It’s Good News Friday. To heck with Egypt, the national debt, congressional Republicans and streets full of snow. Think positive. Celebrate innovation.
To be specific, be amazed that science has discovered a way to turn garbage into a gas that can be burned to generate electricity. Geoplasma, a firm based in Atlanta, uses artificial lightning from electric plasma torches to keep gar-bage from landfills and put it to use.
Dr. Hilburn Hillestad, a Geoplasma scientist, says the process can be used to generate power using garbage as fuel.
According to a story in this week’s Economist magazine, “ … the destruction of organic materials, including paper and plastics, by plasma torches produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. That, in turn, can be burned to generate electricity. Add in the value of the tipping fees that do not have to be paid if rubbish is simply vaporized, plus the fact that energy prices in general are rising, and plasma torches start to look like a plausible alternative to burial.”
The Economist article ex-plains that the torches amount to a pair of electrodes made from a nickel alloy. A current arcs between them and turns the surrounding air into a plasma by stripping electrons from their parent atoms.
(You must, dear reader, take Dr. Hillestad’s word that that’s what happens. Whatever the physics, burnable gases are formed and burn, releasing energy to boil water, produce steam and run a turbine generator.)
The waste from the process falls to the bottom of the chamber as a molten slag. When it cools, it can be used to make bricks or pave roads.
“On top of that,” the article continues, “developments in a field called computational fluid dynamics allow the rubbish going into the process to be mixed in a way that produces the most syngas for the least input of electricity.”
BUT IS IT PRACTICAL? This year the Georgia company is going to start building a $120 million plant in St. Lucie County in Florida. It will burn the trash produced by local households and is expected to produce electricity for more than 20,000 homes. Geoplasma says it will produce enough income to pay for the plant and produce a profit in addition.
More than three dozen other American firms are proposing plasma-torch syngas plants. Demand is so great that the Westinghouse Plasma Corporation, an American manufacturer of plasma torches, is able to hire out its test facility in Pennsylvania for $150,000 a day.
Plasma torches have been around for a while. They were, not surprisingly, developed and refined by university scientists and are being made still better in research laboratories. If their full promise is met, much truly hazardous stuff, such as sludge from oil refineries, will be profitably turned into syngas and road building material rather than being buried and remaining a hazard for centuries.
The lesson to be learned from today’s good news is that cutting research budgets at the state or federal level is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Of course, there is no way
to calculate the cost of stripping away resources from the National Institutes of Health, cutting back federal research grants to the nation’s colleges and universities or pursuing the same reckless course at the state level. How does one put a value on a cure not discovered, an invention not developed, a process that remains trapped in a scientist’s mind?
The cost of refusing to expand knowledge only can be guessed at by estimating what science contributes to the world’s economy today and then conjuring up the consequences of slowing down that energizing flow of new ideas and new ways to put old ideas to work.
What the world’s budget-cutters need to do each morning is to repeat to themselves over and over again, “Protect me from the sinful folly of being penny-proud and dollar-stupid.”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
