Stuff You Should Know - Please Listen to How Plasma Waste Converters Work

Episode Date: October 20, 2015

There is a way to not only sustainably get rid our household waste, but also produce enough energy from it to power the process and even create electricity for the grid. The future is here! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chubby Bryant.

Guest producer, Noel is here. Noel's moved in. Yeah, yeah. So that, that card is on the floor? He works constantly. You know what my superhero nickname was as a child? I'll tell ya. Plasma Boy.

No, it wasn't. Yeah, I'm just kidding. That was a weird joke. Why, we're talking about Plasma. Plasma Boy. Yeah, like Radio Active Man and Plasma Boy. Right. Yeah.

But it wasn't Plasma Boy. It was, what was it? What was the sidekick's name? Radio Active Man's sidekick. Oh, I was just using that as a reference. Now I wanna know, dude. Well, the answer is. Fallout Boy?

That's a band. I know, but I wonder if it's based on that. Oh, maybe, I don't know. We'll find out, won't we? Well, we'll look it up, and then we'll find out with a million emails. So Plasma Boy, huh? I wish.

Must have an affinity for this episode, then. Yeah, it's great. Chuck, you know when lightning strikes the Earth? We did a pretty awesome podcast on lightning. Do you remember, we talked about how it literally rips the sky open? Yeah. It rips the atmosphere open.

Yeah. And as it's traveling down through this ripped open atmosphere, the air on either side of this stuff is super heated to about 20,000 degrees. It's more than three times the surface temperature of the sun. Yeah.

Celcius, I should say. Celcius, not even Fahrenheit. Yeah, it's about 12 grand Celsius, roughly. It's super hot, right? Yeah. I'm sorry, Fahrenheit. Does it say Fahrenheit? Yeah.

12 grand Fahrenheit. Yeah. Okay. At any rate, 20,000 degrees is lightning. And when the air is super heated, it takes on what's commonly called the fourth state of matter, Plasma, right? Yeah.

So you've got solid, boring, liquid, gas. Awesome. Okay, but Plasma is super awesome gas. Yeah. It's a bit like a gas. And usually it starts out as a gas, but it holds an electromagnetic field, or creates an electromagnetic field,

and it holds an electrical charge. It has free roaming electrons. It's running through it, doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah. And it breaks gas into this crazy, weird, different type of fluid. And that's Plasma.

And it's awesome. Yeah. Ionized gas. Yes. Pretty good stuff. Super high temps, like you were saying. And because it's a super high temp, what it can do is it can break down.

It can cause something solid to undergo what's called molecular dissociation, which means it's not just burning something. It's not melting something. Right. It's actually exposing it to so much heat that the molecular bonds break apart, and it becomes a pile of its components.

Yeah. And it breaks it down from its compound of molecules to its atomic components. Yeah. Yeah, pretty amazing. It is. Very amazing. And like you said, it's not burning.

Like this process of using a Plasma torch to break something down, to decompose it, is actually what it's doing. Doesn't even need to use oxygen. Nope. So that means that it's a process called pyrolysis, which is intense heat that creates decomposition in some sort of matter, especially organic matter.

Yeah. And as a result, you get these byproducts. If it's an organic piece of material, say like some corn stalks that you're using as biomass feed stock, it will become something called syn gas. Yeah, synthetic gas. Right. And then if it's something like an old pair of roller skates.

Yeah, we'll save those, first of all. Well, what if they're just not very good any longer? All right. So the leather was at one point organic. I guess it would still be considered an organic material. That turns into gas. Yeah. The metal in the skates, that will turn into something

called slag. Yeah. Right? And it undergoes a process of vitrification. Yeah, it does. Vitrification is where this stuff becomes so, the bombs break between it so thoroughly that it becomes basically a form of glass.

Yeah, like volcanic glass, almost, is at least what it looks like. Yeah, like obsidian. So all this sounds great. We're kind of beating around the bush about what a plasma torch can do. Right. And here's the big bomb.

