My key takeaway here is that tire fires have lower carbon emissions than coal.
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Coal is carbon, so that tracks. In a high temp furnace reactor, the toxic organics from burning rubber are going to break down a lot more than in the stereotypical junkyard tire fire. It’ll still make the people downwind suffer.
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I wonder where all the sulfur from vulcanization goes, though.
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Stack scrubber, if they’re being responsible.
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I wonder how efficient it is compared to oil or coal scrubbing. I’m assuming tires are a lot more complicated in composition and microstructure.
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Sometimes, you might just not know…
Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.”
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It’s a barn owl.
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Not really. Tires decompose when burned to about the same byproducts as oil and coal - burning simplifies composition considerably, eh? Varying amounts of SOx are the main object of scrubbing in all cases, also particulates (and particularly dirty lignite may have more of those than tires).
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I’m curious how often they clean out the furnaces of the steel belting and other fiddly bits that don’t burn off. Is it hot enough to slag it all?
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Well, they’re using them as fuel for a high-temperature kiln (1,450°C for the Portland cement process), so, yeah, the steel belt in the tires will be reduced to slag (most carbon steel melts between 1,350-1,530°C). I’d imagine that they have an ash-handling hopper and conveyor at the base of the kiln - that’s more or less how they handle similar problems for boilers.
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Long (roughly an hour), but a lot of interesting observations about audience behavior, how experts are viewed, youtube’s methods, and more. Seemed like it would be at home in this thread. 
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there is so much terrible science journalism it’s not even a good joke after a while
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[checks URL]
[is not surprised]
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“I learned about the solar system in fourth grade”
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“I haven’t thought about it since then”
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“The world revolves around
the sunME, it revolves around ME” -
“The solar system only exists on schoolroom posters and as a memory exercise for children”
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“The arbitrary, meaningless information I learned in fourth grade must remain the same forever”
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Here’s the MIT press release.
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well I should hope so. The alternative would be alarming.
Engineer 1: Well, we’ve done it. We can scrub CO2 from the air, potententially solving the climate crisis.
Engineer 2: What’s the catch?
Engineer 1: Deployment can’t begin until emissions reach 1600 ppm…
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Yeah, but that has been state of the art. Mind you, I see this as only a mitigation strategy - the amount of scaling up needed to compensate for current carbon emissions would be mind boggling. I also think they are understating the costs - this captures the carbon, but more (possibly much more) is needed to lock up the CO2 thus captured.
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