From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 12:11:44 MST
The Times
How egg-beater at sea could end drought and war
By Anthony Browne, Environment Editor
FIRST, people danced in circles, then meteorologists tried sprinkling crystals
in the clouds. Now one of Britain’s leading inventors has been given a
government grant to develop the world’s first rainmaker machine. Professor
Stephen Salter, the Edinburgh University engineer renowned for “Salter’s
ducks” which made energy out of waves, believes that his wind-driven cloud
maker could finally give man control over the weather and bring agriculture to
the deserts. Done on a large enough scale, he claims, it could reverse the
advance of deserts, stop sea levels rising and end the Middle East conflict.
The rainmaker uses wind power to drive a 200ft high turbine that sucks water
out of the sea, and turns it into water vapour through nozzles, spraying it
out into the atmosphere, creating clouds. Professor Salter, 62, dismisses the
incredulity of many colleagues. “They said you couldn’t make ships out of
steel. They said Marconi’s radio waves couldn’t broadcast beyond the horizon.
The Establishment is almost always wrong,” he said.
He has persuaded the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to
take his idea seriously enough to award a £105,000 development grant.
The rain makers, described as looking like giant egg-beaters, would be based
on catamarans and placed off the coast of desert land. They could be placed
where they were most needed, depending on the weather patterns.
They would not work in areas that were too dry because the artificial clouds
would never generate the critical mass needed. They would be used in areas
where there were already some clouds but not enough to produce rain.
The machine uses an existing design known as a Darius turbine, a vertical axis
turbine that spins around driven by the wind. The turbine blades have water
pipes inside them, with an inlet just below the surface of the sea. The
centrifugal force of the spinning blades sucks the water out of the sea and
propels it nearly 200ft up inside the blades. It is then forced out of
nozzles, creating a spray that turns to vapour. The salt from the sea water
crystallises out and falls back to the sea.
The professor calculates that the machine would produce a cubic metre of water
for one fifth of a US cent, one thousandth the cost of water produced by
electrical desalination of sea water.
Israel is dependent on the West Bank occupation, he says, because it provides
40 per cent of its water. The rain maker could end that dependency and help to
end the conflict. He also calculates that if hundreds of thousands of machines
were used for many years they would transfer so much water from the sea to the
land that they would reduce sea levels by up to 3ft, reversing the rising
levels caused by global warming.
“Salter’s ducks”, which bob up and down on the sea producing electricity from
waves, generated huge public interest in the 1970s but were killed off when
the Government pursued nuclear power. Professor Salter realises his new
invention may also come to nothing, but insists it is worth a try.
--
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com >
Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com >
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