on this idea. BUT I haven't heard anything in the past 2 years.

Again what Mr. Harness has said about not being able to save the planet from global warming while creating energy alternatives is a basic point some of the nay sayers to Bob's suggestions need to wire into their minds on this issue.

THere is no free lunch. The global warming is going to exact its pounds of flesh, and beach front property. There are more managable if not bigger fish to fry.

Wouldn't it be better to put the abundant energy on this planet to better use, than creating a solution to an absurdly wasteful process? A cycle of use, that is found nowhere in our planets ecosystem.

We produce products inefficiently, package inefficiently, store inefficiently, distribute inefficiently, and dispose of them inefficiently. That's a fact, a given, and established in granite. Right?

Why is it so hard to reverse engineer the whole issue? Why start at the end of this whole inefficient process?

There are two separate issues here, the algae and everything else.

There are plenty of existing CO2 streams available for growing algae, so that is irrelevant to the present discussion.

For the rest, there is a question as to what happens in the landfill. If a substantial amount of methane is produced and escapes, then it is better to burn things somehow. But let's suppose no methane escapes.

Now the garbage becomes a mineral which is being "dug up" (ie, not buried) and used as a source of energy. Unfortunately it is a poor source of energy because it generates a lot of CO2 to produce the hydrogen, biodiesel and electricity. In that sense, it is like the oil sands, but maybe worse (I don't know the figures.)

It still may be a good way to get rid of garbage, but it does not look like a way to save on greenhouse gas.

Paul Richards asks: "Why is it so hard to reverse engineer the whole issue? Why start at the end of this whole inefficient process?"

Paul, have you ever examined any instance of an attempt to change any system created by human beings, ever?

This is how things are always done. Usually, for a good reason. In most cases, making one small change, putting a "Band-Aid" if you will, upon the existing infrastructure, is in fact easier to do, faster and far more predictable than beginning from a blank canvas. Even in instances where a good argument can be made that replacing the entire existing system with something new would be better, from an economic or other standpoint, any number of practical factors (inertia, politics, short-sightedness) preclude doing so.

And, after all, of the few large-scale attempts at wholesale replacing an existing system, many have been spectacular failures. Revolutionary communism comes to mind; I'm sure we can think of others if we try.

Wouldn't all exiting material from the furnace be, at least initially, in gaseous atomic form? If so, then wouldn't distillation or separation be possible, kinda like is done now with petroleum? That could result in a output stream of raw material, or at least separate out the really nasty stuff (heavy isotopes, heavy metals, etc).

Maybe the trick is to get the elements out before they recombine into compounds.

Whatever solutions we try need to incentivize the consumer: non-trivial tax breaks for fuel efficient cars, tax credit for home solar, reducing regulations and obstacles. That is why bottom up, non-monopolistic capitalism works- instead of herding cats, the cats heard themselves.

We need to build nuke plants. "not in my back yard" you say? How about free electricity for residential use for the life of the plant inside a certain radius? Should help prop up the declining housing market.

Perhaps the Days will find a great pilot opportunity in Hawaii. Hawaii has run out of room in their landfills and are negotiating to ship garbage to Oregon and Washington.

Hi Bob,

As a long time reader of yours, you still never cease to amaze me and my friends with your provocative thinking. I fully support experiments at doing something different to see what happens. Lets get one of these babies fired up to see what we learn.

I can't help but wonder about the consequences if this really came to pass.

Instead of paying my local landfill $30 to dump a pickup full of trash, they would pay me $5 to bring it to them instead of a competing furnace.

Charitable groups walking house to house asking for donations of trash instead of cash.

"Honey, someone stole the trash again."

The list goes on and on ....

are they asserting that this system will be a net plus of energy? I kinda doubt it. 7,000 plasma furnaces will need a heckuva of a lot of power.

Bob,

Your math simply doesn't add up. Your simple starting comparison is 251 million tons of trash vs. 5 billion barrels of oil. (presumably a barrel is a 55 gallon drum of oil).

251 million tons * 2000 pounds per ton = 500 billon pounds of trash, giving us a ratio of 100 pounds of trash on the one hand, vs. 1 barrel of oil on the other.

After a lot of complicated, partial, and obscure calculations and implied calculations, you say that about half of the imported oil (2.6 billion barrels) will be replaced by this method. So that implies that via the magical Day Cycle, 200 pounds of trash turns into one barrel of oil.

