I could be wrong but I think everyone here would be well aware of the relative comparison?
Thinking that pipes would needed to deliver the water would not be a mistake made by most of the people who can find the US on a map I think. On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is somewhat off topic, but I found an interesting document describing > the largest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated: > > http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html > > It produced a 50 MT blast. It was 8 m long and weighed 27 tons. It was > dropped from a Tu-95 airplane. > > It was detonated in 1961 for no particular reason. Khrushchev just felt > like showing the capitalists what the Soviets could pull off, after a 2-year > "de facto moratorium" on bomb testing. There is no practical military use > for a bomb of this size. > > This is an interesting illustration of the power of fusion compared to > other sources of energy. Anyone can cause an explosion of this size merely > by setting off 50 million tons of TNT, but that takes up much more space and > it weighs 1.9 million times more. This illustrates the energy density of > fusion. > > The bomb was originally intended to be 100 megaton but Sakharov decided to > reduce the yield, so it may be that a 27 ton object can produce 4 million > times more than a chemical device, or even more than that. Although TNT does > not have particularly good energy density compared to gasoline or coal, so > the comparison is somewhat skewed. > > In the book I estimated that D2 can produce roughly 7.6 million times more > energy per gram than gasoline. Heavy water has a lower ratio because it is > mostly oxygen. > > People have little notion of what these numbers mean. During the recent > discussion of cold fusion at the CBS "60 Minutes" website, some people > speculated about how much it would cost to install heavy water pipes under > streets and in buildings, to deliver fuel for the central heater furnaces, > for example. I pointed out that you could deliver all of the fuel you need > for a year with an eyedropper; you don't need pipes. No distribution system > is needed. All fuel will be build into the machinery, the way battery acid > is today. > > - Jed > >
