Electricity From Salty Water

BuzzSkyline writes "It's possible to produce energy by simply mixing fresh and salty water. Although chemists and physicists have long known about the untapped energy available where fresh water rivers pour into salty oceans — it's equivalent to 'each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high' — the technology for exploiting the effect has been lacking. An Italian physicist seems to have solved the problem with the experimental demonstration of a 'salination cell' that creates power given nothing more than input sources of salty and fresh water. The researcher believes that this renewable, environmentally friendly energy source could be deployed in coastal areas and could provide another addition to the green-tech roster. A paper describing the technology is due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters."

Comments

Quick! Grab all your salt shakers and run to the b

[WolphFang]

Quick! Grab all your salt shakers and run to the bathtub!

Urine Powered Society

[davegravy]

A device that gleans usable energy from the mixing of salty and fresh waters has been developed by University of Milan-Bicocca physicist Doriano Brogioli. If scaled up, the technology could potentially power coastal homes, though some scientists caution that such an idea might not be realistic.

Forget scaling it up. Put one such device in every fresh water toilet bowl.

Re:Economy is a Subset of Ecology

[StikyPad]

I thought our food chain was Sun -> Corn -> Cows/Pigs/Chickens -> Cows/Pigs/Chickens -> Dinner.