Thermal depolymerization. It's been commercial for about a year and they are getting the last kinks out of it. They are really interested in it in Europe where the mad cow disease epidemic has caused tighter regulations about feeding animal parts to animals, and the high heat of this process kills the prions, which are very hard to destroy. Here, industries with animal waste are not so eager to pay the TDP people to take it away because they can sell it for animal feed, but in Europe they can't anymore.

What i think is cool is that it solves waste disposal problems (like medical waste and plastic bottles), doesn't create waste, while producing several grades of oil, clean water, and industrial chemicals. And no need to separate the different plastics and metals, you just pour everything in one end and it fractionates out the results. And it powers itself.

It sounds like a great niche energy, like the wood-fueled generators in Northern California. The waste disposal aspect is attractive, since you can generate revenue at both ends of the process. BUT... what's the energy density of all that solid waste? I suspect that TDP'ing all the cow guts and Tupperware in America wouldn't give a year's worth of fuel. 300+ million Americans need a LOT of energy.

I'd jump on the solar bandwagon in a heartbeat if some photoelectric genius came up with a residential A/C unit powered only by the sunlight that hits my roof all summer. Until then, I'm with GvdL, solar is a kiddy toy.

"I suspect that TDP'ing all the cow guts and Tupperware in America wouldn't give a year's worth of fuel. 300+ million Americans need a LOT of energy."

Read the articles, you'd be surprised. It would be a pretty big niche. What's even better is that it is scalable and doesn't use extremely advanced tech, so you could build plants of any size anywhere in the world.

I'm not a real fan of nuclear power, but even for those who are, I'd hope an efficiency push would be a short-term goal.

Our energy future is all about timelines. Nuclear is one of the things we can do, but the timeline is long.

I think the shortest timeline is to go buy energy efficient replacements for "stuff" we own. We can do that today.

My washing machine keeps working (even if it is getting louder), but I can replace it with one that uses half the electricity. A simple case in point.

Please enter Pebble Bed Reactor into your search engine. To me at least it looks pretty interesting. And relatively safe.