[ahecht]

What a lot of you are missing is that this is completely bogus. Yes, he gets a flame from salt water, but the power produced by that flame is only 70% or so of the power required to generate the radio waves. There is simply no significant power stored in salt water.

Don't believe me? Think about it this way:

Mixing hydrogen and oxygen together to make water produces energy. Lots of energy, in the form of heat, light, and if the explosion is big enough, sound. Therefore, in order to split water back into hydrogen and oxygen (which can burn), you have to put in an amount of energy equal to that produced when the hydrogen and oxygen mix. Therefore, no usable net energy is stored by the hydrogen and oxygen in water.

So, maybe it's the dissolved salt that is storing energy. Well, it's true dissolving table salt in water is endothermic, in that it takes energy to make the salt dissolve (and therefore water will cool off slightly after you add salt). However, this effect is very, very small, and since the dissolving salt will at most lower the water temperature a degree or two, the most energy you could get out of separating the salt from the water would be enough to raise the water temperature by a degree or two (not the 3000 degrees this guy was seeing).

Okay, so maybe it's the salt itself that is disassociating into sodium and chlorine and producing energy. However, anyone who has ever mixed sodium and chlorine (hopefully from a distance to avoid the explosion) can tell you that mixing the two to produce salt produces a large amount of energy, and therefore separating the two elements requires a large energy input.

In other words, this is a cool parlor trick, and I can't see what useful purpose this would have. There are simpler ways of converting radio waves into heat.