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Artificial Tornadoes
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?"
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?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Maybe we should sell this to FEMA and put them in charge of creating all natural disasters in the United States. (You know, they could change their name to the Federal Emergency Making Agency...) That way we'd have hurricanes that could destroy the world, but it would take six to eight weeks before anything actually happened, giving us plenty of time to actually prepare for the disaster when it finally did arrive.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I hope it's a roaring success.
Oh no... it's the future.
Wind, Hydro, Nuclear... great for electricity but does nothing about Gas and Oil.
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...
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
It didn't work out well.
The big yellow ball in the center is the sun!
That line always killed me, but yeah - this is a new approach to solar power.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Yeah, I got one of these out of a Frosted Flakes box when I was a kid. It's a little plastic widget and you screw it in-between two 2-liter soda bottles, and when you flip them over, instant tornado! I don't know how you get power from it...
Comment of the year
It's a real bitch, ain't it?
Then it's just like sim city 2000 all over again...
Yeah, you know, like how burning coal never returns more energy than you used to ignite it...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Sounds like an interesting idea for a renewable energy source, but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?
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.
your point is?
What is most interesting is that vortexes are not really understood in common culture and just how inportant thy are in terms of power to many daily facts of life.
/. many years ago that was able to take mostly anything 'cept fat and turn it into dust.
DaVinci studied cadavers and found out that it is the vortexes in blood flow through the years that close the heart valves as blood flows through.
Bumblebees can fly due to the uplifting forces of vortexes on their wind edges.
A pulverizer driven by vortex power was mentioned here on
One of the common effects in nature that has great potential and is right before our eyes is being ignored by most - possibly because they are poorly understood.
This article is an example of someone paying attention to the vortex and finding out what could be done with it for mankind.
Sure sounds like something REALLY interesting to learn about.
and then...
PROFIT!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
... obligatory demanding of ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Seriously, what evil overlord would miss such an opportunity?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"What happens if one of these tornados gets away?"
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.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
...my plans for world domination are being realized! Alfred, recover the vortex machine for me!
This sounds somewhat similar to the 1km high Solar Tower in Australia Both use convection to power turbines. This one though uses man-made vorteces while the Austrailian Solar Tower uses hot rising air.
Simple, you film a new reality show about the runaways, the sequels write themselves...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I don't know, but I'm sure Jerry Bruckheimer will tell us, one of these years.
... but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?
I would be more worried by a cold fusion reactor running out of control than the salt flats being redistributed throughout Utah.
Blizzard Entertainment has launched their torpedo and commenced a submarine patent attack on the man trying to create artificial tornadoes. Blizzard claims prior art on the idea of man-made weather phenomenons, citing the "Blizzard" spell found in hit titles such as "WarCraft", "WarCraft II", and "WarCraft III". From the depth of their lair, they pulled out a letter from the US patent office granting them rights to all ideas concerning the control of weather by man. In a Double Whammy ruling, Blizzard was also granted rights over all forms of "death and decay" techniques by an evil entity. Talks between Blizzard and Microsoft is currently underway on how Microsoft can license such technology.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
If they could mount this thing on a trailer and deploy it rapidly to trouble spots around the globe, they could really blow away mischief makers. Imagine for example unleashing a few mini-tornatos on a terrorist training camp or on advancing enemy soldiers.
The U.S. Army could also position them offshore of an annoying country like Venezuela, issue an ultimatum that their leader submit to fair elections, and then just release hundreds of these things onto their coastline. The havoc wreaked will be tremendously out of proportion to the cost of the construction and deployment, and at no danger to our personnel.
It could also be used to clean up an area after a dust storm; the vortex would literally whisk away the particles.
There are probably a lot of other uses but right now I'm only thinking of military ones.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
irrelevant
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.
It looks like one Webmaster, Eric Michaud did his job getting the company a little publicity the day after completing an update.
Nice...
I mean really people. The proof is right here!!!
If a weatherman from Pocatello, ID can figure it out surely you can too! Now we know the technology exists to have a tornado take out anyone, anywhere at anytime.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
While it would probably be more efficient to use direct solar light instead, in theory one could create an artificially lighted algae farm that could be used to produce biodiesel. Almost surely, it would be better to simply collect solar energy directly from an algae farm though.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Ok, I Read TFA.
