Do you think that Plasma Gasification could be the future of power production and reclamation of landfills?

Question

Yes Plasma Arc Gasification and it actually produces enough to sustain itself and produce a large excess of power as well as Slag (used in road beds and other construction). It produces syngas which is converted to electricity. There are multiple large plants being built in the U.S. now.

Answer 1

If you mean Plasma arc gasification, that process seems to use energy and not create it, as far as I can tell from reading about it in wikipedia.

Answer 2

The current state of the art reguarding The process is some what similar to the state of the steam engine prior to 1800. The art needs to be refined and transformed into a very effective system of waste managment. It took 200 years to make the steam engine work well. This new process is being refined a little faster than that so we should see a good design within a few years at most. Using trash this way makes sense if you consider how much energy can be made from trash and how much new raw material can be recycled rather than dumped into landfill.

Answer 3

I doubt it very much.

Making plasma requires a great deal of high-quality energy in the form of electricity.  This is a lossy process, and one energy unit's worth of plasma would have to produce perhaps 10 units worth of gas for the process to be viable.  I have never seen credible energy-balance numbers from proponents of plasma gasification.  Just a calculation of the amount of water which would have to be evaporated to gasify the remainder suggests that these processes will have trouble breaking even.