Assuming that a gallon of oil weighs about 7 pounds (water is eight pounds per gallon, and crude oil floats on water), a 55 gallon drum of oil = 385 pounds.

Hmmm.

I will be really friggin' impressed if these Day guys can take relatively low energy-density, high-water-content stuff like trash and make one pound of it the equivalent of almost two pounds of high-energy-density, low-water-content stuff like crude oil.

I cry baloney.

I guess they don't teach chemistry and physics in US schools anymore. The "perfect burning" which plasma furnace approaches yields water and carbon dioxide. Contrary to what has been written, heavy metals do burn at plasma temperatures so toxic waste is not a problem. But to state that you can make trash burn so that hydrogen is a byproduct is just plain not true and screams SCAM with the purpose of luring gullible (and clueless) investors. Any known process of extracting hydrogen from water is a huge net loss. Burning - even at plasma temperatures - cannot yield hydrogen as long as there's oxygen present. Which, of course, it is.

Dumb. You might do some basic research before posting such childish articles, Mr. Stephens.

And before anyone attacks my English, it is my third language. Good night y'all.

Another interesting development in regards to turning trash into energy: http://www.changingworldtech.com/

In a nutshell, this company has figured out a way to do in hours what Mother Nature does over millions of years - turn organic and inorganic carbon-based matter into oil. They have a subsidiary called Renewal Environmental Solutions (RES) in Carthage, MO that is taking in the blood, guts, feathers and other waste from a nearby Butterball Turkey factory and converting it into several useful products, including oil. One of the products created by the process - natural gas - is siphoned off and used as an energy source. This company will be featured on an upcoming episode of The History Channel's Modern Marvels this year.

The "Day Cycle" sounds nice, but talk is cheap. Real world energy-to-waste solutions are already out there, and economically viable.

http://www.covantaholding.com/efw_101.shtml

If they can be improved upon, that's great, but don't talk about it, do it . . . . And by the way, most of us global warming "deniers" are all in favor of REAL solutions to improving the environment, we just recognize that pouring billions of dollars into university grants for bogus hysterics will accomplish nothing but more shortages of critical resources, food and badly needed energy. . . .

Well, the real problem is that the Earth's population will increase to 8-10 billion people by 2050 and their energy needs will at least double.

The only longterm solution to that is solar energy. Not collected by solar panels on the roofs of buildings on earth - but solar panels in space that collect just a few of the terawatts of power that bypass the Earth every day and beam it down to energy collection facilities.

This is the Terawatt Challenge that was proposed by the late Dr. Richard Smalley of Rice University. It hinges on investments in nanotechnology to produce the solar collectors, super batteries, and other tech needed to make this work.

Our Energy Challenge
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/energychallenge.html

Hey Robert.

You don't need to experiment with new technologies to use trash as an energy source right now.

Here in Brazil with no rocket-science, we've been producing a lot of energy from trash decomposition. Basically, they install nets of tubes that collect methane from the landfills where the municipal waste is stored and just burn it in regular natural gas turbines.

It's twice as good because you avoid the dispersion of this dangerous greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and generate energy from that, avoiding the release of other greenhouse gases.
Also, according to Kyoto's Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), you can sell the Carbon Credit obtained from these projects in the commodities markets to pay for the investments made in machinery.

One of the first companies to develop this kind of initiatives was Novagerar Ecoenergia from Sao Paulo.

http://www.novagerar.com.br/ingles/index.html) .



Best,

Flavio

Sao Paulo - Brazil

Sounds all well and good, and I'm sure the current purveyors of handling such "commodities" along with ALL of our honest and forthright politicians will readily embrace this idea. Then find ways to stall "approval" and give "official" sanctions, and ...

A similar thing was tried in the 1960's. Check "naturizer lockheed" on Google and look at the hits. (Ignore "Naturalizer" suggestions.) Ironically, the son recently announced he was going to republish his father's work. Good idea that worked, just ahead of its time.

Will radioactive waste cease to be radioactive once run thru a plasma furnace?

bob,

your latest article talks about things making sense, where is your head man?

don't you know that the ONLY reason we don't have unlimited free and clean energy (and many other wonderful things) is because they are not wanted by large business interests who control the government?

even as far back as Nicola Tesla - the inventor of AC Power and Radio, in 1890 he was capturing energy from the ether and focusing it - without wires - to any person who wanted to use it.

