Burning Water

This story seems to be doing the rounds, with the implication that a chap named John Kanzius seems to have invented a perpetual-motion machine. Of course, he doesn't quite come out and say so, but here, see for yourself:

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.
John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.
The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Obviously, if salt water really could be used as a fuel, then you have a perpetual-motion machine. You just burn the fuel, run a turbine, and generate (presumably) more than enough electricity to power the little radio transmitter you need to make it all happen.

Except, well, it ain't gonna happen. For one thing, they're not burning water, they're burning hydrogen. And they're using salt water. How do you get hydrogen out of salt water? Electrolysis. And I'm pretty sure that some kind of electrolysis is what's happening here. The thing is, the energy output of electrolysis, from the burning of hydrogen, is lower than the energy input of electrolysis. And I'm quite sure that the same thing is going on here: the energy needed to run the radio is greater than the energy one could generate from burning the hydrogen.

Anyway, if you really needed proof that this whole idea is going nowhere fast, just read down a bit further:

Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

If research funding were coming from Silicon Valley, home of the Green Bubble, I might just take this seriously. If no one in the private sector is interested, and the researchers are trying to get Defense to pay for it instead, you know nothing's going to come of this.

(By the way, the idea of burning water reminded me of Greek fire. No one knows exactly how the Greeks managed to make this awesome weapon which only burned harder when it came in contact with water, but I'm pretty sure that radio waves were not involved.)