Plasma Converter Offers Hope

(Conspiracy Nation, 02/12/07) – Inflated anxieties spun-off from “Peak Oil” prognosticators caused some to fear “the end of civilization as we know it.” But a “prophet of garbage” belies such claims.

Almost two years ago, Conspiracy Nation reported on the views of an especially dour alarmist: James Howard Kunstler. ("The Long Emergency" http://www.shout.net/~bigred/LongEmerg.html) At the time, this publication advised, “There are a lot of creative people and a lot more having tremendous creative potential. Look for the unexpected, along with the unrealized, to add silver linings to the cloud.”

Unknown to this editor, even as he wrote the above in March 2005, inventor Joseph Longo was proving the maxim of “Yankee ingenuity.” In its March 2007 issue, Popular Science magazine devotes several pages in praise of Longo's “Plasma Converter.” The device investigated by Pop Sci is about the size of a two-car garage. At one end, garbage of any type (except nuclear waste) is poured in. Manmade lightning, three times hotter than the sun, turns the refuse into “an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or 'syngas' – a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen.” (“The Prophet Of Garbage,” by Michael Behar. Popular Science, March 2007)

Longo's process is self-sustaining. After initially using outside electricity to start up, power thereafter is supplied by the system itself. Furthermore, the system generates significant surplus power, which can be sold back to the utility grid.

The Plasma Converter is a veritable “Power to the People” godsend. Surplus energy generated by the system makes us less dependent on foreign oil. Already, cities and nations throughout the world are ordering the devices from Longo's company, “Startech.” (See their website at http://www.startech.net/)

Critics are few. Brad Van Guilder, a scientist at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, reportedly worries that the “obsidian-like slag contains toxic heavy metals and breaks down when exposed to water.” Monica Wilson, international coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, reportedly wonders whether in the cool-down phases, the components in the syngas might reform into toxins. Dour Kunstler of “Long Emergency” notoriety has apparently not yet weighed in on Longo's Plasma Converter.

But, as noted, the device is burgeoning in popularity. The doom-and-gloomers, for the moment, are in retreat. How will this latest hopeful technology somehow be suppressed? Stay tuned.

Conspiracy Nation

http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html