Boom. Plasma torches can burn garbage and waste. Yes, and not only that, they can burn it without combustion, which means there's not a bunch of smoke. Yeah. And they can actually harvest the energy in that garbage in incredible ways. Because it turns out, garbage is

chock full of potential energy. You can release that energy when you burn it, like just regular incineration. Sure. But you only can maybe net about 15% of the energy that's locked into this big pile of garbage in a landfill, right? What a waste. With using a plasma torch to create

pyrolysis or gasification, you can net up to 80% of that energy that's locked in there potentially into garbage. So what we're talking about is a potential future where we are using plasma torches to create energy, to sell back to the grid, to create steam, to turn those turbines, like we're always still just knocked out, that that's how you create energy these days.

I'm sorry, electricity. Sure. And then sell off byproducts as well and make more money. Yes, it's like I cannot be more excited about this. And medical waste, chemical waste, throw it in there. In fact, you know what? Anything you got in there, Daddy, except for radioactive material.

You got a swine flu outbreak? Take those pig carcasses, throw them into the gasification chamber. There is no swine flu left. It is totally gone. Or how about this? I'll bring it to your farm. I'll have a small one set up.

You got a swine flu outbreak. I'll come to your farm. And I'll burn up all those nasty pigs. Right. You've got some toxic waste. Oh, well, we'll just burn that in a gasification chamber. And we'll break it down to its inert components. It's not going to hurt anybody no more, little lamb.

I guess we keep saying burn. Well, it's really tough not to. Yes, you're right. So say torch. Torch. Yeah. Nice. All right.

So let's talk, Strickland wrote this, Jonathan Strickland of Tech Stuff. And he did a great job. As always. And he seemed to be as excited about it as we are when he was writing it. Right. Because how can you not be?

Let's talk about some of the parts of these things. The first thing that he points out that we should point out is that any plasma conversion gasification facility is going to be unique to its own needs. They're all custom built at this point. There is no standardized unit. There are some companies that are starting to. Like Westinghouse has some that you can just

like what amounts to off the shelf. The backyard gasifier? Pretty much. That'd be awesome. Yeah, I think they have like three different models. Although I'm sure they will custom build you whatever you want. Yeah, you're probably right.

But at any rate, when he wrote this, they weren't super standardized. And that's good that we're going toward that. But so what we're going to talk about is, you know, sort of depends on the system. Sure. But what you're probably going to have is conveyor belt that's going to move the garbage

into the converter. Yeah, it's going to play that Bugs Bunny powerhouse song. Man, sometimes they will pre-treat the stuff. Like although you could, if you had a big enough machine, you could throw an entire car in it, let's say. But sometimes it's more efficient to break that car down and have a pile of tires and a pile of scrap metal and break it down to its components

just to make it more efficient. Because it's going to use a lot less energy to break it down into smaller parts and then feed it into the plasma torch incinerator than it will to just torch it with the torch. Because these things use a lot of energy. A lot of energy. They probably save that for when the investors come by.

Right, they're like, watch it. You dropped the car in. Now you see it, now you don't. You have your furnace, of course. And Strickland says, this is where the magic happens. Because you don't need oxygen, it is airlocked and airtight, junk goes in but the heat doesn't escape into the atmosphere

or the gases or the byproducts. Which again, that is really saying something about the material science that's gone into this. Because these things are burning at like, or heated to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, Celsius, like the temperature of the sun in this little, in this canister right here. It's amazing.

I'm surprised you don't have plasma weapons for real. I think it's really great that they don't. I looked into it, it's like the realm of video games, of course, like plasma guns and stuff. So if you have a furnace, which you will, you're gonna have the plasma torch, which is in the lower half of the furnace, let's say. And they're also gonna have some drainage for that slag

and some venting for the gas. And it's going to be water cooled. Yeah, one of the things that came across to me in this researching this is, these things frequently have really elegant designs, right? So you have a drain for the slag, which again, is the molten metal that's broken down to its constituent parts.

It's inorganic material. And depending on how you treat it, it'll turn into glass or sand or nodules, right? Or asphalt. And then you have the gas going up. But you also, and you're draining off the slag, but you're also keeping some in, because it forms basically a coke bed

that keeps the furnace hot, which means you have to use less energy in your plasma torch. It's like having your own little lava bed just sort of sitting there eating things up. So that's pretty cool. But eventually you're gonna probably wanna get some of the slag out of there

because you're gonna do cool things with it, which we'll talk about later. The plasma torches themselves are clever, amazing little instruments. It's basically a lightning creator. Yeah. Like they use an electrical arc. They push usually just plain old air through it

so that this electric charge heats the air to these 6,000 degrees, turns it into plasma. And then that's what's directed into the furnace. That's crazy. It is very crazy, but that's what they're doing. It's a little water-cooled torch that gets super hot. It also doesn't use any kind of oxygen for combustion. Right, and also these things,

you wanna turn me on with electrical stuff is show me a system that powers itself. Right. I just love that more than anything. And these facilities, I mean, they've got excess energy to spare afterward. Not only can they power themselves, in a lot of cases they're selling back to the grid.

