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?"

Comments

Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic

[0xC0FFEE]

You're missing the idea. The idea is that a tornado is a natural mechanism for evacuating large quantities of energy contained in warm water. Since warm water contains a lot of energy, it could be possible to invest just a little more energy to provoke a tornado and harness the wind power. Also, warm water is heated up by the sun and not by other non-renouvelable energies. It might actually be more efficient than heating water to boiling point (as is done in nuclear/thermal plants) since water is such a good heat capacitor that the difference between warming a little and boiling is huge.

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.

[Plunky]

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 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

[Council]

As a physics major, this is one of my favorite passages in any book:

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits ground. That's all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Re:Conservation of Energy

[CsiDano]

That's a great point, I live in Hamilton Ontario, and I see the flames shooting out the stacks over at Stelco all the time and wonder if that wasted energy source could be used to generate power or if they could recycle the heat for other uses.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[mesocyclone]

Actually, you must get your information only from the mainstream media, without looking at little things like numbers and scientific papers.

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...

[Cyberax]

The main reason Chernobyl still has such a big exclusion area is that nobody wants to live there. There are still some radiation "hot spots" but generaly exclusion area is safe enough to live. There are estimates that it will be fully habitable in 50 years (except for some areas near the power plant).

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.