Instead of nuclear or coal, let us burn trash

[MadHound]

Once again it seems as though the Europeans are pulling ahead of the US in the race to find clean, green energy. This time it's burning trash to generate heat and electricity, oh, and take care of that pesky landfill problem.

"HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.

Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/earth/13trash.html?src=me&ref=general>

Instead of new, innovative thinking like this, the Obama administration is pushing nuclear. And here I thought this man was supposed to be smart.

[Sinistrous]

1. Ask Harrisburg, PA how wonderful

trash incinerators are. Theirs is only $288 million in debt.

[MadHound]

3. They apparently work well in Europe, and make a profit

So we shouldn't put them up here because of one aged,poorly mismanaged example in Harrisburg?:crazy:

Yeah, let's put up more nukes instead. Hey, can we bury the radioactive waste in your back yard?

[kenny blankenship]

2. First step: invent clean burning trash.

The packaging industry has to first become the most regulated business in the country if you want to burn trash on an industrial level. That would be Change. That would take bold leadership in the face of screeching accusations of Socialist Takeover! So, I wouldn't be holding my breath in waiting for that.

[Robb]

4. If it comes about

...I fully intend to hold my breath. ;)

[MadHound]

5. Umm, you did read the article didn't you?

You know, the part about the amazing filters and scrubbers and other cleansing agents they've installed.

The Danish clean air laws are much stricter than ours, if these can pass review of the Danes, then they'll work just fine here in the US.

[jtuck004]

6. Spokane, WA does the same thing. Doesn't pay, taxpayers make up difference.

But it gets rid of some of the need for a landfill, while only putting a little pollution out.

[MadHound]

7. You're comparing the operation of an inefficient twenty five year old incinerator

With one that is modern, up to date and much more efficient.

Apples and oranges.

[jtuck004]

18. We wil see in 25 years what this one looks like...

I'm not saying it is not a good idea, but there is smoke obscuring the facts. For example, in the story they say

"The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration. "

Many times? Not every time? It's an appropriately vague newspaper article that pumps the advantages without specific facts. People choose what they want to believe. There is no detail of the carbon pollutants that are spewed to drag all that trash to the incinerator, nor of the energy that is used to burn it. Since we know we cannot create energy from nothing, just transform it, there will be a cost.

Landfills are not a total expense because nearly pure methane can be recovered as they degrade and used directly in power systems, and the land used for other purposes.

And if we ever come up with a real answer for nuclear waste, and a way to replace excuses with real safety, the cost/benefit of ideas such as this will have to be reworked.

But the far more interesting question is how to reduce the trash so we don't need incinerators or landfills, eh? Just because that is a huge issue doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, since anything else is just a manipulation of waste. Maybe if people could eat the whole apple or the whole orange we wouldn't need this discussion.

but thanks for posting the article - it's interesting.

[cherokeeprogressive]

20. "many times more dioxin is now released" as in much more dioxin.

The sentence could have said "10x more dioxin is released by home fireplaces and backyard barbeques than current incineration plants because the plants run so cleanly".

Not "many times" as in often or more often than not. Think orders of magnitude rather than frequency.

[jtuck004]

21. Yep - read that wrong.

[Speck Tater]

8. Ultimately that trash was originally either biomass or petrochemicals

so why let it go to waste?

[kentauros]

11. My thoughts, too.

Recycle the inorganic stuff and compost the organic matter, capturing the methane. Then you can sell the compost to farmers and gardeners and sell the electricity from burning (or "reforming") the methane. It probably wouldn't be profitable, but it would reduce the waste stream considerably.

Doesn't the city of Boston ferment their sewage and capture the methane, too?

[amborin]

9. also:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x241706

it got a cool reception in 'energy and the environment'

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. Do you suppose we have enough trash?

How much trash do you suppose is required make the energy to make the trash we burn to make energy?

[MadHound]

12. Latest figures, we generate over thirty million tons of trash each year

I think that is enough to keep quite a few of these generators going.

