Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[Joeviocoe]

dennisp wrote: Joe I think ikanreed knows the difference. His point is that if they were able to maintain that power output for 1/8 second, it would be the the same energy as Hiroshima. They actually maintain it for a much shorter span of time, but the comparison still gives a good impression of the power level they’re talking about.

I am not a fan of that comparison. It is misleading more than “a good impression”.

Here’s a better impression. Hiroshima bomb was 60 trillion joules, NIF shot was 2 million joules. That is a difference of 30 million times! There is no “maintaining” for anywhere near a second.

Comparing pulse power machines that operate at infinitesimal smaller pulses than a “second”… to a constant power device that would and could run for seconds minutes and/or days… is, well, nonsense.

There is no lower limit to time. It gets smaller and smaller. The reason why I think that comparison is misleading, is because it plays on some people’s inability to comprehend things too large or too small. We perceive the World of the medium. – Alan Watts.

The fallacy:
“So the NIF Laser fires in a couple of nano seconds, that is small. 1/8th of a second is small too. They must be comparable”. The difference between 4.5 nanoseconds and 1/8 of a second … is the same difference between 1 second, and about a year.

Even if you wanted to, and the Lasers could sustain several minutes of 500 trillion watts…, the entire NIF facility, could not hold that much energy in all of their storage systems. They would literally need about 15 Thousand Tons of TNT to store that energy chemically. Or an actual mass of nuclear material (in which case would be an exact comparison).