New Ways to Convert Waste Into Useful Energy

You've all been aware of how some countries use processes like incineration or pyrolysis to reduce the waste created by their industry and people and then convert that waste into useful electricity?

These installations are particularly useful in countries of high population density like India or Japan where there is no real good location to put waste materials that cannot be recycled.

Unfortunately, these techniques are generally not very efficient and in the case of incineration, it actually produces a significant amount of toxic gases that have to be scrubbed before they release it in the air, so as not to make people sick around the plant.

These plans and technologies are becoming more and more refined and they remain good solutions to our solid waste problems.

On the other hand, we have very few ways to dispose of sewage, and even worse, spent radioactive rods from nuclear reactors.  The latter needs to be buried typically for thousands of years in order for any form of life to come anywhere near the things.

We're currently, just stockpiling the radioactive elements in bunkers under the ground everywhere right now and that's the end of our solution.

At least sewage eventually gets recycled back into nature the way we're working it.

Thankfully, some researchers are finding cool alternatives ways of converting these two waste products into energy that everyone can use.

In the case of Sewage, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory controlled by the US Department of Energy has found a way to produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day.

Biocrude oil can be transformed into combustible grade oil, or used in creation of plastics or in other applications.  So instead of dumping all that sewage into our soil, sometimes polluting our waterways and groundwater with the stinky stuff, the sewage can serve as liquid energy for our combustion engines.

I'm not saying we should be using oil for combustion, creating another problem, but we know that this stuff is in limited supply on the Earth, so good to know we can create our own by removing a possibly polluting sludge that we will definitively keep producing for a long, long while yet.

In the case of radioactive spent materials, it is researchers from the University of Bristol who have found a way to take the dangerous radioactive material, like Carbon-14 and Nickel-63, encase them into non-radioactive diamond, and thus make a nice little battery with a life of a few thousand years.

Ok, the batteries aren't as powerful as a normal AA battery (the diamond-encased radioactive stuff emits 300 joules per day where the AA battery emits 14,000 joules per day), but there are likely plenty of applications for these tiny 20g batteries.  I'm thinking lots of low power wearable devices could use those and the wearer wouldn't even need to care about any power supply issues at all.

And don't worry about the encased radioactivity:  diamonds are the hardest material naturally found on Earth and the radioactivity of such a battery is about the same as a banana.

Pretty cool stuff.

Now I need to see how many 20 g batteries we could make with the total accumulated radioactive waste we have stockpiled in the world.  I bet it's a huge, huge number....