What is the Universe expanding into..

Do you think there was anything before the big bang?

  • I don't think there was anything before the Big Bang

    Votes: 56 12.5%
  • I think something existed before the Big Bang

    Votes: 200 44.7%
  • I don't think the big bang happened

    Votes: 54 12.1%
  • I think the universe is part of a mutiverse

    Votes: 201 45.0%

  • Total voters
    447
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I wouldn't believe a word out of lobbyists for the Nuclear Industry... :D

Beyond that you get a lot of energy. Reason most countries are keen on getting Nuclear Energy is to make bombs. :mad:

Fuel comparison - ENS

Radioactivity was the one thing I was most careful with in the Physics Laboratory. Filthy stuff. Nobody knows what to do with the waste. See Fukushima and Chernobyl. Oh wait. I sound like a tree-hugger... :eek:

I have been continuing to calculate. When I were a lad at College and in charge of lighting and electrics on entertainments, we noticed how 1000 paying punters crammed into our concert hall made the place extremely hot. I calculated that each one was radiating 100W of heat. Well do the sums, that's 100 1 kW electric fires!

Turns out my estimate was spot on. A healthy 70kg student eating and drinking 2000 kilocalories a day is 8370 kJ. Divide by 3600 to convert to kWh and you get 2.325 kWh per 24 hour day. Just about 100W! We are old 100W lightbulbs in energy terms.

But there is more! It is a simple calculation to work out it takes 1260 kilocalories to warm our 70kg bodies to 18C above ambient. This is 5266 kJ. Or about 1.47 kWh.

Now when the cops find a stiff in the boot of someone's car, as often happens in my Michael Connelly crime novels, how do they know the time of death? This is vital for the innocent and guilty suspect's alibi.

You might guess with 1.47 kWh to lose at 100W, about 7 hours. Actually it is about 9 hours to lose half the body heat here, because it's exponential decay. I always wondered. :cool:

Algor mortis - Wikipedia
 
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I wouldn't believe a word out of lobbyists for the Nuclear Industry... :D

Beyond that you get a lot of energy. Reason most countries are keen on getting Nuclear Energy is to make bombs. :mad:

Fuel comparison - ENS

Radioactivity was the one thing I was most careful with in the Physics Laboratory. Filthy stuff. Nobody knows what to do with the waste. See Fukushima and Chernobyl. Oh wait. I sound like a tree-hugger... :eek:

I have been continuing to calculate. When I were a lad at College and in charge of lighting and electrics on entertainments, we noticed how 1000 paying punters crammed into our concert hall made the place extremely hot. I calculated that each one was radiating 100W of heat. Well do the sums, that's 100 1 kW electric fires!

Turns out my estimate was spot on. A healthy 70kg student eating and drinking 2000 kilocalories a day is 8370 kJ. Divide by 3600 to convert to kWh and you get 2.325 kWh per 24 hour day. Just about 100W! We are old 100W lightbulbs in energy terms.

But there is more! It is a simple calculation to work out it takes 1260 kilocalories to warm our 70kg bodies to 18C above ambient. This is 5266 kJ. Or about 1.47 kWh.

Now when the cops find a stiff in the boot of someone's car, as often happens in my Michael Connelly crime novels, how do they know the time of death? This is vital for the innocent and guilty suspect's alibi.

You might guess with 1.47 kWh to lose at 100W, about 7 hours. Actually it is about 9 hours to lose half the body heat here, because it's exponential decay. I always wondered. :cool:

Algor mortis - Wikipedia
Can you calculate the impact of Fukushima and Chernobyl on the Earth's mantle, once they inevitably burn through?
 
Galu said:
The energy release comparison is worth emphasising here:

8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal.
12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil.
24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.

Staggering.

But there is more! :D

With one kilo of enriched Uranium 235 fissioned comes an exciting near kilo of stuff like Strontium 90, Iodine 131 and Caesium 137!

Strontium-90 - Wikipedia
Iodine-131 - Wikipedia
Caesium-137 - Wikipedia

They can't give it away... er, except at Chernobyl and Fukushima and numerous other accidents. :eek:

Fascinating classified film released by the Russians. The biggest bomb ever! Like watching a 1950's Science Fiction B movie. Tsar Bomba weighing in at a cool 50Mt. That's 2000 times Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Quite a clean bomb actually. 97% of the yield was environmentally cleaner Hydrogen bomb technology:

Испытание чистой водородной бомбы мощностью 50 млн тонн - YouTube

I don't know if any Polar Bears or Puffins were harmed in the making of this film.

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia

I learned something most interesting about Good Ol' Iron 56, which is the end product of all nuclear fusion and fission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#Isotopes

In the far future of the universe, assuming that proton decay does not occur, cold fusion occurring via quantum tunnelling would cause the light nuclei in ordinary matter to fuse into 56Fe nuclei. Fission and alpha-particle emission would then make heavy nuclei decay into iron, converting all stellar-mass objects to cold spheres of pure iron.

Not many people know that!
 
I have been calculating again, and google has probably already notified GCHQ of my interest in things Nuclear:

24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.

It takes about 60kg of Uranium 235 to make a bomb. Little Boy at Hiroshima was such a device. About 15 kt of TNT equivalent.

Plutonium 239 is the stuff for me! Only needs 11 kg, and that can be reduced to 6kg with some trickery. Fat Man at Nagasaki was this sort of thing. About 25kT.

Tsar Bomba at 50mt was Russia's answer to Krakatoa. About 1/4 of Krakatoa apparently.

I also examined the World's current plan to get Zero emissions. Very long story and some of it quite improbable IMO.

All about renewable sources of clean energy. A simultaneous attack on multiple greenhouse gases and pollution which are produced by everything we like.

I seriously doubt if anything will come of it except huge profits for big corporations.

Our government can't even run a tax on horrible plastic carrier bags. 10p per plastic bag? It doesn't take a genius to notice that better paper carriers are 3p on eBay. Good for turtles and bad for jellyfish. :)
 
The energy release comparison is worth emphasising here:

8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal.
12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil.
24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.

... I've sort of missed out on a bit of the previous discussion here guys.
What are the prices per kWh at the moment?
Here it's quickly rising because of the cables to Germany and UK, so I've ordered solar cells and a bedrock based heatpump...
 
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