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From HowStuffWorks: Daily Stuff Feed:
In "Back to the Future," Doc Brown throws garbage into Mr. Fusion, powering his time machine. While household fusion is still in the realm of science fiction, we might be closer than you think to generating electricity for our homes using trash.
At the most basic level, a plasma waste converter is a plasma torch applied to garbage. A plasma torch uses a gas and powerful electrodes to create plasma, sometimes called the fourth state of matter. Plasma is an ionized gas; in other words, it's a gas with free-roaming electrons that carries a current and generates a magnetic field. On Earth, we can see natural displays of plasma fields in lightning. The temperatures generated by a plasma torch can be hotter than the surface of the sun (more than 6,000 degrees Celsius).
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Re: How Plasma Converters Work
