Burning Saltwater: anybody see this yet?

Wow.
Like ICE 9...Fiction.

Shoot power into water, separating the hydrogen from the oxygen, then burn the hydrogen.

Your comzouta is less than your gozinta.

:)
 
Capt Quirk said:
Has it crossed any body's mind, what would happen if this was used on the oceans? Instant Armageddon...
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Yes, I thought that too. However, in the experiment, they used a little test tube of salt water. To do this to something as large as an ocean, wouldn't you need a much stronger radio wave? If you look at the size of an ocean, would we even be able to generate a radio wave powerful enough to ignite an ocean? Still, it does make you wonder.

Also, the machine that generates the radio waves in the experiment may possibly be doing it at a specific frequency to create the burning effect on the saltwater. I don't know enough about radio waves to say, but these would be my best guesses.

Looks like I'll have to head over to wikipedia to see what I can find out.

If it actually becomes safe as well as feasible to use this technology as an alternate source of energy instead of oil, then I hope that we don't let it become buried or controlled by the oil companies. I can see it now. You'll have to pay twenty bucks a person to go to the beach because they don't want to let people have fuel for free. You want salt on your fries, pay up. Actually water prices could rise pretty high too couldn't they?
 
GenJerDan said:
Shoot power into water, separating the hydrogen from the oxygen, then burn the hydrogen.:)
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That is exactly what they are doing. In my excitement I just didn't let my brain fully understand all the technical details. So you would need an extremely powerful radio wave to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in a mass of water as large as an ocean, which is not likely to be possible anytime soon with current technology.

Now, lets pretend that it was possible to do this to the oceans. Why would any nation use this as a weapon. It would destroy the oceans and all life on the planet. They may win the war, but in the end they will still lose. At least a nuclear weapon has some degree of precision.
 
Nektonic said:
Now, lets pretend that it was possible to do this to the oceans. Why would any nation use this as a weapon. It would destroy the oceans and all life on the planet. They may win the war, but in the end they will still lose. At least a nuclear weapon has some degree of precision.
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Why bother with the ocean? If you have a directed-energy weapon with that much power, just use it on the people directly.
 
Two things that were not answered in that report and the comments on youtube touched on them:

1) How much energy does the machine require to operate it and how much does it create? If what goes in is far greater than what comes out than there is no benefit.

2) Regarding the cancer part: I didn't quite understand how his concept of charging metal so that it is attracted to cancer cells actually works. How would the charged metals be drawn to cancer cells?

To me this sounds like a guy trying to hype up interest through basic media channels so he can gather investors.
 
Cute Video, sorry analysis.

The First Law of Thermodynamics seems to always rule:
"In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics#First_law)

In this case, the Inventor puts more energy in, than he will be getting out. More specifically, making the electricity to make the radio waves that separates the H2O (water) into H2 (hydrogen) and O2 (oxygen) takes more energy than the separated H2 and O2 will produce on burning.

By the way, it is easier to just put a current into the water and separate the components. You do it every day when you are charging your car battery with the alternator in your car. The gas that comes off is Hydrogen. The energy is conserved in the universe through entropy as heat.

One of those perpetual motion machines that seem possible, that on further analysis always seem to slow to a stop along the line.

Sorry, but it seems cool at the first blush. but it won't solve the hurdle of making the electricity without burning the fossil fuels, nuclear decay, hydroelectric, wind etc. These conversions of energy are the first step, and all of them have an inherent inefficiency that cannot be overcome, eg entropy.

For the interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics


jwl
 
The video isn't about a perpetual motion machine. It's about releasing energy from salt water. You would still need a source of input energy to sustain the energy expenditure (be it battery or otherwise) but it would seriously cut down the use of fossil fuels as a primary source of energy.
 
Agreed. Without delving into matters of politics, I think most would agree that any technology that eases or eradicates our need for fossil fuels represents a move forward for humankind and our planet by extension.

e
 
'Cept, it doesn't. If you have enough energy to run that system, you *already* have enough energy to do whatever you were going to do with its output.
 
With all due respect, go argue this with the hydrogen people. Talk about a lead zeppelin.

I've been defending bio-diesel and SVO for a long time. It takes energy to make energy - there seems to be a trade-off no matter what the underlying source.

At minimum, we can regain energy independence through the emerging technologies.

e
 
Aahhh... the energy debate!

There is a heretical theory that methane is produced deep in the Earth's mantle, and that the climate behavior has more to do with our management of land than our use of fossil fuels.

Read here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html

As far as radio waves -> salt water -> H2 + O2, that's a pipe dream. The energy losses in something like that would by far outweigh any benefits. As others said, the total energy is constant, entropy grows. Where it might be useful is water desalination, though... but again, if someone has the energy available to produce that much power, drinking water is probably not the biggest problem. Too bad I can't actually see the video from where I am.

Now if someone shows me a technology that allows a nuclear reactor to directly charge hydrogen fuel cells, which could be distributed instead of gasoline to power our transportation and household needs, that would be news worth listening to... mind you, the distribution cost could still be pretty high.
 
Isn't the gasoline internal combustion engine only 10% efficient? I'm not calling these alternate technologies the answer, but don't they represent a lesser interim evil?

Tell me why native prarie grass SVO or bio-d shouldn't be grown instead of fossil fuel.

e
 
Agggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh

I just get irritated knowing that it is possible (ridding the dependence and destruction of fossil fuel) with alternative fuel sources; and it just aint gonna happen until we all go revolution style

I have always wanted to organize a BUY NO GAS FOR A WEEK
 
overlandfilms said:
Isn't the gasoline internal combustion engine only 10% efficient? I'm not calling these alternate technologies the answer, but don't they represent a lesser interim evil?

Tell me why native prarie grass SVO or bio-d shouldn't be grown instead of fossil fuel.

e
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I'll quote from the article at the link I mentioned previously:
Consider the half of the land area of the earth that is not desert or ice-cap or city or road or parking-lot. This is the half of the land that is covered with soil and supports vegetation of one kind or another. Every year, it absorbs and converts into biomass a certain fraction of the carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere. Biomass means living creatures, plants and microbes and animals, and the organic materials that are left behind when the creatures die and decay. We don’t know how big a fraction of our emissions is absorbed by the land, since we have not measured the increase or decrease of the biomass. The number that I ask you to remember is the increase in thickness, averaged over one half of the land area of the planet, of the biomass that would result if all the carbon that we are emitting by burning fossil fuels were absorbed. The average increase in thickness is one hundredth of an inch per year.

The point of this calculation is the very favorable rate of exchange between carbon in the atmosphere and carbon in the soil. To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.
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More biodiesel => more corn (or whatever) growing => more tilling = less biomass growth => less CO2 absorption in the soil. It just *might* be the reason not to do it...
 
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