Mr. Fusion and Household Waste
With the recent news about scientists being able to pull more energy from a fusion reactor than what they put in, I’m wondering if it’s worth visiting other silly ideas around fusion. Namely, could fusion be used as a potential way to address household and industrial waste?
At the end of Back To The Future, Doc Brown in a flying Delorean raids Marty’s garbage bin to feed a device called “Mr. Fusion”. It was used to power time travel.
For some time, I was obsessed with waste plasma arc gasification. The idea is that if you heat garbage to a high enough temperature that it will break down waste into usable components like syngas, hydrogen, and water. While there are more than two decades of attempts at this technology, there isn’t much to show for it. Opponents say the technology is just as bad as burning garbage.
However, maybe fusion could be it? The idea of shoveling garbage into a fusion reactor and having disintegrate into energy is very appealing. Most municipalities would love this.
Maybe the idea could be taken further? Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest, has started up another company, Mill Industries, that processes food scraps in-home before shipping it out. There are a few other companies doing this but he’s working on a subscription model. What if in a decade, in home, we had our own fusion generators?
Fusion might not be the answer but there are technologies that could help:
- New enzymes that are engineering to breakdown garbage, even plastics in home
- Devices like Mill that reduce the volume of organic, regular, and recyclable waste
- Machine vision devices that can identify trash
- Robotic technology that can make household sorting and managing much more tenable
Ultimately, upstream technologies that reduce packaging or make it biodegradable are much more likely to have an impact in the short term.
