Power Q&A: Jamie Hyneman
NEWS: The Discovery Channel mythbuster and weird-energy aficionado tackles algae, grape juice, dirty diapers, and seven other wacky energy-source ideas.
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On the Discovery Channel's MythBusters, Jamie Hyneman slays urban legends with the greatest of ease. Since he's also a weird-energy enthusiast (he once powered a small rocket with a salami), we asked him to help us separate the big ideas from the duds on the energy frontier.
ENERGY SOURCE: Cow manure
HOW IT WORKS: In an anaerobic digester, bacteria break down manure and produce methane, which is trapped and used to generate electricity.
PLAUSIBLE: It's already being used in California. "nasa actually investigated this, because if you're going to Mars and you've got people on board, you've got poo," says Hyneman.
ENERGY SOURCE: Human motion
HOW IT WORKS: Create a "crowd farm" like the Sustainable Dance Club in Rotterdam.
BUSTED: JH: "Go for the babies. Just put them on a little treadmill and let 'em rip."
ENERGY SOURCE: Magnetic motors
HOW IT WORKS: Evangelical entrepreneur Dennis Lee claims his 500%-efficient motors will bring free energy and "an abundance of wealth for worldwide end-times evangelism."
BUSTED: There's no sign the technology actually works, but Lee has gotten rich selling dealerships to true believers. JH: "I've gotten so that I can smell these things a mile away."
ENERGY SOURCE: Unicellular green algae
HOW IT WORKS: Deprived of sulfur and oxygen, they produce high yields of hydrogen.
PLAUSIBLE: JH: "Algae are such basic, simple organisms. If you optimize them, they are going to produce massive quantities of whatever you have tailored them to."
ENERGY SOURCE: Raindrops
HOW IT WORKS: The Atomic Energy Commission uses special plastic to convert raindrops' falling motion into electricity.
BUSTED: JH: "A when-pigs-fly kind of scenario. It's millions of times more efficient to collect hydroelectric power through a dam than raindrop by raindrop."
ENERGY SOURCE: Old tires
HOW IT WORKS: Microwave enthusiast Frank Pringle found that nuking tires in a vacuum creates diesel fuel, combustible gas, carbon black, and high-strength steel.
BUSTED: JH: Tires do contain hydrocarbons, but "it requires a relatively huge amount of energy to do that conversion. I'm a little suspicious of using microwaves."
ENERGY SOURCE: Empty space
HOW IT WORKS: Thomas Bearden says he can use vacuum energy to power a generator.
BUSTED: JH: "The universe is filled with energy, but pulling energy out of a vacuum or something—there's no substance there as far as I'm aware."
ENERGY SOURCE: Grape juice
HOW IT WORKS: NanoLogix uses bacteria to convert Welch's sugar runoff into hydrogen.
PLAUSIBLE: JH: As with algae, "with microbes there is no bottleneck to slow you down."
ENERGY SOURCE: Dirty diapers
HOW IT WORKS: A British company turns poop and plastic from diapers into gas and oil.
BUSTED: JH: "Are you really going to be able to isolate diapers in such huge volumes that you're running your entire country off of gasoline powered by diapers? No."
ENERGY SOURCE: Greenhouse gases
HOW IT WORKS: Los Alamos scientists propose exposing air to potassium carbonate, which absorbs carbon dioxide that is then converted into methanol, gasoline, or jet fuel.
PLAUSIBLE: JH: "How do you come up with the energy to do this conversion? If you can get it from something like sunlight, then there is your free lunch."
Kiera Butler is associate editor at Mother Jones. Ben Whitford freelances for Mother Jones.
Photo: Courtesy of Discovery Channel; Illustration: Otto Steininger
The only bad idea is to poo-hoo ideas. Many great inventions were originally seen as follies.
Such a scheme has very few, very specialised applications - most of the more obvious ones turn out to be spectacularly bad ideas after a little thought, and the rest end up with a minuscule gain for a lot of time, money and effort, which could be put to better use in another form of power generation.
The local energy use from large rooftops might power a lightbulb or two, but again would be minimal unless the weather was really bad, and so you wouldn't want it hooked up to anything you might want to use in normal conditions. Again, the cost and complexity would involve a lot of waste - you'd be better off just using a more common source, and probably less polluting once you consider the infrastructure required for the scheme.
Diapers... again, the sheer effort involved would make the scheme ludicrously impractical - if nothing else, the pollution and energy required to transport the things would be less than the energy gained. You'd be using a large amount of oil or gas and a lot of man-hours to get a tiny amount back.
Thinking outside the box is good, but you really have to start considering scale.
nl, that's not ALWAYS a bad thing. There are many applications in which such a system would be useful. They're just specialised, small-scale and uncommon.
Oh, no, not for the planet. That's not practical at all. No, the way to go in the extremely long term is a dyson sphere - a sphere of solar panels (more or less) surrounding Sol, powering habitats and manufacturing facilities in space, so that we don't have to mess up the ecosystems of any more planets or moons. Hey, with that much energy, we could make a decent start at terraforming somewhere that doesn't currently have one.
Lots of scam artists are selling "power your car with water" systems.
Busted: They "work" by using the car's battery to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, burning that in the engine, and using the engine to move the car, and charge the battery. Another failed perpetual motion machine scheme.
and the inverse idea is also around:
Energy Source: "Clean" Coal
Coal burning powerplants that scrub the carbon dioxide from their emissions, leaving only clean air behind.
Busted: A Powerplant generates its power by burning: oxidizing the carbon in the coal into CO2. Turning the CO2 back to carbon and oxygen is a chemical reaction that will take as much power as released by the original burning. So, this one too, is just a complicated, failed, perpetual motion machine.
www.marshallsystem.com. Check it out.
Get your chemistry straight.
Apart from the fact that that is impossible (even in a frictionless vacuum), what does it have to do with alternative energy?
I've been reading about Hypercapacitors that store huge charges in a few minutes and then 'leak' the discharge at a controllable voltage for hours. Indications are that it can be scaled up to run an automobile. If this is legit, this could be the oil-economy killer. Yep, you'd have to go nuclear and solar thermal to generate the electricity to make this work but if the point of alternative fuels is to power the engine in a car which then is converted to electricity to run most of the appliances then wouldn't it make sense to bypass the 'middleman' (the fuel burning engine) and go straight electric. It's where everything is going anyhow so shouldn't we be investing a few eggs in this basket?
muscle.
I use my common bicycle to get around all over the city and across the country.
What's that? You NEED a car to carry big stuff?
You should see me carry a bed, a bookcase, a couch-swing, or a chipper/shredder on my cargo trailer.
Hey Jamie, can you beat 1500mpg?
http://www.yourbodypower.org