The theory behiond it was actually better than I expected. He's not trying to violate the second law of thermodynamics or anything. He's trying to use the tornado as dynamic heat chimney (an imaginary pipe carrying air up into the high cold atmosphere). Once he gets the tornado going he wants the warm air at the ground to naturally rise inside the chimney, then to harness this natural flow to extract energy.
I'd put the odds of him actually getting the functional vortex established at all at maybe 10%, getting it reasonably stable and self sustaining at maybe 1%, harnessing appreciable power out of it at maybe 0.1%, and harnessing useful cost effectie power at maybe 0.01%.
Of course I'm probably being way too generous and wildly overestimating those figures, chuckle.
In otherwords I would not advise buying stock in this crackpot scheme. It is an interesting concept and interesting physics though.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Just create a mobile home park within about a mile and you'll know exactly where a runaway tornado will go. Set up a net there, catch it and return it to its turbine cage. Maybe give the tornade a three strikes rule and after its third runaway, just turn it back to slow moving air, or threaten to send it to the jet stream in Canada because we know how much tornados hate the cold.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
The vortex can be sustained by either a specific heat source, like seawater or an area covered by greenhouses [as in the Australian solar tower/solar chimney], or if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid it can be sustained by the inherent instability of the atmosphere. However this instability is not generally always present. This instability is called the CAPE (convective atmospheric potential energy). It is the energy source that feeds thunderstorms. The reason the atmosphere can store energy is that the bottom layer of the atmosphere tends to be heated by the sun. If the air is damp but not at 100% humidity you can get a situation where the air column is stable, but as soon as it is perturbed enough for some of the air to start releasing moisture (when it reaches 100% humidity) the situtation becomes unstable. This is because the air that rises high enough to release moisture, starts getting warmed up when the moisture precipitates and then rises even higher. Theoretically, this could be exploited by a vortex. The vortex is performing the same function as a very tall tower, but hopefully more cheaply. It's like a siphon that siphons gasoline out of your tank. The vortex has lower pressure at the center, much like a siphon. However, it is far from clear whether this idea could be made practical. There are issues like how stable the vortex would be in wind, etc.
The
damn, violated /. rules /. while having sex and playing cowboys and indians with the wife /.ers to believe you have a wife
1. never submit to
2. don't expect
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
People of Green Pastures Trailer Park, I will unleash the fury of my tornado machine unless you hand over all your commemorative Nascar plates and pro wrestling magazines!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Don't worry, the tornado will naturally mount itself onto a trailer, based on all video footage I've ever seen of twisters.
Tornadoes are not quiet.
Where would you put these? In any inhabited area the neighbours will complain. Truly isolated areas will require long transmission lines, with consequent power loss.
Have they learned nothing from the Electric Twister Acid Test??
What if one of those tornados got away? Didn't something like that happen with Superman and Lex Lothor? IIRC Lex built a solar power station that would solve all the world's energy problems but then it threatened to incinerate Metropolis. Maybe a comic book expert can help me with this. It seems to me that that particular comic is really old.
We worry about this kind of thing when we do anything. Weren't they worried that the original atomic chain reaction would spread out of control and destroy the entire world.
If they made even a drop of 'super water', wasn't that supposed to catalyze all the other water in the world and result in the destruction of life as we know it.
A stray tornado sounds almost tame by comparison.
It will wreak havoc on the landscape. Sheesh, that question was about as intelligent as: What happens if I throw a lit cigarette into dry hay?
See my blog for my free opinions.
Some interesting photo's and video's
http://atmosphericvortextower.com/
It doesn't sound like an interesting renewable energy source. To anyone who understands basic physics, it sounds like a fictional perpetual-motion machine. The energy to create the tornado has to move all that air in circles, then less gets captured by the turbines, wasting energy, not generating any.
Synthetic tornadoes are useful if they're actually like natural tornadoes. Especially if we can develop machines to safely capture energy from the natural ones. But people who think we can "create" energy by transducing it ought to be more like spectators in this research, just like watching _The Wizard of Oz_. Newton, he man behind the curtain, might not be a wizard, but the laws he noticed still apply, even in Kansas and Utah (though perhaps no longer in their schools).
