Artificial Tornadoes 267
An anonymous reader writes "This inventor is working on a method of creating artificial tornadoes to generate electricity which he calls the "Atmospheric Vortex Engine". He is claiming that it is possible to create a man-made tornado and use wind turbines to capture the energy from the tornado. On the website there is some video footage of some experimental tornadoes that were generated in a prototype vortex tower in Utah. There seem to be several recent media references to his work including The
Economist and The Guardian.
Sounds like an interesting idea for a renewable energy source, but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?"
Conservation of Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the energy for these tornadoes coming from? To be more specific, how much energy is needed to start up one of these things?
Great for Electricity but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until electric cars become efficient enough to run all day on a single charge with half a day of stored energy still available, petrol is the energy source we need to replace.
I'm betting on Biodiesel. It's still more expensive to refine than crude oil but that gap is closing fast. With current subsidies you can actually buy biodiesel for cheaper than Gasoline...
Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic (Score:3, Insightful)
Runaway tornados? I think not.. (Score:2, Insightful)
They would dissipate quickly, not having the proper weather conditions to support a tornado. It's not like these things pop up sporadically, even after living in Oklahoma for 21 years I've never actually seen one.
"What happens if..." (Score:5, Insightful)
This question is about as ignorant as "what happens if a nuclear reactor blows up?" A vortex created and sustained by the energy from the tower wouldn't be able to escape - if it did, it would have no energy source to sustain itself.
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Similar to Australia 1km tower. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"What happens if..." (Score:2, Insightful)
A nuclear reactor cannot blow up like a nuclear bomb (maybe my statement was unclear). Chernobyl "blew up" in the sense that the coolant failed and the heat built up to the point that things got out of hand - but any "blowing up" that happened was just steam busting pipes and stuff. The nuclear material used in reactors is not pure enough to fission fast enough to actually blow up itself.
A nuclear reactor is in just as much danger of blowing up as any other type of power plant - the only difference is that if you have a problem with a coal plant, you just have coal dust everywhere, and everyone gets dirty. If you have a problem with a nuclear power plant, you get radioactive material everywhere, and everyone grows extra limbs.
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that fossil fuels are being burnt to generate electricity should give you a hint that better ways to generate electricity is really needed.
Well, that or people getting happy about having a nuclear power plant in their back yard.
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If better safety controls and protocols were applied, I would be. Maybe I just don't know enough about it, but I think a lot of the problem with nuclear power is the same sort of mistaken impression as flying-vs-driving, or microwaves-vs-stovetop. With nuclear, the damage in the case of a failure can be much more catastrophic, and the risk factors are strange and scary, but the net ecological damage versus something like coal or fossil fuels is actually less, provided nothing goes Chernobyl or TMI. Of course there is the risk of a Chernobyl or TMI, but if people could actually work on the problem, solutions could be found. Me? I'd rather have nuclear now than wind, water, or solar that's always just over the horizon.
Re:Conservation of Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize how limited your imagination is? A huge variety of industries generate massive quantities of waste heat. Shit, you could tap geothermal energy from deep mine shafts using this technology.
While ultimately, a large portion of the power which is being used to generate the waste heat comes from coal/oil, the idea is to get more efficient usage from whatever source it is you use. Think about it... even a 1% gain in efficiency (if cost effective) would save countless money.
As for it not being an alternative, consider a situation in which an industrial plant sets up one of these and sells power to other companies in its industrial park. For everyone else involved, this qualifies as an alternative energy source and no extra fossil fuels are burned.
Slashdot Submissions Must End With Stupid Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spin Cycle (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a bit like the guy who wanted to run a tube from the ocean floor to the surface, and use the temperature differential to do work.
The thing can be terribly inefficient (in terms of wasting the solar energy) -- the thing that matters is just the price of the kWHs that come out of it.
Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chernobyl likewise did very little environmental damage, in spite of its release of a huge amount of radiation. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of healthy wildlife (and not 6 foot tall mice or anything), and in spite of all the hype, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is under 50, including the firefighters (the number of excess cases of childhood thyroid cancer is over 1000, but that disease is very rarely fatal). However, I wouldn't want a Chernobyl style power plant in my backyard, especially run by a soviet style bureacracy (or for that matter, the typical power plant bureaucracy, although I guess they have gotten better at running reactors in the US after a few widely publicized mistakes).
Since TMI, even though the US stopped building new reactors at that time (due to the ridiculous hype from the main stream media and envirowackos), the amount of nuclear electricity produced in the US has grown significantly.
At the same time, many other countries produce vast amounts of electricity from nukes (I think it is around 70% in France, but I'm too lazy to Google it).
Furthermore, "inherently safe" reactor designs exist (in reality, NOTHING is completely safe), and the biggest danger of nuclear reactors is action by terrorists (and we could, if we were serious about it, mitigate that danger dramatically).
Nukes aren't the solution to the entire energy "problem" (but they work a lot better than Kyoto, a total non-solution to the speculative anthropogenic global warming hypothesis). If one could make good enough batteries (and people have been trying very hard for 100 years), they could supplant hydrocarbons through the use of electric cars (at a significant energy loss), but today the battery of an electric car is still nowhere close to adequate for most needs.
Re:Natural disasters on demand! (Score:4, Insightful)