Salt water and free energy, sigh.

Someone sent me a copy of the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk

It tells how blind we all have been to not have recognized that we could just run our industries and transportation with salt water. "Incredible," was the comment of the fellow who sent it. This is what I sent back:

What's incredible is that the other engineers expressed amazement about any of this. There are a lot of water-dissociation schemes right now: you take water, increase its electrical conductivity with salt or other admixture, and run electric current through it. This splits it into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which are then recombined by combustion, which creates heat.

The problem is that the electrical energy necessary to split up the water always exceeds the heat energy you get out of the process: that radio-frequency generator is plugged into the wall, and the power it used wasn't free. The salt water itself is not a fuel.

They've been selling bogus 'fuel cell' schemes that uses current from a car's battery to dissociate water that's placed in an under-hood tank. The gases are fed to the car's air cleaner, where they increase the power of the engine. But the purveyors of these things forget that the electric current has to come from the car's generator, whose resultant additional burden loads down the engine and decreases fuel mileage.

Some of the more militant free-energy websites claim that there are methods of pulsing current through the water, and these reduce the amount of power needed to dissociate the water. They do not, which is just as well; we benefit considerably because water is as stable as it is.

What I didn't add was that the cancer cure mentioned here is about as dubious as the rest of the claims. What bothers me is that the happy crew did this all with a straight face, which indicates that they probably believe that they've accomplished something. Notice that there was no data, no measurements, no description of the apparatus, and that trick with the fluorescent light bulb is done daily at every science museum with a home-built Tesla coil. I can do it with the spark coil I got at AutoZone, and what's more it has no relationship to the deal with the hydrogen fuel.

This is an example of how pseudoscience is spread by clueless TV news producers. I once proposed to teach some basic technology to the journalism school at Ohio University. The department chairman there laughed at me, and his students probably believe this stuff.

M Kinsler