--
make install -not war
"This is Scorpio. I have the doomsday device."
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
technology aside, I think its cute that he let his little kid do those sciency diagrams in microsoft Paint
There is not too much info on their website: http://vortexdehydration.com
But the following two articles provide a good summary:e =article&sid=1312
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4723367/
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&fil
Michael Crichton is hard at work on his next book..... a Tornadoe gets out of a ultra-secret lab and a scientist, a child, and a surprisingly militarily trained caretaker have to track it down and stop it.
Don't waste your time on the gems that end many Slashdot stories.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Sounds like a case for... Team X-Treme!
The way the title kerned-out on this horrible school LCD, I thought it read "Tomadoes". I was like, WTF are tomadoes?
Where does this thing run on?
"surround the construct by 10-20m of black concrete or gravel". Right! It is a solar energy collector. And a bad one at that.
A normal solar collector will work whenever there is sun. This thing will only work if there is sun AND the atmosphere is unstable. In that case it might be able to "amplify" the solar energy by about a factor of two. If it becomes more than a factor of two, then "shutting down the base" which the inventor claims to shut the thing down, won't be effective anymore. And your vortex might escape.
This depends on the weather. i.e. is inherently unpredictable.
In order for this to spawn a real tornado it would have to tie into the jet stream. I doubt this device could spawn even a half way powerful whirlwind.
A bonus, if it could produce a decent amount of convective upflow it could be sold to farmers for use in orchards to create airflow and prevent a hard freeze. I doubt it would be any more energy efficient than the currently used devices.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
They've already got fairly efficient ways of turning solar energy into power. Turning it into a tornado and then into power probably won't be as effective. So we'll assume they plan to use already-warm water... From where? The oceans? We've got people complaining about windmills and weather patterns, you think maybe messing with the temperature of the ocean won't be a bigger problem? I can't see this being anything other than a scam or a 'really cool idea' that just isn't practical.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well, since it happens to be in Utah the most likely scenario if the tornado escapes is that it kills mormons. It may be a good thing because it would eventually lead to a decline in bicyle related accidents.
... looks like it was illustrated by an eight year old using a Disney paint program.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Dr Heller already invented this...in a can no less.
This would be useful for using against an enemy, even though it is against a few treaties that we have signed.
But we have seen the ABM treaty and no-space weapons treaty go into abeyance.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm guessing that his tropospheric tower to increase a power plant's output by 20% would probably cost significantly more to build than the power plant itself.
That having been said, however, there are a number of very tall factory towers that he could use to test his ideas with shorter pipes. Most of those chimneys are only designed to pump (toxic) waste high into the atmosphere where it wouldn't bother local voters. If nothing else, it might be interesting to see what happens with one of those things if you add atmospheric intakes at the lower levels. I wouldn't expect energy in the megawatt range, but I woldn't be terribly shocked to find energies in the kilowatt range being economically produced from waste heat.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Prior art!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They're not trying for perpetual motion, they're just looking for another way to convert heat into electricity.
There aren't many energy production mechanisms (in popular use) that produce electricity directly. Most produce heat, which must be converted into electricity.
The majority of energy production systems use heat convection to operate some type of electro-magnetic generator. There is always a loss in efficiency in this process. What's potentially novel about this idea is that it may turn out to be a good way to convert heat generated by solar energy into usable electricity. As it has already been pointed out, there is a significant amount of energy stored in water vapor that is heated just a few degrees. Most conventional solar based systems that heat water, heat that water from a liquid state to a gaseous state. That takes a lot of energy, and a certain portion of the heat is lost in the inefficiency of the heating mechanism.
If a vortex only requires a heat differential of a few degrees, then you've eliminated a certain portion of the inefficiency. The question will be whether or not the conversion from convection to electricity is efficient. This may be a simple case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but it's interesting enough to follow through on.
Another King-Kong-sized dupe. It is really the time now to get rid of Slashdot editors because the quality of their work simply sucks!
