imagine a giant steel container. A hollow sphere, say 5 miles in circumference filled with water. In the center you set of an H-Bomb. The H bomb vaporizes the water and now you have a giant sphere with steam at very high pressure. Then release the steam to power generators.
I know there is no practical way to build a sphere to contain such an explosion. But say we had some type of exotic material that could. And the material was a good insulator so that the heated steam would not radiate the heat from the steam through the material as a metal would. Would using an H bomb to vaporise vast quantities of water to build a giant steam engine be a good energy source?
Is there any way to calculate how many megawatts of energy could be obtained from a 1 megaton H bomb converting its heat energy to steam?
the above was supposed to be a new topic. I messed up and posted as a reply. Not sure how the subject was changed. I’ll notify a mod to have it removed from this thread.
From here 1 MT = 1.16 Billion KWH. A large power plant might be 1GW, so at 100% efficiency, your bomb will produce as much electricity as a power plant does in 48 days.
While a nuclear explosion does create heat (point in fact, that’s largely all it creates, from what I can tell), it’s most likely going to be overkill. Attempting to superheat water past a certain point is pointless, and hence a waste of energy. Since the temperature is going to drop off as a ratio of the distance from the center of the blast, there’s no way to heat everything at optimal efficiency even if you make the blast material small enough to not be insane overkill.
The recharge time between blasts is going to be immense. If you want to automate the process, then essentially you’re talking about a nuclear-bomb powered internal combustion machine. In that case you’re rather go with existing technology and use pistons that are being directly pushed by the blast (maybe filling the chamber with something that is harder to vaporize than water).
Each blast is going to destroy a bunch of equipment (i.e. what turns the radioactive material into a bomb), which is adding extra cost on top of the cost of the nuclear material.
It’s been proposed before-- My memory is telling me by General Groves, who never found a use for nukes that he didn’t like. But I can’t remember enough details to Google on.
Let’s imagine that we had imaginary material that would be used with imaginary technology to handle imaginary engineering in an imaginary process. Would this have practical uses?
In a mad-scientist way, this is entirely do-able. In a very mad-scientist sort of way. The trick is to have two huge chambers and the blast pushes the water from one to the other, through turbines. Then you detonate a nuke in the second chamber and push the water back through another turbine. Much like pistons, really.
But this would be very inefficient. Not only in the process itself, but it requires a vast amount of energy to create the H-bomb in the first place. And fissionable material is rare and expensive.
Tritium is not particularly rare but is expensive. But I did mean fissionable, not fusionable. You need a fission bomb as the initiator for a fusion bomb. U-235 is very rare indeed, and is expensive to separate from the more common U-238, and you need a nuclear reactor to produce Plutonium.
