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Zapping trash with man-made lightning
Plasma gasification test facility at Integrated Environmental Technologies.
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Bob Moon: A little later in today's program we'll be talking to an author who's been trashing the idea of energy independence -- He says it's just not realistically possible -- but some of the innovators looking to free us from our oil habit are promoting an idea that could turn one man's trash into another's energy source. At the same time, they suggest their idea could help clean up the mess we're making of the planet.
From our innovations desk at North Carolina Public Radio, Janet Babin reports.
Janet Babin: This new trash technology is based on something as old as the sky:
[Sound of thunderstorm]
Not the thunder, but the lightning that goes with it, and in this case, the lightning is contained inside a reaction chamber and the bolt never ends. This man-made lightning is so hot, most things put inside the chamber completely vaporize in seconds.
The technology's called plasma gasification and proponents say it could be the answer to our growing trash problem. Although it uses intense heat, developers insist it's not incineration. The "not-in-my-backyard crowd" has complained for years about emissions from burning trash.
Dan Cohn: It's a non-combustion process. The waste is not burned, it's converted.
That's Dan Cohn of MIT. He was part of a team that developed a plasma gasification device for a company called Integrated Environmental Technologies. IET says its plasma melter can take a ton of trash down to five cubic feet in less than a minute.
To see how it worked, I took some of my own trash -- an old sneaker -- and headed up to Richland, Washington, where IET demos its plasma melter.
The stainless steel chamber where the lightning happens is about five feet long by three-and-a-half-feet wide. Before the sneaker can go inside the chamber, it has to be shredded, so IET's president Jeff Surma and four engineers take a band saw to it.
Jeff Surma: Andy looks like he's having fun here.
Babin: How many engineers does it take to shred a sneaker?
Now for the fireworks. Surma picks up the play-by-play:
Surma: It's going into the plasma zone. So first, the shoe gets pre-processed in the gasifier and then what doesn't get completely gasified there gets dropped into the high-temperature plasma zone.
That plasma is about the temperature of the sun. Most of the sneaker is vaporized in seconds. The rest comes out looking like a blackish glass bead. IET says beads like this can be used as fill in road construction.
Since it was mostly plastic, the sneaker also created about four gallons of a gas that could be used to make alternative fuel. Jeff Surma says rising energy prices have more firms interested in his invention.
But plasma melters are still rare in the U.S. Dr. Robert Do with the Solena Group says that's because the new technology threatens two powerful industries.
Robert Do: You know, we would be taking away a large business for the landfill people and the incinerators, so waste company do not want to see this technology come out. On the other hand, if we produce power, we will be infringing on the coal business and fossil fuel burning business.
Critics say plasma technology uses too much energy and is too expensive. And Steve Boton with McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry says the technology could send the message that trash is OK -- kind of the opposite of reduce, reuse, recycle.
Steve Boton: We see waste as a signal of design failure because products and materials can ideally be designed so they can maintain their flows within closed loops.
In other words, products that can be recycled into items with second and even third lives. But transforming all consumer goods into products like that is a long way off. In the interim, plasma gasification might be the best way to shrink our growing trash problem with technology as elemental as lightning.
I'm Janet Babin for Marketplace.
It is encouraging to see solid research and applied demonstration of thermal gasification. The mass/energy balance and energy efficiency/throughput with variable MSW streams, followed by scalability will be a determinate factor.
Comparison with non-thermal plasma (gliding arc) can then be made.
Garbage can serve a useful function if it is contained in cement blocks used to build levees that would be impervious to muskrat undermining.
Affordable and Practical Flood Protection Materials and Techniques
By
Patrick E. Hamel
Retired Engineer formerly at NASA Michoud Assembly Facility and Ingalls Shipyard
April 14, 2008
Summary:
Interlocking transportable standard-size cement blocks packed with compressed garbage and sealed can create permanent, reliable, and affordable flood-control structures. Especially if convict labor is used to compact the garbage into the blocks and pour the seals.
Retirement has not destroyed my ability to solve problems, it has allowed me to select the problem which to solve.
I have chosen this problem because my own home, and the homes of many others, are threatened by the extreme costs of conventional flood protection construction and the alternative of not doing the job.
There are several considerations in any civil engineering attempt: Political, Cultural, Economic, and Physical. I will attempt to address all these considerations in this paper and show why my proposed solution is practical on in these four areas.
The hardest to address are The Political and cultural effect of flood control.
