Re: Bad News from the Physics Frontier

Hold on, no offense but you're acting like a physicist :-).
Your figure for the amount of energy from fusing 1 ton of
hydrogen into helium is about 2.6 MegaJoules.  Now, an
engineer :-) would look at that and say "We currently have
power plants that put out thousands of Megawatts, and they
certainly aren't fusing thousands of tons of hydrogen every
second.  I must have goofed."

I double checked and got:

Hydrogen: 1.00794 grams/mole    Helium 4.0026 grams/mole

4 H  -  1 He  =  0.02916 grams/mole of matter converted to energy

1 ton of Hydrogen is 992122.547 moles so there are

(992122.547 moles * 0.02916 grams/mole) = 28930.3 grams of
matter converted to energy.  Or 28.93kg since I hate cgs :-).

Use E= m * c^2 to get

E = (28.93 kg) * (3.0 x 10^11 m/s)^2 = 2.60 * 10^24 Joules

Your figure for the energy consumed by a scout ship accelerating
at 1G for 1 hour, 6.76 E 14 Joules, is correct.

So using the new figure for energy from fusing, this scout ship
will have consumed

[ 6.76 E14 Joules  /  ( 2.60 E24 Joules/ton of H fused)] =
        = 2.6 E-10 tons

or 260 micrograms of Hydrogen fused.  I think we have the
reverse problem!  This process is too efficient!  To burn
(how much does a scout ship hold?) 20(?) tons of hydrogen
in 4 weeks of constant use, we'd have to operate at, oh...
0.0000002% efficiency (within a couple orders of magnitude)
==
John H. Kim
[email removed]
[email removed]