Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)

What happened

Turns out, though, it won’t if you draw power from it fast enough. This seems to be the only practical device built on this principle that is available to the public.

[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The patent made some wild claims about how much you could draw from the device, but the video shows that practical results are somewhat less.

Mechanically, a spinning metal disk has a sodium electrode extremely close to it. You have to connect to the spinning disk.