The numbers don’t add up. If you can get 21 billion food calories from total annihilation (which I checked is right), you’d get nowhere near 18 billion food calories from a fusion reaction. Maybe if works if you assume “calories” for the fission reaction means metric calories, since food calories are metric kilocalories.
I hate the way the word “calorie” ended up with two wildly different definitions.
Krauerking@lemy.lol 6 months ago
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.
Oh shoot that would be some wild math to figure out how hungry they all are.
datelmd5sum@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.