Right. So once you've got this initial input where you get this thing going online and you heat that plasma torch up for the first time, the moment you start feeding feedstock into it, which in this case is garbage, plain old municipal solid waste from your landfill. Like back to the future.

Right? Right when you start feeding that, it starts to produce energy. Yeah. And the way that it does that, that gas that escapes, syngas. Let's talk about syngas, dude. Yeah.

Syngas is a beautiful, amazing, elegant thing. It has, it's combustible in its untreated form. So you could use it to burn like natural gas, although it has about half the energy density of natural gas. But if you're burning garbage, it's just basically free natural gas. Yeah.

It's a byproduct. You can also treat it and scrub it and just release it into the atmosphere as inert gas. Yeah. No problems with that. Water scrubbed. Right. But when the syngas exits the furnace,

it wants to expand. So if you're a very clever engineer, you'll put what's called the gas turbine right there. A gas turbine is spun by expanding gas. Well, you got plenty of that stuff, right? So you've got the syngas going through the gas turbine, spinning that so it's generating electricity. It's also very hot.

So once it goes through that gas turbine, it can be caught by what's called a heat recovery steam generator, right? Yeah. And that's just got some water going through it. It uses this hot heat gas to turn the water into steam. Well, that in turn turns another turbine that generates even more electricity.

And then at the end, before you even treat it, you have all the syngas that could be used to fuel a combustion engine, to generate even more electricity, all from burning garbage. All right, we have to take a break because I have to peel Josh off the ceiling because you're so excited about syngas.

I am. All right, we'll be back in a sec. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. No, something should know, something should know. How are you feeling, buddy? Are you OK? I'm so excited. This might as well be ocean currents. Oh, yeah, you like that one too, huh? Yeah, that was good.

All right, so we were talking about send gas. You need to scrub it with water. They pass us through a spray of water. You're actually cleaning gas, which is pretty interesting. As a concept. And then there are all measure of filters afterward to remove acids and things like that, which do form weird byproducts like salts and salts.

It's pretty neat. If you run it through a base scrubber, it turns into salts. But they're, again, inert. Like, just go ahead, pick up a handful and eat it. See what happens. Probably nothing. And if you use an afterburner, sometimes they'll

use a secondary burner, which is actually just natural gas flames. I guess to finish the job, maybe? Yeah, to burn off any particulate matter in the gas. Like, if the process didn't, the send gas isn't pure. This basically burns off particulate matter. Or you can scrub it too. And if you're doing all this, you're probably

just going to release it rather than try to trap it and use it for combustion. Right. If you're going to scrub it. But you do need to scrub it, especially if you're going to release it in the atmosphere, because it does contain some pretty nasty stuff. The cadmium, mercury, a lot of heavy metals.

Because remember, what this process does, the plasma torch and the gasification process breaks these things down into their constituent atoms and molecules. And heavy metals and some other things are not really good for us, even in their most basic form. So for the most part, it's going to take something that chemically speaking was once a threat,

but has been broken down to its separate innocuous inner components. Right. Some things, even when they're at their most basic level, are still dangerous to us, like cadmium, like mercury, like other heavy metals. And these things do have to be taken out of the slag and or the send gas and disposed of.

The thing is, is if you put 1,000 tons of municipal solid waste into one of these furnaces, you're only going to get about 20 tons of that stuff. Right. So we will still need landfills or something like that, but it will just be for these very dangerous chemicals or very dangerous like heavy metals or something like that. But you still got great stuff out of the other 980 tons.

Yeah, exactly. So the byproducts we talked about, the send gas, the slag and the heat, are all used or not always used, depends on what you're trying to do with your plant. But they can potentially all be used. And the slag, I think you already said, you're getting 80%. So that means the weight of your resulting slag is only 20% of what you started with.

