The cold fusion boys. That was a great scam.

I doubt we will do anything until the oil is used up. Except for shale oil in Canada, and some steam techniques to recover oil in deep wells, why would we use anything other than oil?

What hippies don’t get is that we want the cheapest power with the highest BTUs. While nuclear power plants and electric cars would work, the hippies don’t want the nuclear power plants. What they want is to bitch about both sides. Nuclear power is too dangerous. We need solar and wind. Except of course neither provides the BTUs at anywhere near an acceptable dollar per BTU.

Their solution is for everyone to live in little apartments, condos, and maybe very small homes. Ride your bike and eat your vegetables. That car had better be electric.

Liberals are the new Luddites.

I’m holding out for that “Mr Fusion” thingy they had in the movie Back to the Future. Then I’ll be impressed. Oh, remember Ponds and Fleischman? Remember the fawning, orgasming news coverage those two douche-bags got? Those two have this salt water thing beat all to hell.

So; 1KW in (assuming 100% efficiency in the RF generator) and around 0.2KW out. Oooh, I’m all a-twitter!

What got to me most was that each and every single one of the mind-numbed, lemming newsies failed to ask any pertinent questions. Hey newsies, we’ve known about cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen now for generations. This is new to you? My son’s jr. high school class studied that last year, and we did it in my high school class back in about 1974.

But we get the explanation in the last seconds of the vid, during fadeout: GOVERNMENT GRANTS. If the geniuses in the DOE are as fucking retarded as the newsies reporting the story, there’s a half-billion dollars in this for some schlub in public universtiy somewhere.

When it utterly fails to go anywhere, we can always blame it on the BIG OIL companies supressing the technology.

As for moving the hydrogen … it would be easier to convert it into methane ( CH4 ), which can be done with catalysts at nearly zero cost, and move and use the Methane for fuel, as the infrastructure and automobile tech is already established.

If it can be produced cheaply using energy generated by a nuclear or hydro plant, hydrogen might be useful as an energy storage medium. It could be used where it’s produced to supply peak power, or it could be transported elsewhere if special pipelines are built. Protytype hydrogen powered vehicles, using either fuel cells or internal comubstion engines, have been built. But you ain’t never gonna run your car on water.

Currently, the only ways to get H2 for fuel are either chemically, or through electrolysis. This looks like it might be more efficient than mere electrolysis.

A more efficient way to store energy by making H2 is a good thing.

I’m willing to bet that you’re looking at an energy sink, not a source. Perpetual motion machines don’t exist.

That being said, if the conversion is very efficient, then using a nuke plant to run this process for desalinization and using the waste heat for a steam-cycle could be an excellent engineering application.

Bravo, that is the first thing to look at. Is there a positive energy gain? We think alike.

Of course the professional doomsayers known as envirowhackos will find some reason to be against it.

Again, you are correct. I can hear it now, but if we use all the water in the ocean where will the fish live? Or global cooling. Or global warming. They are hell bent that we must ride bicycles to the store to shop for our vegan food stuffs. Reminds me of Neil on the Young Ones. Are the lentils done yet?

BTW, Anyone remember this movie?

That’s really freakin’ cool.

If the energy used to extract the hydrogen from the water exceeds, or even is not significantly less, than the energy obtained from the burning hydrogen, then this is nothing more than an interesting phenomena.

I’m not saying that this CAN’T be an important discovery, only that it is a little premature to announce the beginning of the hydrogen age.

If the rf transmitter can be made efficient enough to release significantly more hydrogen power than the power required to create the field, this could be the most important invention since the internal combustion engine…maybe since fire itself.

Of course the professional doomsayers known as envirowhackos will find some reason to be against it. The extinction of some protected species of microbe that only lives in saltwater? The release of oxygen as exhaust would lower CO2 levels in the atmosphere and cause catastrophic global cooling? Who knows what they’ll come up with…anything to stand in the way of progress.

Electrolysis is not exactly a new idea; it is also _not_ the critical element impeding the coming “hydrogen economy”. A very large amount of infrastructure is needed: energy source, production, storage, transport, sales, education, engine systems built to use it, …. (I’m quite sure the list is longer than anything I could come up with). Oil/gasoline has 100 plus year head start on it; it’ll take a while for hydrogen to catch up — and there is no guarantee that it will. Hydrogen not only has to be _better_ than oil, it has to be enough better to justify building the new infrastructure AND tearing down the old; it is not exactly obvious that it is (wishful thinking aside).