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Boiling Water In Space

Actually I think that's 5 TeraWatts....:eek:

Yep, 5 terawatts.

To put that into prespective,

5 terawatts over an hour (5 terrawatthours) is:

4.3 Megatons - 500 times stronger than the bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Less than a 10th the size of the largest bomb ever made.

It's about the number calories used by the entire population of China every day.

Equal to 136 million gallons of gasoline -45% of the amount used by the US every day.

It's also enough electricty to power NYC for a year.
 
Okay, so scrap all the ideas save two. How feasible is it to beam energy from space to earth in a usable form? This seems far fetched to me, but if it will one day be a reality than the second idea of building energy collectors in space is also good, just perhaps in a better form.

Can anyone here speak to the possibility of the first idea?
 
Okay, so scrap all the ideas save two. How feasible is it to beam energy from space to earth in a usable form? This seems far fetched to me, but if it will one day be a reality than the second idea of building energy collectors in space is also good, just perhaps in a better form.

Can anyone here speak to the possibility of the first idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite

Yes, I know it's Wikipedia but there are a ton of references, and TGT seems to be long gone from here (which I can well understand).
 
OOps, how about some salt for that foot?

Submarine and surface shiip reactors go up to 500 MW. A reactor that was transportable by aircraft ran at 1.5 MW output and kept one of the Antarctic stations powered for a decade.

So, where are your numbers, Taccy?

My space turbine will go up to 5 million MW.

That's 5 gigawatts. It only takes 1.21 gigawatts to make a Delorean time travel. :guffaw: Seriously, that's an order of magnitude more juice than a commercial nuke plant puts out. Have you ever seen how much waste heat a 500 Mw plant puts out? You'd have to have thousands of acres of radiator to lose that heat. The ISS has 1680 square feet of radiator for it's heat load.



Correct. Nine Mile Nuclear Power Plant in New York used Lake Ontario for cooling when they had the first two reactors installed. When the third unit was built they had to reject the waste heat via cooling tower because the additional heat from Nine Mile II would have raised the surface temp of the lake in the local region too high. Not to boiling but enough to upset what is effectively a cold-water (as opposed to non-tropical) ecology.
 
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