Slashdot Mirror
19 million Amps
deblau writes "On July 27, scientists at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Test Site said they generated a current equal to about four times all the electrical current on Earth. During the few millionths of a second that it operated, the 650-ton Atlas pulsed-power generator discharged about 19 million amps of current through an aluminum cylindrical shell about the size of a tuna can. Official news release is available from the DOE (PDF)."
In operation, the 650-node Slashdot news-for-nerds generator successfully discharged nearly 19 million hits of HTTP requests through the NNSA Nevada Site Office News webpage, or PDF, on a server about the size and shape of a tuna can. The requests caused the server to implode at extreme speeds, with unrivaled symmetry, precision, and reproducibility.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I wondered why my cat has been so tense lately...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
"current equal to about four times all the electrical power on Earth" riiiight.
I did the math for everyone... it works out to One point twenty one jiga-watts, Marty!
More
Now that was how Pink Floyd should have played.
I want me one of those!
Sig
How much was the voltage? Would the power be more than 1.21 Gigawatts?
Was it part of a modified DeLorean travelling at 88 mph?
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
they generated a current equal to about four times all the electrical power on Earth.
Sounds like apples and oranges:
units of current = Amps
units of power = Watts
The statement is pure nonsense.
"about four times all the electrical power on Earth"
Wouldn't that be all of the OTHER power on Earth? After all, this test was conducted on Earth, making even this discharge a subset of the "all the electrical power on Earth," but I digress. It's really amazing, though, to think this was pulse through a tuna-can sized hunk of aluminum. You'd think it melt. Tuna...melt....I really should stop.
Nah, I doubt it.
10
20 Print "Balls To That"
...
During the few millionths of a second that it operated, the 650-ton Atlas pulsed-power generator discharged about 19 million amps
Um....unless things have changed in the 25+ years since I took a college physics class, we measure POWER in WATTS, and CURRENT in AMPS. So the number you quoted in AMPS that you claims is eqaual to four times the POWER in amps doesn't make any sense. Of course, that never stopped our /. Editors before!
Best Buy can have you arrested
On July 27, scientists at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Test Site said they generated a current equal to about four times all the electrical power on Earth.
Where did they do this experiment--Mars?
to power the beowulf cluster I just imagined.
Laugh kids... it's kinda funny.
1. Current != power. Power = I^2 R, or any equivalent formula.
2. They did this on Earth, so it was actually only 80% of the electrical power (or insert appropriate noun here, see point 1) on Earth. Assuming it was four times the normal power levels without this extra current.
I'll bet this amp goes to 11.
to about four times all the electrical power on Earth.
19 million amps
Urr... if it was all about generating amps I don't see the point. Can't you get near infinite amperage with finite power in a supraconducter ?
\u262D = \u5350
I thought I felt a disturbance in the force.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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Although, having read the press release, I do believe the four times the net energy production figure; without telling us what voltage this few-microsecond pulse is at, it is impossible to know what the instantaneous power is.
One would need to scrounge around in Wikipedia or something for the total worldwide electricity production, multiply by four, do the arithmetic, and know the peak voltage. But maybe they meant the energy dissipated in those microseconds, which case you'd need to know the discharge curve. That's what, 0.5*C*V**2, right? Quick, what's the resistance for a tuna-can-sized chunk of some random aluminium alloy?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
One of the researchers was quoted as saying.
Deleted
A group of lab-coated engineers having a barbecue using a 48 million dollar grill.
Could Intel be funding the construction of this generator as a drop-in replacement for our current source of electricity? With this, Intel should be able to get a system to POST with the new Pentium V. Disclaimer: I have a 3.8 GHz Precott on my Gentoo machine.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Does it hurt when you hold the other end of the tuna can shaped wire?
:-(
Ok, last night Braniac rerun had an electric fence test, you have got to get your inspiration from somewhere
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Current, power and energy are not the same!
power = voltage times current
and
power = energy per unit time
(the rate of energy production or consumption)
How much is all the electrical power on Earth? It doesn't give numbers.
Umm, okay that's interesting and all, but are there any practical uses besides using this thing to simulate nuclear weapons material tests? Or is this just another huge money sink for the good ol' US Gov't?
Do we really need to keep reasearching nuclear weapons anyway, with the Cold War long over and the ban on them and all?
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
... Sandia National Lab's Z-Machine is about 20-times more powerful (http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm)
Any fool knows they could obtain just as much current by sticking a few boyscouts up on a pole... oops, bad taste...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
19 Million Amps, eh? Now all they need is 19 million guitars and the whole planet can rock out.
The Power of the Sun in the Palm of my Hand?
Of interest, the testing work here in Nevada has been farmed out to a private corporation. We now call it the Black Mesa Research Facility. Dr. Freeman and I have just started working together, and we have a number of exciting experiments underway. This last one in the story just happened, and it was very...
hold on, there's something moving out in the hallway, I've got to go check.
