Could salt water fuel cars?

I haven't been so fabulous lately. My wallet keeps shrinking and shrinking. Have you been to the gas pumps lately? Yeah? I know what you mean. Those numbers keep climbing. But it's not so expensive to feel my car because I drive any seven. Well, I drive a big old Honkin Volvo and it uses gas like you would not believe. Uh. Let's think about this though. I mean, what if you could put something else besides gas in your car to power, you know, like sand or air, something that would be nice,

would be nice? What about saltwater? What do you talk about? That's crazy? No, it's not crazy. Really. Have you heard of this guy named John Kansias. You have okay, so you have read the article. That's great, Thanks for that. All right, well let's tell the people out in podcast LAMB what we're talking about. This guy named John Kanzius

is this retiree in Florida. He's a retired radio broadcast engineer, and he came up with this thing called a radio frequency generator RFG is right, and basically what it does is it takes radio waves and condenses them into a beam and it's got all that has actually three applications that they found so far, but one of them came about when Kansias was tinkering with trying to desalinate water, salt water, which could solve the global thirst crisis, right, yeah,

because not everyone has access to clean water, actually to the tune of about two billion people, I understand. Yeah. Uh So he was trying to desalinate water using his RFG and he had the little box trained on a test Cuba saltwater, and he noticed that it sparked, which is fairly unusual for water. Water does and burn. On the contrary, water actually puts out fire exactly. So Kansis has a little bit of this mad scientist spent to him.

You know, he's a very curious fellow, and he likes the paper towel and turns the RFG facing the test tube agin and he touches the paper towel to the water, and rather than the paper towel being put out by the water, the paper towel exactly it basically it caught the water on fire. And on fire it was. It was burning it about three thousand degrees fahrenheit. It was a pretty serious flame. Actually, yeah, so well, how does

this convert to fuel for our cars? Well, I'll tell you. Basically, what Kanzius did inadvertently was to separate water into its components, you know, hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecules. Basic science. We're all there, and we've known for a while that you can use hydrogen as fuel. You can create an electric charge from it, or you can burn it in a combustion. Is hold on because hydrogen fuel is potentially dangerous, right,

I mean, look at the Hindenberg that exploded. Actually, the Hindenberg has been kind of latched onto by people who aren't all about hydrogen e g. The big oil companies. Uh, that's that's kind of a fallacy. Actually, the Hindenberg explosion. It was a blimp held aloft by hydrogen. The static spark caught the hydrogen on fire um and thirty seven people ended up dying. The problem is is thirty five

of those people died by jumping to their deaths. Most of the people, actually all of the people who are on board the passenger compartment who stayed aboard, landed safely and unharmed. And that's because hydrogen is actually the most lightweight of all the elements, and so it floated upwards. It's lighter than air exactly, and it burned upward actually

too away from the passenger compartment. That's not to mention that the Hindenberg's outer skin was coated in a rocket fuel and a really highly flammable Yeah, that wasn't too conducive, it was. So the Hindenburg is probably not the best thing to point to to say hydrogen fuel's dangerous, right,

It's it's not that dangerous. The problem with this type of hydrogen fuel, salt water fuel, essentially, is that it has a negative net energy ratio, and so to create this type of salt water fuel, you're actually putting in more energy than what you're getting out exactly, and what's

the point. I mean, speaking strictly from an energy standpoint, you might as well just use the gasoline that you get this gas gallons worth of energy from, rather than say, using a gallon to get a half a gallon's worth of energy from. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. You can't get something from nothing, And Cansius isn't the only person to run into this stumbling block. Hydrogen could be a really legitimate fuel. I mean, it packs a

real punch and its emissions are nothing but water vapor essentially. Yeah, so it's probably the cleanest burning fuel. I mean, the only other thing that's cleaner is electricity, and if you follow electricity back to its origin, electricity is created by burning coal. So really hydrogen would be cleaner. But there's that negative net energy ratio and keeps stopping up. When are we going to figure this out? I don't know, but I've written a couple of articles on it so far.

One is a good salt water fuel cars and the other is is hydrogen fuel dangerous? And they're both pretty interesting. You can read on both on how Stuff Works dot com dot com. And I was taking no guests to Get there for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you