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?"
Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic (Score:5, Interesting)
So, hopefully the laws of the universe are respected. But what you missed is the 2nd law of business: A good deal is when you reap the benefits of other's investments.
Re:Theory and reality, explanation. (Score:2, Interesting)
I read TFA also, and was similarly impressed - but what I didnt see mentioned, and what struck me as a potential risk was that when you set up quite a few of these, you are in effect setting up pipes to pipe surface air up into the troposphere or ionosphere or whatever it is and will be setting up a circuit of sorts. Now, I am not a meteorologist but I'm fairly sure that the layers in the atmosphere are exactly that - layered - and usually there is not a lot of inter layer flow except for very light elements like hydrogen that pass right through.
I dont want to appear as an ignorant naysayer but I have read of 'issues' that people have as regards to water vapour introduced by jet engines and it strikes me that this could have a similar effect. I would like to know what that effect would be and how destructive in reality it could become if practiced on a large scale.
Re:Vortexes (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Re:Conservation of Energy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, as I said, there were a lot of cases of childhood thyroid cancer, the ONLY human effects that have been measured, and that (last time I checked) had caused exactly one death.
The 1000 square miles (or whatever the exclusion zone size is) is, if you care to check, so nice a place that it has been suggested as a wildlife park. Yes, it has more than normal background radiation (as do a number of places in the world where man had nothing to do with it), but there is no evidence that it is dangerous - only an unproven theory.
Much of the fear that people have about radioactivity is based on the linear dose no threshold theory - one which is the consensus for safety reasons, but is really a "precautionary principle" sort of idea. The evidence for it is basically non-existent - it is derived from extreme extrapolation. Humans have poor intuition about toxicology (and radiation behaves as a toxin), finding it difficult to deal with the many orders of magnitude involved. Hence, people are terrified of tiny levels of radiation while large numbers of people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive 60 years after being dosed with hundreds of REM (far more than you would get if you lived right next to Chernobyl). The linear dose hypothesis leads to the dramatic high estimates of radiation deaths - estimates which have not been proven out.
Prior to 9-11 (you wouldn't want to do it today) I took a small digital geiger counter up on an airliner. At 10,000 feet MSL it was singing - off scale in its counts-per-minute mode. Scary, eh? Not to me.
When there are popular phobias, especially those that match someones' agenda (and you did mention agendas, didn't you - no, I'm not a libertarian), looking at the underlying evidence can be an edifying experience. You might want to try it sometime.
Re:Great for Electricity but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, there are some "bureaucratic" reasons: regions near the exclusion zone receive large government subsidies. So usually radiation checks are "magically" performed in the most "hottest" places.
Radionucleotide levels are increased but there are some places (Três Corações for example) on Earth where _natural_ radiation is much stronger.
PS: I live in Russia and have relatives in Ukraine in area very close to the exclusion zone.