/. about 50 days ago. Total bullshit, the guy is a lunatic, who has esoteric ideas about storms that thermal-control themselves via electric discharge and replace atomic reactors and similar flat-earth "science". One would think geeks are more plausible than to be fooled by hoaxes that make "intelligent design" pale in comparison.
The same junk was on
Down with stupid editors, who always favour bullshit and never host interesting stories, like:
"In soviet russia, squirrels eat dog!"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm
Already done in 1999 in Mystery Men!
He's using heat to create a vortex, perhaps creating a permanent storm and using it to power windmills around the periphery would be better. Storms sustain themselves due to both the shadow they create and the moisture release. The moisture release would be problematic as it isn't always available, so, we'd want to go with the calmer version that just works via shadow.
What if we put large reflective films in an elliptical orbit that causes one of the reflectors to stay precisely between the sun and a spot in a desert each day. The shadow cast would create a cool area where air would sink, flow outward from the center, be reheated, and rise, essentially an artificial storm. The power concentration factor would be less than a tornado and thus safer to work with.
Essentially, this is just another way to implement a solar collecting satellite. The satellite materials may be cheaper, requiring less active control, and rather than sending concentrated heat beams down using a film formed into a focusable dish, a less weaponizable / dangerous method of cooling an area is being used.
When I was in 8th grade, our teacher brought in a tornado machine that she had built at home. It is really a very simple project to do, and it actually works. Here are two sites that show some working examples. http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/tornbox.html http://www.tornadoproject.com/cellar/workshop.htm The second site seems to be more like what this inventor is trying to do. Most of the other tornado machines found on the internet use fans to produce suction. However, it is not necessary to use fans, simply haveing warm water will work well enough. Our teacher added a large tube to the top of the tornado box to produce a chimney effect, adding more strengh to the updraft. It was not necessary to heat the water to the boiling point. We used dry ice to generate the mist to show off the vortex.
f=DW^(phi)/7
where phi is the ratio obtained from the Fibonacci series, and DW equates to the number, in space-time of Double-Wides in the area which you wish the vortex to appear
The movements of air around the planet, and the rising of air due to insolation, are "nearly" perpetual motion for our petty human purposes. You are usually not such a defender of conventional viewpoints! Motion that is perpetual over the remainder of the solar system's useable lifespan is perfectly in accord with basic physics.
One interesting concept engendered by an "artifical tornado" is the idea of a solar tower (such as was successfully built in Spain and are currently being built in Australia) with no physical tower structure that can fall down and crush expensive facilities and people. Instead, you just find an area that's nearly hot enough to generate a tornado already and truck in der wunderbox - voila! solar tower without the time and expense of building a giant chimney in a baking wasteland. Startup energy supplied over the same cables used to carry the power out afterwards, just unroll 'em off the back of the truck.
Get enough of these fsckers going and then you'll see some climate modification, ya betcha. Might even be controllable and useful for that purpose (though I imagine politics would prevent).
Difference in temperatures is as important as the amount of energy. there may be a ton of energy available but if all energy is distributed evenly, then there is no flow of energy and no work can be accomplished.
This is not a perpetual motion machine. It draws its energy from either solar radiation, warm industrial water runoff, or from a natural, warm body of water.
The engineering involved will not be easy, that's for sure, but the basic principle involved is not magical. It has more in common with a fair weather waterspout or a dust devil than a regular tornado.
I believe it may be possible to use ideas like this for energy generation, with enough money and study. It may even be possible to use this idea to produce fresh water, if some way of precipitating and collecting the water contained within the vortex can be engineered.
We should not dismiss this out of hand just because it is unorthodox.
I have to say that, knowing what physics I do, the article loses all credibility with me the minute it mentions "centrifugal force," which, in truth, is complete B.S.
Say inertia, say pressure imbalance is the centripetal force, but don't give us that 3rd grade science bullshit.
My 2 cents.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
Let centrifugal_force = cetripidal_force + force_applied_by_tether
There. How is that B.S. ? A system of forces results in a net force, I can name that net force anything I want. It can become the Jerry Seinfeld Force, if I want, instead, I just happen to call it the centrifugal force. I think you're confusing your 10th grade physics teachers comments about how "there is no real force applied called the centrifugal force". Fine, in a Newtonian sense, he's right, the net result of forces is a virtual force and not real. But, then again, outside Netwonian realms, classical Netwonian force is itself the net result of other forces, so it's hardly unique to the centrifugal force to be a virtual.
