Not dumb at all, but very perceptive.

Actually, by building a dam with a hydroelectric power station, and using the energy freely received from the water-environment to power hydroturbines driving generators, the ENTIRE HYDROELECTRIC POWER SYSTEM ITSELF IS OVERUNITY AND IN FACT WHEN OPERATING IN THAT MODE EXCLUSIVELY IT IS COP = INFINITY.  The operator himself doesn't have to input the energy to drive the generator that powers the whole entourage.

So that is why I say the question was very perceptive.

How many electrical engineers or journal articles have you ever seen that bluntly stated that silly fact?   But it's true.

The difference in the hydroelectric station (and a windmill driven generator, or a solar cell array power system) is that "fuel" is not consumed, so we don't have to "pay for fuel". Of course, we do have to pay for other things, but not for the input energy itself.  The prevailing practice is to consider "furnishing fuel" to make the energy is somehow directly paying for furnishing the input energy. Not rigorous at all, but that seems to be the handy dandy practice.

The nuclear power station, of course, gets its energy in a different way from some special mass (fuel). So it is a variation of the "use of fuel" approach, just nuclear fuel and nuclear reaction instead of combustion reaction. Nonetheless, its major output is pure heat, to heat the boilers to make steam, to drive steam turbines driving the generators. So the fuel itself is a "lot more powerful", and of quite different nature than simple oxidation (combustion).  The difference is that the operator doesn't have to pay for the energy stored in the fuel, but has to pay to dig out the fuel, process it, haul it to the site, etc. where the fuel is to be consumed and liberate its energy (by either combustion or nuclear reactions).

Problem is, those statements above are the CONVENTIONAL view, or very close to it.  The real divergence comes when one recognizes that all EM fields, EM potentials, and every joule of EM energy actually comes from the local vacuum, extracted by the source charges in the devices and in the circuits. All the rest of it is to manipulate those charges, move them around, force them apart, force them back together, force them back apart, etc.

That is still so radical a concept to the electrical engineers that they cannot accept it. Even many physicists cannot accept it (I dialog with some well-known ones who cannot accept it, e.g.).

But if one believes particle physics, quantum field theory, and broken symmetry of opposite charges, it is true.

Maybe 30 years from now it will be accepted and considered trivial.  Just now, it isn't very much accepted at all, and is in some quarters bitterly opposed "to the death" so to speak.

Ah well!  Nobody ever said it was easy.  Sadly, many of these same fellows still do not clearly understand the difference between efficiency of an EM system and COP of the same system. Many still assume that COP>1.0 is impossible, even though the lowly solar cell has COP = infinity, even with a poor efficiency of typically about 17% or so.

Cheers,

Tom

Tom

Dumb question.

Following on from the logic of the Atomic Hydrogen process, aren't nuclear power plants, atomic and hydrogen bombs also legitimate overunity processes?

Best

Tony