I Have Only One Question...Is It Profitable?

Wheelabrator has been doing it for decades. They're still in business so my guess is that it is profitable.

https://www.wtienergy.com/

As usual, it all depends on how one balances the books and which books one is interested in. For instance, do you include the costs and possible repercussions of any alternative waste disposal not utilized? If one is only interested in the Physics of how much additional energy is generated by adding the waste to the furnace then I suspect only a marginal energy benefit if any will be realized.

The question is, is it profitable as a business? Otherwise it's just an alternative disposal method...

The answer is, it can be profitable. It probably won't be profitable forever. Those locations where is profitable, it might be mismanaged into bankruptcy.

Let me ask you a related question. Why do you think the mob was/is deeply involved in the garbage disposal business? Do you think they did it just for the environment?

High tech industries are not mob friendly....

http://mentalfloss.com/article/30738/why-mob-often-tied-garbage-industry

You still did not answer my question. If you tried you would have hopefully recognized the need for waste disposal trumps the Physics of energy production balance so much that the mob once held a lucrative monopoly in waste management for many densely populated regions. Regardless of the business model, if one cannot force a financial profit then organized crime is not interested in the business.

In short, can this be profitable, yes of course it can.

The mob used it as a front to launder money from it's various illegal enterprises, they didn't depend exclusively on the business itself for income...They chose the garbage business because it was easy to set up, all you need is some trucks and some guys...then they artificially inflated the prices by intimidating the competition...I don't think that will work in this case....

They also intimidated the commercial customers to no end. I once stayed at the Laguardia Holiday Inn on business for a few days. It was basically across the highway from Laguardia airport and convenient to a customer I had in Queens.

I had a room on the 3rd floor of the round tower behind the main hotel. The first two floors were mostly open and had maintenance areas and cubbyholes for the dumpsters. The trash trucks emptied them at 4 AM every morning and it was impossible to sleep through the echos reverberating through the canyons.

When I complained to the management they just shrugged their shoulders and suggested I take it up directly with the mob as it was totally out of their control if they didn't want their trash to not be picked up for a couple of weeks.

Big, big profits in NYC trash hauling.

Hooker

Waste to steam plant <-- click

Operating since 1980

This is gasification...doesn't burn the waste it heats it to a high temp 4k° and creates syngas that is then used to make fuels or generate electricity...slightly different process...

https://www.sierraenergy.com/technology/fastox-gasification/

Wishful Thinking ?

Around 1:42 she says that 90% of the waste is converted to syngas and 10% is converted to liquid and then to "inert stone." I see the light bulb in the container and I think (not incandescent but) pigtail fluorescent. Now, what happens to the mercury in that pigtail ? Does it indeed ALL go into the "liquid" which somehow(unspecified) magically becomes "inert" stone(is this the magical sorcerers' stone?). How does that happen and is it complete ? Can the mercury in the "stone" leach out of the roadbase into our groundwater ?

I grant that what we have now does a very bad thing instead. Mercury combines with hydrocarbons in dump fires to become very soluble methyl mercury which enters our groundwater as an extremely biologically active poison. So, I am not trying to indict these innovators for a crime which is happening already with what we do today. I am merely trying to see if they are claiming to have fixed something when they actually have not or have only partially reduced. So, my question needs a detailed quantitative answer. How much can they reduce the release of mercury into our environment in the long run ? This question applies also but with other nuances to other heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, tellurium, ... And to radioactive isotopes of waste elements(including but not limited to metals) which leads to the question of "is this magic a potential cleaver cleanup technique for radioactively contaminated waste ? Which, of course, brings us back to your universal economic question, SE.

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thewildotter

"let someone else clean up the garbage" - Homer Simpson

I don't think this would be a significant contributor to mercury pollution....I think it would be a strategic method of reduction...

https://www.livescience.com/39982-surprising-mercury-pollution-sources.html

It is only profitable if you want it to be.

When I lived in Ocala Florida a group came through and sold the county something similar, it never worked.

I have seen waste to energy plants before,with some set up to furnish steam to a large factory(DuPont comes to mind).

It failed fairly quickly and the problem was the trash itself,getting wrapped around rollers,jamming belts and bearings,and keeping enough people to separate the items.

People did not stay long`in the hot dirty workplace conditions.

If the trash does not have to be separated,that is a plus.

The reactions to the materials remind me of a recent post of mine where I mentioned scientists pumping waste down a deep borehole into almost magma temperatures,and getting back usable gases.

High temperatures,sudden shock of rapid temperature change,etc.

They have simply found a better way to do it.

Did you not see my link above about the NASA Langley/Hampton, VA trash to steam plant that's been in operation nearly 40 years?

Perhaps a link to a youtube video will help.

Video Link

When I left NASA in 1978 we were going through all kinds of tribulations about emissions from power generation for our facilities. This plant resolved a whole bunch of that.

Hooker

Thanks for the link.Very informative.I guess it is a matter of bigger is better because the ones I saw were small scale compared to this one.Only about 200,000 pounds of steam per hour.I am glad to see a system that really works..I don't know why it is not used more often.Large cities use a lot of steam.High pressure steam could be used in a co-generator system to provide steam and electricity.

I trained for while under a NASA Electrical Engineer,named Ed Brackney.Did you happen to know him?

When it was being built it was described as a scaled down prototype.

And no I don't remember a Brackney. But the couple times I was farmed out to engineering while I was an experimental machinist it was on the mechanical side.

Hooker

<...profitable...> for which party? A fossil fuel supplier would not find the proposal <...profitable...>, for instance.

Because of the absence of commercially-sensitive information, and the wisdom of its being concealed from the forum, the forum is not really in a position to answer such questions.

I worked several years for a company designing waste fired boilers for process heat up to co-generation using fuels ranging from dewatered sewage sludge to compressed paper bales to sunflower seed shells.

The process is well known, works and pays for itself.

Because you replied to an OT post. By default, that inherits the OT, but you can avoid that by unchecking the square to the lower left of the posting window.