He - of course - was shut down after he could not tell Mr Westinghouse how it could be metered - and how it could be charged for.

Without that metric - and control staying with the corporate interests - no great technology will be allowed to the masses.

Let me just give you two quick examples.

The first is very recent - this week - a car running on water, covered by reuters video:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=84561&;
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080613/153276/

Not like this is news - just search Youtube for "water car".

Second - and very simple - a way you can prove to yourself that energy can be generated from permanent magnets:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkgyY47duCM

see attachment for how you can build your own in 10 minutes.

just look at Dennis Lee, Perendev, Steorn, Tesla, Patterson, The Joe Cell, Pantone, Lindemann, Leach, Adams, Hutchison, Hendershot, Cack, Blue, Brown, Howard Johnson, Paul Winchell and Joseph Newman.

what of 80% of these guys are false, can you say that all of them are false?

what would be the point of doing the same projects for 30 years?

What energy turns the earth? What energy makes objects fall downward? What energy sends pictures to your tv set? What energy powers a windmill or water powered dam? all of that energy can be used by humans.

look at a book called "Suppressed Inventions" to see the amazing technologies which are all bad for business, and hence, the masses can't have them. I'll be happy to send you a copy if you like, PDF or print version.

so I ask you - don't propose solutions without a reasonable plan to implement them, because i can assure you - in the current corporate controlled climate - they will go nowhere.

brad

The crux of every problem facing mankind is over population. There are too many people, requiring unsustainable and ever larger amounts of energy, food, raw materials, water and space for housing. The population doubles approximately every 40 years, so your 80-year old grandparents have seen the number of human beings quadruple in their lifetimes.

We now happen to be living at a time when centuries of unplanned growth has nowhere to go. The planet can take more population growth, but at increasingly high costs for raw materials and to the environment.

So, if you want to solve the world's problems, focus on this one. Maybe handing out free birth control pills is the way to go. However, China hasn't been able to fix it with dictatorial powers and economic incentives, so I don't see anybody else doing better. But at least they are smart enough to know what to focus on.

It is not helpful to focus on tiny band aides -- like fuel efficient cars, syn fuel, or better garbage dumps -- when the number of cars and garbage being produced is growing at a much faster rate. Of course, capitalism and religion are 2 institutions that want more population growth, and they won't go down without a fight (literally, with armies).

Change will only come when politics and money are truly separated. It's going to cost $1 billion to get elected President this year. That's a lot of favors that will be owed to the capitalists who got him there. Every politician at every level will have a similar burden, albeit on a smaller scale.

"Actually, that's Jigawatts, not Gigawatts, needed to initiate time travel. It was something of a joke from the movie...

Darren | Jun 21, 2008 | 12:46AM"

Actually the correct word is gigaWatts and the correct pronunciation has the first "g" sounding like a "j". The "giga" prefix comes from the same root as the word "gigantic".

So it was used and pronounced correctly in the movie. It's only recently that so many people involved with computers saw, rather than heard, the "giga" prefix and began pronouncing it incorrectly.

The "Day Cycle" eh? Well the city of Ottawa already has a 100 tonne-per-day demonstration plant built and running. But who's cares about us Canucks eh?

@Brad W.

Check out this forum to debunk your magnetic motor guy:

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8358872&fpart=1

You don't get something for nothing, and there is no "mystery force" that will solve all our energy problems.

And if converting garbage to electricity were so easy and cheap, we'd already be doing it. Nuclear and fossil fuels have a lot of bang for the buck. Replacing them is not easy. I'm really getting tired of seeing all these researchers, both backyard and laboratory, claiming to be able to solve everything overnight, when they don't understand the shear scale of the energy industry. Just because a few people can run their groovy bus on bio-diesel doesn't mean there's enough french fry fat in the world to power everyone's 18-wheeler.

I do think that long term, solar/steam power will have an impact in places like the desert southwest, but it will be 10 years out, and in the mean time, we're going to continue to use oil, coal and gas at an ever alarming rate.

If you ever visit lake Powell in AZ, make sure you look to the east. You'll see a coal fired generating station. It produces more power than the plant in the Glenn Canyon dam. Really puts things into perspective.