Here, read this and stop acting outraged just because your schooling teaches you so.
I'm sick of reading "funny" posts.
The quantity of mechanical energy which could be produced in the atmosphere is 6000 times greater than the mechanical energy produced by humans.
Well, yes, but is that either surprising or remotely useful? I mean, the sun produces millions of times more energy than we could ever possibly use (at source), but harnessing that energy is the tricky bit. The oceans contain massive amounts of water, but that is unlikely to prevent global water shortages in some of our lifetimes. And if we extracted all the available energy from moving air, worldwide, do we think this might have some interesting side effects?
Virtually serving coffee
"what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?" ... ok it's official Slashdot's standards for news editing are somewhere around that of a 2 year old's.
Well what would happen? Considering the whole thing is precariously engineered to take place inside of a giant cylinder, IF it did somehow jump out of it's container, it would no longer have the precise input conditions to be a tornado and would immediately break up.
Tornados require massive thunder cells to power them, they don't usually just take place in the metaphoric vacuum of atmospheric conditions. This isn't Doc Oct. and his crazy chain reaction sun we're talking about here.
The proper placement of tin can single and double wides should act as a catalyst for the formation of tornandos.
A dup of a pseudoscience story that got torn aport shortly afterwards.
I commend thee, editors.
Muahahaha. Phase 1 of my secret plan to dominate the world is almost complete!
I'm no meteorologist but I think, unless the vortex is kept very, very clean, he will end up generating a collosal static charge (e.g., lightning). How is his machine going to address lighting strikes? On a somewhat unrelated note... I think this could be a grand concept for harvesting energy from other solar bodies (providing it has a source of heat of course).
The vortex system described is nothing more than a very inefficient solar power collector.
What a joke. Invest your money in researching higher efficiency solar cells. There's no need for this Rube Goldburg contraption that sits between the solar power and the generation of the electricity.
The effort required to get a stable vortex going will prevent any profitability. How much energy will have to be added to the system to start it, and to ensure that the heat supply at the bottom is strong enough and continuous?
Even natural tornadoes don't last for very long, and they would die faster if they didn't move. The movement ensures they don't deplete their heat source nearly instantly.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
He is not proposing building a tower, rather the tornado IS the tower, with walls of wind as it were.
Not that it really sounds feasible to me anyhow.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?
Um, I'll tell you what happens. We finally have a response to Canadians who bitch at us Americans about sending pollution their way.
Tokyo Desaster department had this for years!
Though the seemed to lack the competence needed in the recent past. For example they mixed up arrival dates for a martian invasion with the recent godzilla attack a few month ago!
Don't even mention their lack of mechas resulting in mothra becoming a maniac depressive, since he had barely any resistance.
Maybe they should take a closer look at their new Orleans Counterpart which pulled of some real impressive havoc this year.
I'm sick of these polluting non-funny messages.
Pretty easy... it'd suck!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I would say I'm sufficiently familiar with the power of vortices. I'm not convinced he's found a legitimate way around the laws of thermodynamics. For example, what does the flow rate of the "warm" water need to be to sustain the vortex? Presumably it will vary according to the dimensions of the vortex container and the desired velocity of the vortex. Even using the energy "from warm water" or from the sun incurs transport costs.
Even if we don't generate artificial tornadoes, this chamber architecture sounds like it could be adapted to enhance the efficiency of normal wind turbines and address environmental concerns about turbine blades killing mass quantities of bats and birds.
We are the 198 proof..
If I'm understanding this right, this would be able to draw on the energy contained in warm water. But, as far as I can see, warm water, at least on the level of industrial use, simply doesn't contain that much energy.
_ (volume) ) says that a medium sized pond contains ~1 million liters, or ~1 billion mL. Water's specific heat is ~4.19. This means that cooling a million liters of water by 10 degrees C would net about 42 billion joules (4.2 x 10^10). That sounds like a lot of energy, but, again, according to Wikipedia, that's less than a megawatt-day (the amount of energy produced by a megawatt plant in a day).