As far as your convoluted second question, frankly I don't know, and I don't think it is relevant. After all, whether the trash is going into an incinerator or a landfill, either way we're going to continue producing it. Shouldn't we get something useful out of that trash, like heat and electricity, along with helping keep the environment clean.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

13. Have you seen the latest figures on energy consumption?

[MadHound]

14. And gee, burning trash would *gasp* generate energy

We make trash anyway, so why not reclaim some of that energy and turn it back into a useful form, like heat or electricity? Clean, green, renewable(at least until we stop making trash). More efficient than getting methane out of landfill and using that to create electricity. In fact these incinerators would eliminate a lot of waste that currently goes into landfills. Hmm, win-win:shrug:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. It would eliminate some waste, sure.

But enough to replace coal and nuclear?

[MadHound]

16. Thirty million tons is a hell of a lot of waste

Would it completely power our electrical grid, no, it wouldn't. But in combination with other things like solar and wind, yes, we could eliminate the need for coal and nuclear.

The thing is to do this we would need adapt a much different paradigm in energy production. We're currently stuck in a central power generating/dumb grid paradigm. We need to get to a decentralized power generation/smart grid paradigm. Of course big energy corporations don't like that because it takes away their profits, oh well. It is the best path for our country.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

17. I'm reminded of a line from The Matrix.

In explaining why the robots need human beings, it's explained that the robots use electricity generated by humans "combined with a form of fusion."

At least the kung fu was good.

[Petrushka]

19. K & R

:kick:

[rve300]

22. Green lobby has been fighting this for years.

I remember an article from a few years ago that quoted renewable energy spokesman that were fighting this. Because it would encourage more waste, that the trash they burn should be recycled instead and they didn't want to fight for government dollars if this was classed by the government as a "renewable energy source".

[TheMadMonk]

23. Dealing with our waste stream is most definitely high on the the to do list.

Making a buck out of it only makes it more attractive.

But realistically even at 100% utilisation the cities will cover about the equivalent of rural demand.

It will never be more than a small part of a composite whole.

Solar will in fact make up a big part of the solution. Wind I think not so much.

And efficiency another chunk.

But there's going to be a certain unreducable minimum demand that is going to require a 24/7 capacity like that of the coal or gas. Nuclear is the only mature technology which can be made to fit the bill. Proof of concept work demonstrates it is possible to make the waste stream considerably more managable in both volume and timescales. Other proofs of concept point to the feasiblity of safe small scale powerplants, that use only tiny amounts of fuel, for virtually any industrially conceivable application. I'm not saying they should be put on the roads, but in controlled environments the potential for use is certainly there.

Virtually every argument I've seen against nuclear power has assumed that any new technology will not be any improvement on designs that were finalised thirty or more years ago. Even more ridiculous is that the very little new construction happening, or at least well along in the approval process, has almost exactly the same thirty year old underlying design at the core.

Yes there are hurdles, but the technological objections are (at least in principle) addressable. And with proper oversight, diversion is easily managed, since a good part of the thinking has gone towards making the extraction of weapons grade material as difficult as possible. And because processes are intended to be cyclic, the loss of material caused by any diversion outside the cycle would be noticable before any appreciable quantities could be accumulated.

[MadHound]

26. The thing is, we don't need nuclear

Despite the new designs and technologies, nuclear has yet to solve its two main problems, namely what to do with the waste and how to eliminate human error. Until you take care of these two problems, nuclear is simply unfeasible.

Furthermore, do to technological innovations, we don't need nuclear. Wind, solar and other clean, green alternatives can supply all of our power needs, 24/7. Yes, it is going to require us switching from the current paradigm of centralized power generation to decentralized power generation with a smart grid. But it can be done.

Oh, and your notion of micro nuclear plants is simply crazy, for a number of reasons. A couple of them is this would put the handling of nuclear material and the operation of a nuclear plant in the hands of amateurs. Second, such micro plants would become the targets of terrorists and thieves looking to get their hands on nuclear material.

[TheMadMonk]

28. Reducing waste volume to 1 kg per MWhr, and it's dangerous life span...

...to just a few centuries seems to me to be a pretty fair facsimile of a solution to the waste problem. This is doable with a liquid salt thorium cycle reactor.

Two inherrent parts of the liquid salt design are aimed at making human error a non issue. The first takes advantage of thermal expansion of the liquified thorium salt to move it into thin shielded tubes and automatically damp the neuclear reaction. And a last ditch defence will automatically melt plugs in the bottom of the reactor vessel if the core overheats and gravity separates the fuel into portions too small to sustain a reaction. Human error of course can not be completely eliminated, however threats to the community at large are more than managable. Spills and incidents onsite are no more or less significant than spills of chemical poisons or pathogens in a lab, or white hot metals in a foundry.