A company which is running trials to process waste into energy using the steam reformation process in Sault Ste. Marie Canada.

http://www.enquestpower.com

If it can be done why hasn't it been done already? I'll tell you why! Locally they proposed incinerating the garbage, but the environmentalists immediately demanded 100% safety and 0% emissions which is ridiculous, but they stopped the project. Let's not get sidetracked here about minutiae of atoms of plutonium which I have never had to dispose of; that's a whole different problem. And a hundred tons a day is not a lot; it's only six or seven truckloads. My elephant in the room is that the stupidest solution of all is to bury the stuff, rendering it unavailable for further processing or recycling by storing it in the bulkiest, most awkward way possible!

The male pony tail revolution! No more barbering, a few snips a month, saves (150,000,000 males in USA) X (150 watts per cut) X (2 gallons gas avg round trip)X (10 haircuts/yr)= huge gigantic energy savings! Yea! Go Ponytail male! Note nothing over estimated, and if extrapolated to global, the magnetude is exponentially huge! And if I add in beards and shears, it approximates E=HEADS x HAIR SWUARED! Surely this passes the "Cringification" over simplification filter

I have a real problem with that "generates enough syngas to power the plasma furnace making it self sustaining." For me the red flag starts madly waving when new energy proponents start claiming that their new process can now break the laws of thermodynamics.

It sounded good up until that point, and I will say that they may really mean that the syngas can help minimize the extra energy needed to be put back into the system to keep it that hot.

But, often, when someone makes the self sustaining claim, it means that their process is bunk.

Jason, if you set a dump on fire it would sustain itself as it burned out the combustibles. The idea that an energy rich mix like garbage can't sustain its own combustion process is idiotic. There is no violation of thermodynamic laws.

If anyone doubts my claims please send me an email. I will share the DOE review and do my best to answer any questions needed. This is a passion of mine to make a difference.

Andrew Day Inventor

Thedaycycle@yahoo.com

John,

I can understand your not wanting to get into a public discussion over AGW, but increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide directly and immediately increases all agricultural yields, so you can assume that a lot of folks who think beyond the headlines do, in fact, want to see more greenhouse gases. At least we want to see more of that specific one.

Van

I don't understand the need for the water injection and Algae growing. This seems problematic and extremely captital intensive. Surely just burning the Syngas in a turbine (CO is flamable) to generate electricity is more viable.

Ehm ....
missed a bit and am too lazy too look it up. For the sake of information:

where do atoms that are not C H O end up ??

Specifically heavy metals or radioactive stuff ??
or if you want a more positive approach
Specifically noble metals or rare earth stuff ??

Bin do

If it's just "a little electricity" then let's spend it on drama -- forget selling it back to the grid, let's have giant Jacob's Ladders to burn it off in a colourful, ascending arc just like we used to see in Creature Features. Let's show the world just how far into yesterday's future we've gone!

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen

55 gallons of biodiesel

a little electricity

926 pounds of oxygen

---

1093 lbs net production

  2000 lbs: One ton of municipal waste

- 1093 lbs net production

------

  907 lbs ??????? 

Apparently 907 lbs = a little electricity

I never would have guessed electricity was so heavy. :-)

"The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete."

907 lbs may be made up for in the glasslike inert material.

I feel a little more enlightened after reading the HowStuffWorks article. However, this is still confusing:

"The solid byproduct from the gasification process is called slag. ... The weight of the slag is about 20 percent of the weight of the original waste."

If the 907 lbs is slag, that's around 45% of the original weight.

For *real* energy change using the plasma furnace, it could happen...if CA was somehow able to trick all the PG&E execs, lobbyists and PR propagandists to step inside it;>

Thanks, Dave, for the post.
I get the strange feeling that there's a lot of winking and nodding going on between politicians at consuming nations and politicians at producing nations. There is a whole lot of money being made the way things are. If the pain at the pump gets too great, to the point that we actually might change the underlying system, be prepared for the price of oil to fall dramatically, to where it's not economically possible for the change to happen.

that's the 3rd year I cut the grass in my garden with about an average 75% of water as combustible.
I'm not the one, nor the first.. Does it have change anything ? does companies have research on it ?
No... why ? because oil is taxes, water is less taxes, more difficult to get from peoples.( water may come from sky, taxes are not easy in that way ;-)
Furnaces, why not? if industries and government can win money with it ... If not, not a chance... :(

This sounds like a great idea. The only thing better than a great idea is when someone is currently implementing that idea. Like the good people of coskata (www.coskata.com). I can't wait to see them be successful.

