A really interesting and promising bit of news…
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 discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.
[Source: Yahoo News]
Now that would be a great source of energy: sea water.
We have more of it than we need, it’s clean, cheap, and all we’d possibly get as emissions from burning it is more water, now who wouldn’t want that?
Hmmm… well, actually a lot of people, starting with the oil companies and the people backing/profiting/being backed by them; but that’s their problem.
[Thanks for link: Janissary]
There’s one problem with this though: No one has said how much energy it takes to make the radio waves that make the water burn, and it’s probably a lot. There’s a similar experiment out there where you can use a grape and your microwave to make flaming balls of plasma. Plasma is high energy stuff, but the energy that goes into making it doesn’t come close to what it’s putting out. The salt water my work the same way.