| Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are: 1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere 2. need to clean it from time to time 3. not necessarily a profitable business Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers. Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there. In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too. |