Bob... someone claiming to be Andrew Day invited e-mails but my cynical alter-ego suggests this is an impersonator looking for e-mails to harvest for later spamming. Could you prevail on the Days to post their DOE study to your site so we can all share it?

cheers...ank

This might be for real, but just at a really obvious level there are some problems with the claims.
If you put 1kg of plutonium into a furnace that "that breaks everything down to single atoms", you're still going to have 1kg of plutonium afterwards. It's an element - short of a nuclear reaction, it doesn't change.

Burning garbage is nothing new. And, while we should take advantage of any process that makes our world economy more energy efficient, we aren't going to supply any significant percentage of our needs with technologies like this.

When it is affordable to cover your house with solar cells (and it will be, when fossil fuels are expensive enough), people will do this.

Also, I think if we took a lesson from France, and generated nearly all our electric needs from Nuclear power, we can have our zero-emission grid and zero-emission hydrogen fueled cars.

The solution is there, but, unfortunately, the green "revolution" is what keeps us on fossil fuels, since solar and wind simply cannot scale to the levels a 7-billion (and growing) population requires. So fossil fuel power plants sprout up weekly.

Pushing food-to-fuel programs is immoral when people are starving in many parts of the world, with food prices increasing.

Wow, at last, a chance to put that organic chemistry class to work!
For those wondering where the weight goes when the trash is burned:
Most polymers like oil, wood and plastics have about half as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms, plus a few oxygen, nitrogen, and other atoms. Since a carbon atom weighs about 12 times as much as a hydrogen atom, about 70% of burnable waste material is carbon. The carbon atoms combine with two oxygen atoms, each with atomic weight of 16, so burning 1000 kg of waste involves about 700 lbs of carbon that ends up being combined with 1800 lbs of oxygen to produce about 2500 kg of CO2. The 250 lbs of hydrogen combines with oxygen to make another 2250 kg of water. These, sooner or later, generally go off up the smokestack. Is anyone surprised that the promoters aren’t inclined to mention that they turn one ton of trash into 2 ½ tons of CO2? Before you feel cynical, remember that you do that with your car too, except that you only wish it was trash you use for fuel. The rest of the 1000 kg turns out to be other stuff, like the ashes left from burning wood in your fireplace. Everyone with a fireplace knows we carry a lot more weight in as firewood than we carry out as ashes.

At least one of the sites which readers posted links to boasts that their process converted heavy metals in the waste stream into “harmless” metal oxides. Ha! Most metal oxides are much more easily absorbed by plants and animals than the un-oxidized metallic form.
If the plasma furnace can reliably get the ash to combine into a glass-like waste product, it nicely locks up most heavy metal atoms so they don’t leach from the now compact landfill (or concrete road surface) material into the ground water. However, the difficulty of controlling the ash in a coal burning furnace is a complex task, and trash will come with much greater variation in the composition than coal does. Solving that problem is much more important that all the folderol about feeding the CO2 to algae, and using the CO to produce hydrogen. Better to burn the combustible gas in some kind of engine to produce electricity.

Nothing new here. There have been companies selling plasma incinerators for years. They do a good job of greatly reducing a trash pile but they will not normally generate much energy. The water content of trash greatly reduces the efficiency of the system. Even if you break it into oxygen and hydrogen and burn it - you still dump a huge amount of energy into it to do that and you don't get energy back to make up for that loss. Also when dealing with toxic trash , no matter how many times you feed the exhaust gases back into the system - you will still have to have a scrubber for exhaust - those require a lot of energy and are expensive to maintain.
Reducing volume of trash - yes, Generate large amount of Power - No --- Sorry wish it would work , but it won't.

The best invention yet for clean and virtually free energy remains hydrogen derived from water.
Who knows why this has been shelved...

http://www.google.com/patents?id=lLcjAAAAEBAJ&dq=stanley+meyer
http://www.google.com/patents?id=ihY9AAAAEBAJ&dq=stanley+meyer
http://www.google.com/patents?id=Dz86AAAAEBAJ&dq=stanley+meyer
http://www.google.com/patents?id=fqt1AAAAEBAJ&dq=stanley+a.+meyer

Why waste all that energy to create CO2 to grow algae to make oil, when you can just convert it to oil directly?