So you took that Buick and it now weighs 20% what it formerly weighed. Right, you could pick it up if you wanted. Yeah, maybe so. Probably should wait for it to cool down first. And the volume is only about 5% of the original waste volume. And like you said, it looks like volcanic glass and they can use it in asphalt and concrete.

They can pour it directly into molds and make paver stones. And all of a sudden, it's something that you would find at your big box hardware store for your garden, which is pretty amazing. Another potential creation that you can use slag for is to turn it into rock wool. Oh man, I love this stuff. Right, so as a molten slag is coming out,

if you expose it to compressed air blasts, it turns into this thready, very light, but also very strong wool type material. Like gray cotton candy is how Strickland puts it. And there's a lot of uses for it. Like you can use it in hydroponics. It's a growing medium. You can also use it as insulation.

Apparently it has twice the insulating properties of fiberglass. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, it is. And you can also use the cleanup oil spills it says. Yeah, this is the one that really gets me going. It's lighter than water, so you can just throw it on water and it'll sit there.

And it's super absorbent. So it'll basically, what they'll probably do is contain it in something like a tube or something. And then just throw that tube in a big circle around an oil spill, it'll float on the water, soak up the oil. And then you just go back and scoop up the rock wool. Yeah, I guess so.

I had a friend that used to work and I need to look that up and him up actually, because I don't know where it went, but they were using banana fibers to do the same thing, to clean up oil spills. Didn't we do one on oil spills and like your friend, you emailed with them or something like that about it? I don't know. I feel like we did.

It seems like the distant past. But here's the cool thing about the rock wool, they currently use it. It's not just something that you can only get as a byproduct of creating the sand gas. It is produced by mining rocks. You melt it down and then spin it sort of like cotton candy, like you said, in a big machine.

And here's the cool thing about the gasification though. The way they make the rock wool now, it's about 10 cents, I'm sorry, about a dollar a pound. As a byproduct, it could be sold for 10 cents a pound. Plus you don't have all of the disturbances in the earth of mining rocks to turn into rock wool. It's a byproduct of garbage that you're burning. That's great.

It's amazing. This is like win, win, win, win, win, win, win. The slag is not leachable? That's another cool thing that I found too. So Strickland specifically said, you can't do this with radioactive material. I have seen that you can. Oh really?

Yeah. And what you can do is it'll turn it into the slag, the subsidy in glass. And while it's still radioactive, it's not going anywhere. It's not going to leach out into the soil. And it should be stable like this for thousands of years, conceivably, until the radioactivity is not harmful to humans any longer.

Oh, interesting. So it'd be a really great, you could just turn it into these radioactive paver stones that, yeah, that might even glow at night. Have a nice little path in your backyard and it'll glow. There's actually glass like that. I can't remember what its technical term is, but in the mid 20th century, there was a big trend

for radio, they called it Vaseline glass, because it glowed about the color of Vaseline, which is weird, but you can find cut glass like ashtrays and sculptures that glow. The reason they glow is because they're radioactive. I think I know what you're talking about. It's really neat looking, but it's also like, I don't know if that should be in my home.

It'll light your own cigarette. Just hold it against the ashtray. Just hold it near there, yeah. All right, well, let's take another break here and we'll talk about where we are now and where we could be headed with gasification. ["The 90s Call David Lasher and Christine Taylor"] On the podcast, pay dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with a Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So here's what I've found. And this might not even be current. What I saw was that there are currently eight functioning plasma gasification

facilities in the world. That sounds about right. One in Taiwan, one in Japan, one in Canada, one in England, one here in the USA. Where's the one in the US? Think of Varro Beach, Florida. Oh, yeah. One in India, one in China, and get this one.

There's one on an aircraft carrier. Neat. That the US is using. The idea is that it's a little small unit that basically just treats the onboard waste. Oh, that makes sense. So they envision a future where cruise ships have these things. They don't have to dump all their garbage in the ocean

while they're at sea. Exactly. You treat all the waste. And I guess they could even sell byproducts if they wanted to. Yeah. That's pretty cool. There's one that's supposedly going.

I know you saw it was mothball, right? But there's one that's planned. And they have all of the licenses and certifications that they need to build one in Port St. Lucie, Florida. And it started out as it was going to take on 1,000 tons of garbage a day and put out it was going to generate 67 megawatt hours a day and sell 33 of that.

