I think the problem is that the resulting power is minimal. Do they feed it into the power grid? I wonder if the ROI makes it worth while.
At Lake Anna they built an 80 foot dam to make the lake to cool a couple of 900 MW reactors for electrical generation. But some agency required them to install a few MW of generation at the dam rather than just let the power go down the sluice. I wonder what the ROI is for that?
There's a *lot* worse stuff in those landfills than lead.
How much lead in the water?
Yeah small scale, I can't recall any numbers... A few MW, If you could get $0.05 kW/hr, that's $50/hr $1k/day...
George H.
It's surprising that no-one has commented on the base material used in these bond wires. The reliability/life testing for the change from gold to copper was only completed about five years ago.
The fact that they're trying coatings, at this point in time, should set some alarm bells ringing somewhere......
Will be more carefull with subject headings in future.
RL
About 2010 or 2011, the next city west of me opened a new road through a certain patch of land. There is also a newer golf course on either side of the new road... the first time I drove on that road at night, I noticed the flare by one of their maintenance buildings. I was puzzled about this until I mentioned it to my parents, who told me that there used to be a landfill in that area. It had been closed to trash dumping for probably 20 years before they built the golf course and the road.
On one hand, flaring it is probably a better idea than possibly letting it build up underground and escaping randomly. On the other hand, I would think they could do *something* with the gas... run a generator and charge the golf carts! On the other other hand, maybe the utility price is hard to beat, and the water bill at a golf course probably dwarfs the light bill, making the potential savings small.
On the big, still-active landfill further away, I can see what I think are the "gas well" pipes sticking out of the sides of the hill, but I don't know whether they flare it or run a generator or what.
Every once in a while, mostly when metal prices go up, somebody floats the idea of mining old landfills. I don't know of anyplace this has actually been done, though.
Matt Roberds
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