Meme is referring to nuclear reactors, not complete antimatter annihilation.
Nuclear reactors don’t “burn” everything — most of the matter stays (this is what nuclear waste is). So you can only apply E=mc^2 to the difference in mass, not the mass of the fuel.
The numbers don’t add up. If you can get 21 billion US food calories from total annihilation (which I checked is right), you’d get nowhere near 18 billion food calories from a fusion reaction. Maybe it works if you assume “calories” for the fission reaction means metric calories, since US food calories are metric kilocalories.
I hate the way the word “calorie” ended up with two wildly different definitions.
You know it’s funny, technically a calorie is just a measure of how much energy it takes to heat up 1 gram of water 1° C I never really thought about it but it could totally be applied to other things and nuclear reactor plants that literally just heat up water to spin a turbine would be the perfect thing to measure in calories. So would regular electric plants for that matter. It might just be literally calories.
Oh shoot that would be some wild math to figure out how hungry they all are.
Calories are just a measure of the energy released by a material.
Normally they’re measured by burning the material, so it’s not really accurate to say that you can get that many calories from uranium. On the other hand the whole concept is fucking stupid anyway, because it’s measured by burning the material. Technically, a kilo of dry sawdust has 4800 calories (more than double the daily calorie requirement of the average person).
Picking a higher density of the material just means the one gram would occupy less volume, it doesn’t affect how much energy that gram is equivalent to in terms of E=mc2.
For that calculation, as the equation implies, only the mass matters; a gram of feathers is equivalent to the same amount of energy as a gram of lead for that equation.
Now, this equation is in fact a simplified assumption; if you launch your feather at relativistic speed, then we’re talking
I never got this analysis, doesn’t any material have absurd energy if you break down its very molecules and atoms?
http://www.jaygarmon.net/2010/09/according-to-einsteins-famous-equation.html?m=1
Apparently 21.5 billion calories per gram of matter
Not sure what this meme is getting at, then, since it seems to be significantly undercounting it
Meme is referring to nuclear reactors, not complete antimatter annihilation.
Nuclear reactors don’t “burn” everything — most of the matter stays (this is what nuclear waste is). So you can only apply E=mc^2 to the difference in mass, not the mass of the fuel.
The numbers don’t add up. If you can get 21 billion US food calories from total annihilation (which I checked is right), you’d get nowhere near 18 billion food calories from a fusion reaction. Maybe it works if you assume “calories” for the fission reaction means metric calories, since US food calories are metric kilocalories.
I hate the way the word “calorie” ended up with two wildly different definitions.
Yeah, I looked up energy density assuming fast neutron reactor, and it’s “only” 7 million US food calories.
US calories are equal to the real metric unit of kilocalories. Maybe the meme above used real calories
You know it’s funny, technically a calorie is just a measure of how much energy it takes to heat up 1 gram of water 1° C I never really thought about it but it could totally be applied to other things and nuclear reactor plants that literally just heat up water to spin a turbine would be the perfect thing to measure in calories. So would regular electric plants for that matter. It might just be literally calories.
Oh shoot that would be some wild math to figure out how hungry they all are.
Except that 1 gram of water is at 1 bar. Heating up 1 gram of water from 300°C to 301°C takes 1.38 calories.
Can they really get out THAT many calories from a gram of Uranium?! That’s insane!
I wish I cared more and would verify it
Calories are just a measure of the energy released by a material.
Normally they’re measured by burning the material, so it’s not really accurate to say that you can get that many calories from uranium. On the other hand the whole concept is fucking stupid anyway, because it’s measured by burning the material. Technically, a kilo of dry sawdust has 4800 calories (more than double the daily calorie requirement of the average person).
I also think it’s an interesting choice to use uranium. Wouldn’t osmium be a better choice due to its increased density?
Picking a higher density of the material just means the one gram would occupy less volume, it doesn’t affect how much energy that gram is equivalent to in terms of E=mc2. For that calculation, as the equation implies, only the mass matters; a gram of feathers is equivalent to the same amount of energy as a gram of lead for that equation. Now, this equation is in fact a simplified assumption; if you launch your feather at relativistic speed, then we’re talking