How much more energy would you get if you fused uranium?
Comment on logs are for quitters
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Uranium generates that energy by fission. The hydrogen in sugar could generate huge amounts of energy if fused.
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Using the rule of thumb, anything heavier than iron requires energy input to fuse. So you lose energy fusing uranium.
davidgro@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Serious answer: A huge negative amount. Anything above iron requires energy to fuse (which is why it produces energy from fission.) and I’m pretty sure nothing with 184 protons could be stable enough to count as being produced - the nuclei be more smashed apart than merging at that point.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In alphabetical order.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Those are fission. Fusion bombs don’t fuse uranium. They use a fission bomb to fuse Lithium.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For that matter, even the Nagasaki bomb (“Fat Man”) didn’t use Uranium at all - its fuel was Plutonium.
frezik@midwest.social 2 months ago
Oh, they do, but not as the primary or secondary. You can wrap depleated uranium around the core to capture fast neutrons that are leftover from the rest of the process. Changing the number of layers is how you can dial in a desired yield.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Damnit, you’re right and I’m wrong!
davidgro@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s fissed, not fused.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I stand corrected, because I done forgetted.
nialv7@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s disappointing that natural selection didn’t figure out fusion.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It figured out photosynthesis instead. Why do your own fusion when you can just take advantage of the fusion that’s already happening?
ryannathans@aussie.zone 2 months ago
There is still time
DoYouNot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean, technically it has.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
It’s good it didn’t, otherwise it’s possible that all the hydrogen in the ocean would be fused into helium by now
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
On the fusion planet: “Man, can you imagine if early life figured out how to make poisonous oxygen gas?”
LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 2 months ago
*in a silly high voice due to all the helium
Trollception@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
We have fusion (hydrogen) bombs. We just haven’t figured out how to maintain and efficiently harness it.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
and all would generate the same if thrown to something capable of lossless e=mc^2 conversion (maybe a black hole)
sga@lemmings.world 2 months ago
sadly black holes go to something like 42% conversion (source: some minute physics video i think)
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
That’s quite interesting. Is it because of the light produced when the materia starts spinning around in the accretion disk in very high speeds? I doubt hawking radiation would do anywhere near that much
sga@lemmings.world 2 months ago
No, It is actually the light produced that we can actually use as a energy source, the limiting thing is, before completely loosing its kinetic energy to frictional heat, stuff falls into black hole, from where we can not get anymore energy back. If black hole is stationary, then its 6%, and if its spinning (and assuming the fastest spinning theoretically possible) - 42% (spinning black holes are smaller and have smaller radius of no-return
Redex68@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Whilst I get your point, their point is still valid in the sense that you just can’t extract that energy from gasoline in a more efficient manner than just burning it. For practical purposes, gasoline truly is that much less energy dense.
Suoko@feddit.it 2 months ago
For comparison:
- Chemical combustion of uranium: ~4.7 MJ/kg
- Nuclear fission of uranium-235: ~83.14 TJ/kg (or $ 83.14 \times 10^6 , \text{MJ/kg} $)
qaz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Do you have a Lemmy client that supports mathematical functions?
MBM@lemmings.world 2 months ago
Built-in LaTeX support would be so cool (and not that hard, Mathstodon has it)
Suoko@feddit.it 2 months ago
With ollama, having smart local bots should be easy
qaz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
dalekcaan@lemm.ee 2 months ago
In theory, yes. In practice, of those two only fission is currently viable.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 months ago
If you can do nuclear fusion yea, it’s more efficient. Cold fusion has been a sci Fi thing for a while; they mostly moved on to antimatter-matter annihilation, and ZPE(seems to be a favorite for sg1)
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And this boulder could generate huge amounts of energy if I pushed it up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and let it roll down.
44 upvotes and 0 downvotes for a comment that doesn’t understand that energy density measurements like this tend to measure the useful energy of a system.