Nah, zekeman, but hook the back end of the process up to the front to power it, as some people seem to believe is going to happen, and Sadi Carnot may have a few points of contention with the idea.
That's what I was getting at. Plus, Homer Simpson is the source of the 'obeying the law' quote and that makes it even funnier.
The problem is fundamentally what I was getting at in my first post. The water is not a fuel. This process creates a fuel from the water (and some would argue that isn't even true, that the hydrogen is merely an energy storage medium, like a battery), but to do that takes energy input, and you can never get out of it what you pump in. Take gasoline, for instance. The sun and earth have made it, and from our viewpoint, there is a net energy gain when we burn it, but when you look at everything it took to create that fuel, there's a lot more energy that went into making it over time than we get out of it, and we don't really think about that.
Aaaanyway, a chemical bond is a chemical bond. We can nitpick about preferred and ground states, but to get it into or out of those states requires energy flowing into or out of the molecule. Since the whole point of a preferred state is that it's the most energetically favorable state for the molecule, it's pretty safe to start from the viewpoint that on average, without a directed input of energy, a bulk material is statistically going to be in its preferred or ground state. Getting a large number of those molecules into non-preferred states should take extra energy, making the process even less energy favorable.
I light of that, the gist of my argument was that a chemical bond represents a certain amount of energy. Since this process is in essence first breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen, then turning them right back into water, the net energy moved is zero. The minutiae of which process is endothermic or exothermic doesn't really matter because we start with water and end with water. Whatever energy moved into or out of the water to create the hydrogen and oxygen should be equal in magnitude and opposite in flow to the energy moving when the gases recombine to reform the water. Viewing just that reaction, there is no energy added to or removed from the system by splitting the water and recreating it. Of course, this reaction is not spontaneous, so take a step back, and you have the input in the form of RF required to kick it off, and then you get the heat and light put off by burning the hydrogen. The energy is coming from the RF forcing the water to do unnatural things.
Now, if the RF generator were powered by a nuclear process, then we could get a net energy gain due to mass reduction in the nuclear reaction.
Otherwise, I don't see how this possibly works.
