Artificial Tornadoes

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Posted by samzenpus on Sunday December 4, 2005 @05:30AM from the turn-on-the-weather-machine dept.

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?"

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Conservation of Energy by quanticle · 2005-12-04 05:33 · 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?

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1. Re:Conservation of Energy by TubeSteak · 2005-12-04 06:11 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Why are they limited to waste heat from coal or gas burning plants?
  
  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.
  
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Great for Electricity but... by PlayfullyClever · 2005-12-04 05:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...

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1. Re:Great for Electricity but... by paterthorn · 2005-12-04 05:40 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Well if generating electrical power becomes trivial enough it would probably be easy to mass produce hydrogen via electolysis to be used to vehicle fuel.
2. Re:Great for Electricity but... by maswan · 2005-12-04 05:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And every time someone comes up with the idea of electric cars, I usually see here the argument that there is no point, because "electricty is made by burning oil anyway"...
  
  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.
3. Re:Great for Electricity but... by FLEB · 2005-12-04 06:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Well, that or people getting happy about having a nuclear power plant in their back yard.
  
  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.
  
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4. Re:Great for Electricity but... by mesocyclone · 2005-12-04 09:18 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  TMI did almost zero environmental damage. The only real damage was to the stockholders and ratepayers, because a very expensive plant had to be shut down.
  
  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.
  
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Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic by KDR_11k · 2005-12-04 05:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yeah, you know, like how burning coal never returns more energy than you used to ignite it...

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Runaway tornados? I think not.. by shbazjinkens · 2005-12-04 05:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
"What happens if..." by heatdeath · 2005-12-04 05:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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.

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1. Re:"What happens if..." by heatdeath · 2005-12-04 05:54 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  "what happens if a nuclear reactor blows up?", call me stupid, but why is this a stupid question?
  
  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.
  
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Similar to Australia 1km tower. by Bananatree3 · 2005-12-04 05:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Slashdot Submissions Must End With Stupid Question by stevesliva · 2005-12-04 06:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

Don't waste your time on the gems that end many Slashdot stories.

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Re:Spin Cycle by putko · 2005-12-04 06:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

There's energy coming in the system though, right? The sun heats the air on the bottom.

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.

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Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic by Aladrin · 2005-12-04 06:57 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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Re:Natural disasters on demand! by SilverspurG · 2005-12-04 10:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

it would be a major violation of Federal laws, including The Constitution
Funny how that pesky Constitution gets in the way when we want to help victims of a massive disaster but it's never much of a problem when we want to suck the money out of their wallets from behind closed doors.

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