So it would completely power its own operations and still have 33 megawatt hours to sell back to the grid as just more money that this thing is making, right? Yeah. What I saw is that, and I think it was like 2014, it said that it was going to be about 60% of that. So it would take in about 600 tons of garbage and generate a total output of 22 megawatts.

But yeah, I don't know if it's coming or not. But either way, the thing that got me about this one, Chuck, was that they plan to not just accept landfill waste, but to go out and mine existing landfills and use those things as feedstock. And in fact, there was one in Utoshinai, Japan, that closed down because they ran out of feedstock. They burned through all the garbage.

Wow. Yeah. That's pretty great. Yeah. When you're out of garbage. Exactly. So you have to go get more garbage. I guess we'll stop.

Earlier this year, I think the world's largest plant is, they said it was near completion in May, so it may be done at this point. But a company called Air Products began processing 350,000 tons at this facility, creating power. Wow, wait, 350,000 tons? Yeah, it said enough power for 50,000 homes and 50 full-time jobs, which is not that many.

Not for that much, but it must be highly automated, I would guess. Yeah, which is sort of good in a way. But I guess you'd want more jobs created too. Sure. Sort of a balancing act, I guess. And it cost half a billion, $500 million. And that is one of the stumbling blocks along the way

Strickland points out that any time you have a new technology, it's going to be super expensive to get going. And everyone's dug in on the landfill and how we're doing things now. So it's going to take a lot. It'll get cheaper over time like everything else that's a new way of doing things. You also have to win over the establishment with dollars.

You have to show them why it'll be better for them financially. Well, yeah, also, if, say, a municipality is kind of like, well, we're not going to close down the landfill, but if you guys want to open one, go ahead. Well, then you have a plasma waste treatment facility and a landfill in direct competition. And if you are their customer, meaning you have some garbage that you want to take,

you don't care where your garbage is going probably. You want to go to whoever has the cheaper fees for accepting that garbage. Because a landfill is kind of an expensive proposition, their tipping fees are going to be high. It's basically the only way they can make money is by charging people to deposit their garbage. With a plasma waste treatment facility,

they're making money all over the place. They're selling slag as paver stuff. They're selling rock wool to clean up oil spills. They're selling electricity back to the grid. So they're making money in all these other ways that can pay for the operation and generate a profit. So they could keep their tipping fees low. So if you own a landfill and somebody

opens a plasma waste treatment facility in the same city, you may be in a bit of trouble business-wise. Yeah, keep the tipping fee low, and not just people like municipalities will begin using your services. Ultimately, because I think the one thing that's lacking still is that environmental will. Right.

And we're definitely a lot further along than we were when Strickland wrote this article. Sure. But I think that that's one of the things that makes it so attractive is, we're going to burn your garbage in really, really green, sustainable ways, create energy from it,

and we're going to go get your old garbage and burn that, too. Yeah. And make even more electricity. And the plant's going to power itself with your garbage. Yeah. It's a win-win. Win-win, win-win, win-win.

So Strickland interviewed, he was from Georgia Tech, right? A doctor, Cicero. Yes. I'm sorry, Circeo. Oh, I thought it was Cicero, too. Yeah, it's a mind trick. R before C. So Dr. Circeo said he envisions a future

where you don't just have like the big municipality plant, like that'd be great and all. Maybe you could bring a plasma torch to a landfill and just bore a hole through it and stick that plasma torch in there, cap it off and start burning that junk from the inside out. Yeah. But if you're like, well, whoa, whoa, whoa,

there could be a coal seam nearby. What about, you know? That's what I thought. It's not like a Centralia, Pennsylvania, right? Centralia, Pennsylvania caught fire. There's a combustion fire going on. If any coal seam was exposed to this, it would just be decomposed into carbon,

into its constituents. It wouldn't catch fire. That's nothing to do with this, again. So it's actually extremely safe and the landfill itself would act as the furnace. That's amazing. And it's really tough to think of really intense heat without thinking fire.

Right. But that is not where this goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Dr. Circero, Circeo. Circeo says that. Dr. Cirque de Soleil. Says, hey, why not work together here and bring a plasma converter

to another existing traditional facility where they can work hand in hand? Like a coal-fired power plant. Yeah, why not? So what this would do is you would just basically stick a plasma facility onto it into the existing infrastructure and just accept garbage in there

and burn that and everything. And then the syngas that's created would be used to help fire the coal-fired plants. Then it would be used for combustion, right? And you would be using less coal or less fossil fuels to do the same thing, to create steam, to spin the turbine. Because ultimately, that's what it all comes down to is electricity.