I'm talking about Thermal Depolymerization (TDP), also known as Thermal Conversion Process (TCP). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

This process is applicable to many different types of materials from human waste to rubber tires. This is a much more promising technology than the Day Cycle, and it has already been implemented on a large scale.

Of course, nothing would prevent you from using the Day Cycle process on material that's not suitable for TDP.

Alek, producing hydrogen from water has been around since the early days of electrochemistry, but it is far from being clean and free. The process of producing hydrogen from water is simply the conversion of electrical energy into portable hydrogen fuel, so the energy needs to be produced somehow at another site. It's a matter of basic thermodynamics, it takes energy in the form of electricity to make those devices patented by Stanley Meyer work. There is actually quite a lot of research going on in finding catalysts to make the process more efficient, but it can never use less energy than it takes to run the redox reactions, both for hydrogen production and the oxidation of the fuel in hydrogen fuel cells. Then there is the issue of safely storing large quantities of hydrogen so that you can travel 200+ miles on one fill-up.

The idea is far from being shelved.

There are literally millions of ways to generate power that sound good, including this one.

The place where nearly all of them break down is in cost. We can talk about all sorts of ways to generate, store, and use power, but few of them are as cost effective as the ones currently in place in the world. Some may be cost effective in the future, but require more research.

Discussing this without any cost numbers is fun and educational, but in the end what really matters is how much this will cost compared to current energy sources today, and how much this will cost in the future if we put more research dollars into it.

Side benefits like reducing the need for landfill space and reducing global warming are great, but those values need to be quantified and put into the equation to see if the result is worth looking at.

3. Former U.S. Navy Site in Agnano to House Incinerator.
The Agnano neighborhood of Naples ? on the very compound that once housed a U.S. Navy base ?will be the site of the city?s future incinerator, Italian news media are reporting this week.
Stars & Stripes - June 25

So the simple solution to a problem is always overlooked for some more arkane and more complicated idea? What happened to the mindset about producing less trash and buying less rather than finding fancy ways to work around a problem to make money? If they want to get rid of trash.. why not stop making all of those one-time disposable products / food packagings (ie go back to glass pop-bottles and glass-milk bottles?) once the bottles are made.. there is little impact on the planet to re-clean them and re-use them.. but then again I guess the guy who makes the plastic bottles wouldn't be rich then?

IMO if people truly cared about this planet, they'd fix the problems instead of creating ways to procrastinate abut having to fix it.

How much [heat] energy is generated just from the incineration?

Well, if the biodiesel weighs around 400 lb (which would be a bit high), you're still 500 lb short of a ton, although an 8:1 reduction is nothing to be sneezed at.

On the other hand, San Francisco is aiming to reach 75% recycling of its waste stream, a 4:1 reduction. But strecycling is not just about reducing waste, but reducing material (and energy) inputs into the economy. Rather than putting the tantalum in our used electronics into a roadway, then demanding further tantalum from politically destabilized places, it's obivously better to turn that tantalum into more electronics.

Which may be the potential subtlety you allude to.

Oil is just one strategic resource that is strained by generations of compound growth in population and prosperity. Climate change is just one of the unintended environmental results.

Which is not to say that some form of clean cogeneration isn't part of the answer. It probably is. But recycling and more up front reduction in resource use are certainly part of the answer.

This is off topic, but I just noticed that Cringely owns nerdtv.net now! The default Apache installation is running and the older NerdTV shows are being served from there. Does this mean NerdTV Season 2 will become a reality soon?!?!

Oh, dear. After your skeptical words about magic cures, you seem to have fallen for one. Do a simple mass balance thought exercise: where does the lead, the copper, the mercury, the cadmium that is in our waste go? How about all the chlorine (lots of it in PVC) and bromine (in flame retardants)? Out the stack of the syngas? Or in the slag? (which I've handled and felt -- it's nowhere near as useful as they make it sound). Either way, you're dealing with serious pollution. And heating a material to 30,000 F won't make it non-radioactive. But the bigger problem is this: it isn't sustainable to keep making the amount of waste we Americans produce. Forests are being cut down, mountains are being blown up to get at mineral resources, the planet is being mined to feed our consumerism. But if we recycled that stuff -- and made sure we stopped producing bad products that we can't recycle -- it would ease the demand for natural resources. Oh, and it also saves a lot of energy: check out www.stoptrashingtheclimate.org

Guys, This works!