They intersect all the other areas in that public moneys are being spent in a manner not directly determined by the local politicians. Any barrier to water becomes a barrier to line-of sight, isolating voters on the “other side†of the barrier from the politician on “his or her†side of the barrier. It also isolates school districts and stores from the people who have been the clients and customers. In parts of the country where the population is family-oriented, such as the Gulf Coast area including New Orleans, access to “our Churchâ€, “our Cemeteryâ€, or “our School†is very important and the local politicians are held responsible for any changes.
It is particularly important to avoid the “Dogpatch Syndromeâ€.
Public information from investigations of the physical failures of the flood control structures in Louisiana and the fantastic cost of replacing these structures using conventional methods has driven the voters to fear they will be unable to pay the increased property taxes to finance conventional repairs.
Those of us who remember the recession of the 1970’s when we had to pay for the war in Vietnam anticipate the same effect - only worse - because of the evidence of the current housing disaster. The voters want to know that the requirement of the government to protect them from physical and financial disasters as well as wars will be met, or they will elect new politicians who promise to do so.
There are no voters living on the Barrier Islands in the northern Gulf of Mexico, but the entire southern coast parishes and counties were naturally protected from serious flooding until the islands washed away by neglect.
The Mississippi river flooding in 1920 caused a change in flood control, as must the Katrina-Rita storms of 2005. The Dutch have developed and implemented solutions for floods from the sea. What I propose will be most difficult in the gulf south due to the lack of bedrock, but it will apply anywhere a flood control structure (levee) is needed and expected to last for generations.
The problem is to make solution methods politically, culturally, economically, and physically possible.
There need to be two parallel methods to attack this problem.
Finances for the work must come from somewhere. I believe I have found a way to do what needs to be done by using moneys already being spent for a dual purpose including the flood control solution.
Enough situation background, how to do it .
Physical background for the physical solution.
Any levee or breakwater solution will require site design, and civil engineers on the work site and experienced contractors doing the preparation and finish work. That cost cannot be avoided.
I have pictures from my father’s WW2 service at a Houston area shipyard where he helped build cement barges.
During the Normandy invasion the allies used barges sunk in place (Mulberries) to create docks to bring material inshore.
A few years back we had in the news the travels of the New York garbage barge nobody would take.
All over the country there are stories of over-full jails and the costs of not punishing felons or of housing and feeding them.
The Gulf coast was originally protected by the barrier islands. Channelization of the rivers has resulted in lack of natural replenishment of the islands. The hurricanes washed away the Islands.
Water has Inertia. A wall of water coming down a river, or a dome of water sucked up by the low pressure of a massive hurricane, is traveling forward and must dissipate the energy somewhere. In Katrina, the dome was so large it was funneled into the bays and up the tributaries, resulting in damage hundreds of miles from the shoreline. The existing barrier Islands that should have taken the worst part of the storm surge were easily over-topped because the majority of the islands no longer exist.
Quarrying and moving the correct fill material (not the local muck which was undermined in Louisiana) and building the flood control structure block-by-block in place is the conventional method.
This has the voters frightened by the cost.
What I propose, how to finance it, and how to accomplish it follow:
I propose that cement barges or containers (shaped like interlocking rectangular garden pavers with one concave end and one convex end) be created to hold one standard shipping container of material and float when empty. These barges / containers will be created so that the rebar is exposed on top. When the barges are floated or trucked into place and interlocked, they can be filled with compressed garbage from cities and have a prepared rebar cage welded to the exposed wall rebar and a cement top poured, creating a solid heavy block. Floating a filled block while the cement top cures would require other empty barges as pontoons, ready to be moved and filled in turn. Containers trucked into place empty and filled locally could cure in place before the next layer of blocks would be stacked on top.
Interlocked solid heavy blocks 40 feet long, 10 feet high, and 10 feet wide placed around the original barrier islands on prepared base material and stacked as pyramids would form the skeleton for replenishing the barrier islands and creating levees.
The breakthrough is the fill to make the blocks heavy and solid – Compressed blocks of garbage provided by the cities of the country. (Nuclear waste would probably not be acceptable).
The cities now pay the landfill, they can pay the same money to compact and ship the garbage. Cities on the Mississippi River can have their convicts build the barges and float them partially filled with garbage toward the gulf.
Equipment for handling and trucking intercontinental shipping containers exists.
The containers themselves are not as reliable as foot-thick reinforced cement walls, and the containers are not built to interlock convex-to-concave.
The cost of the fill material can be removed by using the money normally paid to dispose of garbage to supply garbage as fill. A standard simple interlocking block approach can provide a successful way to create a flood control structure, prison wall, or border wall.
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick E. Hamel
1157 East Old Pass Road,
Long Beach, Ms 39560
pehamel@cableone.net