A further advantage of the thorium fuel cycle is that it breeds at a rate only a few percent better than break even. It would take the total output of a 1GW reactor for 8-10 years to make enough material for one bomb. With even the most basic international oversight, diversion of enough material to be dangerous would be a very difficult task.


Yeah, micro nukes which come with a power switch and no other controls. Suitable for virtually any industrial application in the megawatt range. And each containing so little fuel that about 1000 of them would have to be broken open and looted just to get the starting materials for a single bomb. Which would then have to be subject to some very esoteric and expensive processing to extract that small portion that can be made to go boom. Refueling is a matter of swapping out a lead lined steel box. Done under seal with proper oversight, diversion is not an issue.

As for the terrorist threat. It's way, way overblown. Any attempt to use a nuclear weapon in the name of an ideology would invite such a backlash that it would be self defeating. Even someone as obviously insane as Kim Jong Il understands that. A nuke is not a weapon of beligerance for the little guy, it's power lies in being the ultimate "Fuck you Charlie!" and the big nations don't like it, not because of the threat the bombs represent, but because they make invading the possessor a non-option.

It's one reason why there is such a push for an assault on Iran right now and an attempt to shut down its nuclear enrichment program. Because IF Iran is working towards building a bomb, it's now or never.

[4lbs]

24. Let's see how much electricity we can generate from that trash.

It might be considered, from this article.

http://blog.cleantechies.com/2009/12/01/waste-to-energy-trash-landfills-heat-electricity/

<snip>
Spittelau Fernwärme in Vienna is probably the most photographed Waste-to-Energy plant in the world because of its famous design by the famous architect Hundertwasser. The 40-year-old building can convert 880,000 tons of waste into heat that supplies 290,000 Viennese apartments through a total pipeline length of 1,000 km. Another incineration plant, Pffaffenau, burns 250,000 tons of waste each year, while supplying district heating to 50,000 households and additionally supplying electricity to 25,000 subscribers.

According to the Danish Energy Agency, the calorific value of 4 tons waste would equal to 1 tons of oil or 1.6 tons of coal. The incineration of 1 ton of waste produces approximately 2,000 kWh of heat and 670 kWh of electricity. Considering the fact that waste is a local resource and partially consists of biomass, waste incineration appears to be a better and cleaner option.
<snip>


The EPA estimates that we in America generate about 320 million tons of garbage per year, about 70 million of which is recyclable (glass, plastic, metal, cardboard/paper). That leaves 250 million that isn't recyclable.

Let's say our less-than-efficient plants turn 5 tons of waste into 500 kWh of electricity (versus 1 tons making 670 like the Danish could).

So, that 250 million per year, with a waste-to-energy program, could generate 25 million MegaWatts of power per year. That's not including all that heat that could be piped to hundreds of thousands of homes, instead of heating oil or natural gas.

[old mark]

25. Most of the problems of the older US type of waste burning plants

have been solved over the years. The problem here is political - no one makes a profit from garbage as they do from coal and nuclear plants, and even the recycling proponents are against it, stating they want to reduce our waste to zero rather than "encourage' waste by making it a usable comodity.

So the right is against it because of money and the left is against it because of a ridiculous ideology.

And the states and regional governments are in charge, which means the politicians are pretty cheap to buy.

Get your federal gommint out of my garbage!!!

Oh, yeah - Europe also is ten years ahead of us in wind power and water power...What were we doing for the lase 8-10 years? Oh, yeah - the republicans were in power.....
mark

[muriel_volestrangler]

27. End result: 20% of district heating, and 4.5% of electricity, for the whole of Denmark

http://www.ens.dk/Documents/Faktaark/Engelske%20faktaark/affald_engelsk.pdf

Unfortunately, the NYT quotes the figures for one town, that has one of the incinerators - so it imports trash from elsewhere. Since the trash comes from the whole country, it's the overall figurethat is more useful.


So it's a worthwhile contribution to energy supply, especially in areas that have a reasonable population density - so that district heating can be used, and the density of trash production is enough to feed a plant without transporting the trash too far. Denmark has about 330 people per square mile, which is about the same as Florida.

But it's not enough to replace coal in US electricty production. It's just one part of any solution.