Forgotten Eyesores

Landfills may soon be a thing of the past as trash may become a new source of relatively clean energy. Since the plant is actually online in Florida, we can’t really call this vaporware… and it is nice that one of the “great things for the environment” wasn’t mysteriously shut down before it started. Scientific American and Popular Science have some articles explaining the tech. Basically, they use the electrical grid and capacitors to create a massive electrical arc in a gaseous environment which creates superheated plasma which is around 10,000 deg. F. These temperatures are enough to vaporize most materials in a self-sustaining reaction. The resulting superheated “syngas” is then processed through turbines and filtered for unstable elements. The turbines produce enough energy to sustain the arc and feed back into the electrical grid. In this case, 60MW, which is huge!