If you doubt me, email me.

thedaycycle@yahoo.com

The DOE would not have stated our designs have merit if they didn't. I will email you a copy of there review and specs on the emissions levels.

Andy

Janssen,

The difference with the method for production of hydrogen from tap water, patented by Stanley Meyer, is that it uses a tiny amount of electricity measured in miliamps.
The issue for storage is a nonissue, because the production is on-demand. Produce as you consume.
This energy is totally clean, as the only output by the combustion of hydrogen is water.

The only issue that I see with this invention, is that the inventor is dead, and he has stated on camera that various energy and goverment institutions had threatened him.
Please google this for more details.

Alek,

Okay, I'll do some more research on Stanley Meyer. In the meantime, perhaps I can interest you in some perpetual motion devices I have for sale.

Alek,

Okay, I'll do some more research on Stanley Meyer. In the meantime, perhaps I can interest you in some perpetual motion devices I have for sale.

For a great read on alt.energy topics, check out Don Lancaster's Tinaja.com
This PDF is a good place to start:

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse153.pdf

The money quote:

Proponents who feel Meyer to be correct have two intelligent choices: They can accurately measure the true watthours input to dry STP hydrogen out and then have it independently and objectively verified.

Then publishing the results in a credible forum. Perhaps in Elsevier's International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. Or they can clog Aisle 14 at Wal-Mart with their product.

Either way works just fine.

I'll predict that accurate efficiency measurements will never get made. These are the last thing proponents want to see happen, as the odds are a zillion to one that they will end up conclusively and terminally proven to be clueless idiots.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/21029/

Am I alone in thinking that this solves the symptom but does nothing for the true problem, the generation of large amounts of "waste". What we really need is a device that can easily and efficiently break down the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other chemicals into their easily handled forms. Sort of like the Heechee CHON machines described by Fredrik Pohl.

How about drilling our own oil? In Rocky Mountain shale oil we have 3 times the amount of oil as Saudi Arabia. On the outer continental shelf of the West Coast we have massive amounts of oil, along with a trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In the Gulf of Mexico we have another trillion barrels of oil lurking beneath the water. These sources have laid untapped because Congress has made it illeagal to tap them, and has blocked any new nuclear power plants that in addition to providing cheap electricity could also provide a massive amount of hydrogen. I'm not opposed to converting garbage to fuel, but couldn't we start with some options that are a little more proven??

Yes we do need multiple solutions, if it works this is a good addition, I urge however even if it is less cost effective to continue recycling, we can't keep mining forever raw materials, we need to design products and packaging that makes the recycling process easier and recycle more.

Solar is not the answer to all, but just think if
panels were on every roof, if we had photovoltaic glass panels on high rises, if roads had tough non slip solar cells embedded into a grid imagine the power you could produce.
Yes storage of solar is a problem. Think about this, excess power during the day gets converted to hydrogen, and stored (technologies do need to keep improving here). During night hydrogen is used to drive power plant turbines to power our homes and pick up the slack. Yes we also need wind power.

It takes serious ambition from politicians, citizens and companies to make our future certain.

Some councils are doing their bit, London is making big moves, bio-mass waste power, decentralised power and heating systems and other efforts to become self sufficient. Just a shame the governments of the world seem to be almost sleeping on the job.

To anyone who believes that finding and using our own oil from our own turf (the U.S.)is an obvious answer to our energy needs, it is this type of short-term thinking that gets us nowhere. How much longer are we going to be satisfied with finding only temporary solutions to such a critical problem?

While we certainly do not have all the necessary information and technology to turn trash into fuel, it is not going to help anyone by putting it off any longer. We will continue to generate garbage, and we will continue to struggle with not only finding accessible sources of oil but then affording to purchase that oil which will be shamelessly swallowed by our 13 mile per gallon SUV's.

As a professor of mine always told us: If you can dream it, someone can make it happen. It may not be in our direct line of vision at the moment, but if we embrace the potential that alternative energy sources have and work on mastering those instead of being lazy and settling for what we KNOW we cannot rely on for much longer, we will eventually figure this out-sooner than later.