In which the press and the government prove they don't understand scientific basics

[unixronin]

ERIE, Pa. - An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer.  He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

[...]

The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said.  Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.

[...]

Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.

OK.  Who else sees the beginner-obvious problem with this "discovery"?

Hint:  The Laws of Thermodynamics.

This is, of course, beyond both the AP and the government bureaucracy.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

From my (outdated) readings, storage in metal hydrides was almost equivalent in energy density to cryogenics, and far less equipment was needed. The resultant material for transport was higher density, but it has fewer safety concerns, which leave the engineering scales somewhat in balance.

Metal hydride storage showed great promise for energy density, yes. However, my recollection is there are technical hurdles which have not yet been solved that make it impractical, one of which — if I recall correctly — is the necessity to heat the hydride to about 400°F to initiate hydrogen release, which means "engine" startups require a lot of stored electrical power. What's worse, the heat to "start" the hydride system cannot be recovered when you shut the system off, so it is lost, making short runs extremely inefficient. Another problem is the mass and cost of the hydride matrix itself.

Currently, the technology of fuel cells "burning" hydrogen produced from liquid hydrocarbon fuel by a reformer is looking a lot more technically feasible. Much of the current research is going into methanol reformers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_reformer), but methanol reformers have the drawback that even though the reformer/fuel-cell combination is much more efficient than burning the hydrocarbons in an internal combustion engine, the reformer still produces CO₂ as a by-product.

It'd be nice to see really practical fuel-cell cars, but it's too early yet to tell whether it's actually going to happen. The Tesla roadster (http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php) has proved that an electric vehicle can perform well enough and operate economically enough to be accepted in the market (the Tesla's power cost of 2¢/mile compares very favorably with internal-combustion powered vehicles running on gasoline, diesel, or liquefied petroleum gas), but that's only half the problem. It's also got to be affordable to the mass market, both to own and to maintain; the Tesla costs about $100,000, far beyond what most people can afford to spend on a car. (According to Tesla, this includes the cost of recycling the battery pack when it wears out, but they're rather cagey about how much that cost actually is.)