So if you have a green way to supplement the stuff, all you're doing is using less fossil fuel, too. It's also way cheaper because then you're not having to treat the syngas, which apparently is half the cost of a plasma treatment facility. Because these guys have to treat the escaping smoke and everything anyway.

So all you're doing is adding actually a cleaner fuel into the fire that's going to ultimately be cleaned down the line. Amazing. And then we talked about sort of half joking, but they're serious about decontamination. If you have an outbreak on your farm and you have a bunch of, you know, sad,

but if you have a bunch of sick, diseased, dead livestock, just bring out the P3000. Throw those cows in there. Bing, bang, boom. Yeah, maybe grind them up first, too. Yeah, why not? Yeah, and you can do that with soil as well. Contaminated soil.

Got an E. coli outbreak in your spinach field. Not anymore. Yeah. Bunch of dirty humans. Not anymore. Throw them in there. Medical waste of biohazard. Nope, you've got inert stuff.

Yep, a poopy cruise ship, the P3000. Put the whole thing in there at once. I'm kidding about dirty humans, by the way. Why? Do I even need to say that? I don't think so. Okay, good. Not?

Never now, buddy. So that is plasma waste treatment, hopefully the wave of the future. Yeah, we should title this something a little sexier so people aren't like. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are gonna listen to that because it should. Yeah, because then, like even people that are super

into like green technologies will probably be like, oh, I want to learn about this weird science thing. Yeah. How about plasma waste treatment? Please listen, signed Josh and Chuck. Yeah, I like it. It's a little clumsy, we'll work on it. If you want to know more about plasma treatment facilities

or any of that stuff, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and since Chuck said sexy, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this You Guys Got Africa Right, thank you. Hey guys, listen to your podcast about female puberty and I was very impressed with the thoughtfulness and sensitivity in which you explained things and gave advice.

By the way, we heard from a lot of people on that and thank you. A lot of young women, a lot of grown women, a lot of men and dads and that one meant a lot. It was really good to get that one right, I think. The one thing that we didn't quite get right that someone has pointed out of more than a few times is we said boy crazy a lot and we should have gone out

of our way to say like, you might also be girl crazy or you might not have sexual feelings and thoughts. I wish we had that one back. I know, I'm giving us a break on that because people know how we feel about that stuff. We just didn't point it out as strongly as we should have. But that's how things change and improve though. I know.

What we're saying now, young ladies out there going through puberty, might like other girls, you might not like boys or girls and all that's okay too. Yes, all right. Thanks for saying that. So back to this, probably listen to about 200 or more of your podcasts. Oh man, you got a long way to go buddy.

And I'm always- He's like I'm almost to 301. Yeah, only 500 after that. I'm always happy to hear you guys do your best to be specific when you make references to events in countries or geographic regions. What I mean by this is you don't generalize like a lot of people do and say crap.

Like in Africa, they blah, blah, blah or in Europe, it's normal to blah, blah, blah. When you got to the part of your latest show where you talk about female puberty rights, I was elated to hear you being careful enough to say in Ghana, there is a village where, dot, dot, dot. The reason for my reaction is that I've lived in the US for 20 years, but I'm from Ghana.

There are at least 20 distinct ethnic groups and languages in Ghana alone. And I know for a fact that the ritual you described is not done in all of them. In fact, I've heard of it, but I don't think it happens anymore. By the way, the official language in Ghana is English. So we are able to communicate with each other.

Nothing irritates us Africans more than to hear someone start a sentence within Africa. I bet. Like a continent that huge? Yeah. Because no one says, well, in North America. No, but they do say like in the US, but at least it's a confederation of like

associated states in Africa. It's like, yeah, you're putting the whole continent and it's all these different countries, all these different cultures. Yeah, it's amazing. So thanks guys for being so thoughtful and professional. Eric from Seattle, by way of Ghana, I guess. Yeah.

Thanks a lot, Eric. Appreciate that. Thank you. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, whether to give us big ups or poo poo us or submit some sort of neutral statement that's fact based, who knows?

We give those a lot. Yeah. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.