waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day
That actually makes the data complex a 16 gigawatt thermal load project, the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said.
Those bombs would have about 14kt tnt equivalent each. tnt has about 4.18MJ/kg, so 4.18TJ/kt. 16GW over a day is 1.5PJ, so we have 330 kt per day.
This comparison will surely be useful to all designers of orion-drive style nuclear combustion power-plants.
2 Comments
Redjard@reddthat.com · 7 pts · 86d
Incidentally, tnt is about a tenth the energy density of the densest hydrocarbons, so this should take at least 30 thousand tons of oil or gas per day. And emit CO₂ on that scale. Probably more.
anyhow2503@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 86d
That's nothing compared to the 40GW ludicrousscale datacenter I'm proposing. To put it into perspective: that's more than 4 O'Learycenters. Now, who wants in? 😎