The One

Researcher sets saltwater on fire

Last winter, inventor John Kanzius was already attempting one seemingly impossible feat -- building a machine to cure cancer with radio waves -- when his device inadvertently succeeded in another: He made saltwater catch fire.


A test tube full of saltwater fuels a flame.

TV footage of his bizarre discovery has been burning up the blogosphere ever since, drawing crackpots and Ph.D.s alike into a raging debate. Can water burn? And if so, what good can come of it?

Some people gush over the invention's potential for desalinization or cheap energy. Briny seawater, after all, sloshes over most of the planet's surface, and harnessing its heat energy could power all sorts of things. Skeptics say Kanzius's radio generator is sucking up far more energy than it's creating, making it a carnival trick at best.

For now, Kanzius is tuning out the hubbub. The retired radio- and television- station owner says the saltwater stuff is interesting, but a cancer breakthrough is what he's really after. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, he began building his radio-wave blaster the next year, soon after a relapse. His lifelong fascination with radio provided further inspiration.

Radio station antennas, he knew, can turn a bystander's metal eyeglasses toasty warm. If he could seed a person's cancerous cells with nanoscopic metal particles and blast them with radio waves, perhaps he could kill off the cancer while sparing healthy tissue.

The saltwater phenomenon happened by accident when an assistant was bombarding a saline-filled test tube with radio waves and bumped the tube, causing a small flash. Curious, Kanzius struck a match. "The water lit like a propane flame," he recalls.

"People said, 'It's a crock. Look for hidden electrodes in the water,' " says Penn State University materials scientist Rustum Roy, who visited the Erie, Pennsylvania, inventor in his lab in August after seeing the feat on Google Video. A demo made Roy a believer.

"This is discovery science in the best tradition," he says. Roy thinks the sodium chloride in the water may weaken the bonds between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which are broken free by radio waves. It's these gas molecules that are igniting, he explains, not the liquid itself. Tests show that the reaction disappears once the radio waves stop. Roy plans to conduct more tests to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Meanwhile, researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have made progress using Kanzius's technology to fight cancer in animals. They published their findings last month in the journal Cancer.

How it works:

1. A generator emits 14-megahertz radio waves.
2. The waves bombard a solution of regular table salt and water.
3. Exactly what happens next remains a mystery, but one theory posits that the sodium chloride may weaken the bonds between the strong oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water. Radio waves break apart the bonds and liberate flammable hydrogen gas molecules.
4. A match ignites the hydrogen, generating an intense flame.
5. The resulting heat powers a simple engine.

Salt Water Fuel

YouTube - Salt Water Fuel

gunnut

So it's electrolysis, except using radio waves?

If the energy input is less than the energy extracted, this has enormous potential.

If the energy input is greater than energy extracted, this is useless as fuel.

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ArmchairGeneral

Think of it this way. Pick up a rock. Drop it. What?! It broke? Wow, that's a lot of kinetic energy! This could be a vast energy resource!!

Exactly the same principle here. You're starting with water, and ending up with, guess what? Water. It's a state function. It don't matter how you get there, if you end up where you started.

'Cept, of course, that in the real world you always lose a bit as heat.

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eboyer

Here we go again!

Think about it. You take salt water (Sea Water). Apply an energy source (radio waves) and whala! Hydrogen. Apply heat. Whala!. Flame. We all know why nobody gets interested in this stuff is because the international community does not want to upset the world economy based on oil! Who wants to take on the world oil cartel. Intereresting science. When will our depenence on oil change? I do not believe in our life times.

ArmchairGeneral

Er, no. Nobody is interested because it's not interesting, at least as a fuel source. If you could avoid lighting the stuff on fire, it might be interesting as a source of hydrogen, but I doubt it. Probably less efficient than electrolysis.

Canmoore

Does this destroy the water in the process? if so I can see one problem..

We have a limited source of water on the planet, and we need it to live. This is not oil created from ancient ecosystems long gone extinct.

This is the same water that the dinosaurs drank and pissed in. If we start consuming water, than we are committing suicide not only for our species, but for life on this planet now, and for all eternity.

ArmchairGeneral

Actually, that's not a problem. When you burn hydrogen, you're reacting it with oxygen, to make hydrogen monoxide. Also known as water. Water is being produced and consumed constantly throughout the world, in fact. Plants consume water to make carbohydrates, and we burn 'em to make carbon dioxide and water.

gunnut

How about this as an energy source for a car?

I use electrolysis to seperate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn the hydrogen in the combustion chamber with water as the only exhaust. Sound good? Come on. Water as fuel? Energy problem solved.

Canmoore

The environment consumes dihydrogen monoxide through soil, plants and organisms. But it is not destroyed, it is only retained and is then released back into the atmosphere slowly through evaporation.

If this process creates dihydrogen monoxide, rather than destroy it than I am all for it!

However, again, there may be a problem, we will be monkeying around with the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, and adding water to the earth... there has to be some consequences for this...

I don't know though, I am not a chemist

ArmchairGeneral

Incorrect. Water is constantly being consumed and created. Photosynthesis is a chemical process whereby water is split into hydrogen and oxygen, thus serving as a source of electrons for the photosynthetic electron transport chain. If you like, I could go into it in gory detail, starting with photons and the oxygen evolving complex and finishing with Fd-NADP+ reductase and F1-F0 ATP synthase. But I digress.

At the same time, every time you breathe, you are exhaling water vapor created by Complex IV in the mitochondrial electron transport chain, the final step in the oxidation of organic molecules to carbon dioxide and water, which is how all non-autotrophic aerobic organisms get their energy.

There are other natural processes where water may be consumed or destroyed, but these are the biggies.

The process starts with water, and ends with water. There is no net destruction or production of water. Which is why all claims for energy production from this phenomenon are total and complete bullcrap.

Parihaka

Hydrogen is a useful storage battery for electricity. As ArmchairGeneral alludes to, you don't create energy by creating Hydrogen, you simply store it long term.
AG, I heard a while ago that there was something like a 20% loss in energy creating hydrogen, do you have any data on that?

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ArmchairGeneral

It really depends on the method. For example, you're going to have an easier time pulling hydrogens off carbon than off oxygen, so it will probably be more energy efficient, which is probably why most hydrogen is produced from hydrocarbons rather than through electrolysis.

As for specifics on electrolysis, Wiki to the rescue: If this new process (call it "radiolysis," maybe?) is for real, it would be interesting to see what kind of efficiency it has. My guess would be less than electrolysis, but that's just a WAG.

2DREZQ

That is the only really interesting thing about this hullabaloo: Efficiency. If it's reeeeaalllly high, just maybe we could get real "friendly" Hydrogen. That's been us "real" environmentalists beef with the big H since day one; it's all made from dinosaur poop.

Did I miss anything the last couple months?

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ArmchairGeneral

Not much. Just a few troll baitings. Not really high quality though. Seems like ages since a really hard core, long lasting, crunchable, munchable troll came through.

eboyer

ArmchairGeneral is missing my point. The point is, you do not burn the hydrogen. The point is you use the process to free hydogren from salt water to dirve fuel cells from sea water (which of course is vey abundant). It is obvious the process must be economical. Resources and it's costs used vs power supplied.