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude
Do large-scale industrial processes heat so much waste heat that they can constantly heat pond or lake-sized bodies of water?
...to just install wind turbines in trailer parks?
I disagree!... The sun isnt renewable :P Its not like we can pop another battery in and off we go for another million years. Of course, its not like it will run out of energy any time soooon...
Sea water cooled thermal power stations have been around for a long time, and their solutions to not heating up big of ocean have been simply to channel the outlet water for some distance until it get cold before it gets dumped into the sea. Why not do the same here if there is any excess hot water?
We all know this is just the first step of many to utilizing artificial quantum singularities for power.
To Romulus, and onward!
Hey, now we can travel to Oz at will!!
Follow the yellow brick road!
Follow the yellow brick road!
Follow the yellow brick road!
Follow follow follo...What?
Oh Sorry.
When I rule the world, I'll have squads of flame throwers fanned out around me, and for me, winter shall cease to exist
Sounds like an interesting idea for a renewable energy source, but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?
Run.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
This sounds like it came out of a really bad episode of Sliders.
You use solar cells if you want a small power source that isn't on the grid, if you are a power authority that wants a small cheap demonstration unit the requires almost now planning for PR purposes (eg. hey look guys, we're green - you could almost run a refrigerator of this thing!), or if you are a nuclear power advocate looking for an expensive alternative energy to compare against since hydro undercuts you by a mile.
Wikipedia's entry leaves out a lot of information.
This site (called "Three Mile Island Alert") provides 6 numbered points and then goes on to explain in detail how each point is a safety issue.
It's short, direct and informative. I recommend you give it a look. Wired's article on this reactor design mentioned almost no risks
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I once saw a CNN news report describing the damage from tornadoes to a mobile home manufacturing facility!
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
An energy related story on slashdot and the researchers don't seem to be claiming that they have violated the laws of thermodynamics or have discovered a new type of nuclear physics! No magic stickers either!
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
The point that the parent poster is trying to make is that cars need a fairly compact source of energy to run. Present battery technology does not allow us to store electrical energy at the same (energy) density as the chemical energy in gasoline. Biodiesel, having a similar energy density to gasoline, is a much more viable technology in this regard. Also biodiesel, and its corn based relative, ethanol, have the advantage of requiring minimal modifications to current engines. Thus a switch to biodiesel/ethanol would create less waste than a switch to all-electric cars.
The advantage to switching to electric cars is that electricity is easy to generate in a centralized location and is easy to send long distances. Thus, with a switch to electric cars, one would only have to worry about the efficiency of a few thousand power stations, versus worrying about the efficiency of millions of cars.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Hey My CPU gets really HOT!
So maybe a little mini tornado stuck inside my computer case would contribute to the power grid!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This could be really useful in Chicago where the buildings seem to natually channel the wind into small corridors. Just get a few turbines setup in the streats and you're good to go.
Let's hope we can avoid these twisters, we've still got a couple days until the next slide...
I vaguely remember a French/belgian scifi comic book precisely about this topic: making tornadoes for good or evil and what happens when they become uncontrollable. Schould be one of these (horrible site, click english then comic), can anyone tell me which one?
You're right!
I think we should turn the Sun down a bit and move the Earth closer to save the Sun's fuel. I mean, 5 billion years may not be long enough. We have to think of the children!
However, I kind of like using the mine shaft walls -for containment- til it dawned on me that all that energy coming up out of the shaft might would cause a shaft implosion. At least you got your thinking cap on.
biggest problem is going to be building a 6KM tall tower
He's not suggesting building a tall tower at all, just a reasonably short ground station to get it started and to harness the energy. The idea is that the vortex itself will act as a virtual pipe. The warm air would rise within the low pressure tube of the vortex, just like the force driving a natural tornado.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference, but in practice this scheme aint bloodly likely. Heh.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The allure of decadent capitalism.
More accurately, we broke up a semi-empire into constituent countries. Russia still exists. The CCCP doesn't.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
What would be the longterm results of these heat pumps warming the earth's upper atmosphere? Would it hinder natural thunderstorm development around the world if the temperature lapse rates were lower? Would the rain forests dry up from lack of rain??? Better notify a protest group before this guy wrecks the planet!