)#($)
NO CARRIER
Obviously current and power aren't the same thing, but I was making the assumption that the submitter simply used them interchangeably, making a layman's error.
If you divide that between the entire human race ... each person could make a piece of toast? Maybe over a 20 minute period of time?
I see no reason to allow four times the amount of energy the Earth can produce unless the generator runs my favorite operating system. :-)
(Would nineteen million amps be enough to power the three million processor TRANSLTR, do you think?)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
How the hell was it generated? A capacitor farm? 32 trillion hamsters on exercise wheels?
power = current * voltage
at least thats was teachers & prof bashed into my head for years.....
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
This is part of the nuclear stewardship program. The US has a few thousand nukes that need to be maintianed, but not tested due to treaty restrictions. Therefore, intricate computer simulations are used to run virtual weapons tests.
The "tuna can" in this experiments is being subjected to high stresses, and measuring its response lets the researchers validate their simulation's predictions. If the simulation predicts the behavior of the can, it's more likely to acurately describe a nuclear device.
Jeff
I think tuna can be cooked with far less power.
Tuna can be cooked with much less power, but unforunately by slow cooking it you lose a lot of the natural flavoring. That's why this, the preferred solution by most gourmet chefs, cooks the tuna in a few millionths of a second.
Was it 1 volt? 1 watt? Call me shallow, but it could be much less impressive depending on the aforementioned questions.
Inquiring minds want to know...
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
Keep Pedalin Lance, we're at 19 Million Amps!
Ted Nugent can finally go to 11!
Wait, that's BAD news. Sorry.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Isn't that the same AMP that a 2 Year Old Child produce when on a Sugar Rush??
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
This post is so useless... there is nothing back it up... that press realease is so generic I could make my little sister write one like that... and what are we supose to get from this? some random chunck of aluminium can implode when stuck by 19 million Amps... I could of predicted that and saved them a couple of millions...
During the few millionths of a second that it operated, the 650-ton Atlas pulsed-power generator discharged about 19 million amps of current through an aluminum cylindrical shell about the size of a tuna can.
That's one über wi-fi.
I can only imagine the wi-fi range they'd get with a Pringles can.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
All that power and no Frankenstein monster in sight. You would think they could use the technology to create humanity instead of light shows.
Sounds like apples and oranges If the scientists actually tried to compare current and power, their scientist licences should be revoked immediately.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Could you people maybe check and see that 9000 other people have not posted the same thing, or maybe realize it's just not that important to correct an offhand quip? That's why people make fun of nerds: you insist on technical accuracy in inappropriate or unnecessary situations. It's annoying.
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Now when they can mount it on the back of a shark, I'll be impressed.
All's true that is mistrusted
for when you want that extra edge
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
nuclear fusion achieved with raw tuna!
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
For example
Bert Hickman's coin shrinking
Thaltech's capacitor experiments
Sam Barros's Power Labs page
Bill Beaty's webpage
and many others...
I was wondering why I had developed a brain tumor over the weekend...
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Yeah it sure does.
But the impressive part isn't the current. It's the pulse. It's surprisingly easy to get really high currents... as long as you only want them for fractions of a second.
Sure the total current achieved here is impressive... but what about watt hours? I would imagine the number of watt hours here is surprisingly low compared to the current...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Ok, so I did RTFA. And yes it was very light and fluffy. But what caught my attention was the method of energy generation. They trickle charged a big old bank of capacitors and then disharged them really really fast through a conductive slug. Sounds like how a railgun works to me! Just modify the geometry a little and you can start carving smiley faces into Mars... :)
Given: 19MA generated(That's ninteteen megaamps as opposed to ma which is milliamps for those of you who avoided engineering). 1210MW (Again that's megawatts, or 1.12GW for you Back to the Future types) Then using Ohm's Law (E=P/I) They needed to work at 63.68MV (mega again). I wonder how long it will take them to get all this equipment packed in a DeLorean.
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
After my first thoughts (which as usual everyone else has posted) I wondered what the point was... well to save anyone else who can't be bothered to actually read the article - it's to create a really high pressure explosion type thing (although the article says "implosion") to research into nuclear explosions (without actually setting one off - which is a good thing:)
This dull go nowhere story gets on /. while my inspirational story about robot jockeys gets denied.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
They should have titled it "19 trillion microamps." Sounds more impressive to the aveage dufus.
"A billion microamps here, a billion microamps there and pretty soon, you are talking real power."
It's important because now we can generate enough power...er, current, to power a graphics card powerful enough to run Long...er, Windows Vista. We can also fight back when there is a thunderstorm around. Before, Thor was able to torch us at will with no fear of return fire. Now we can stand every whory hair on his wrinkled body on end.
A cable that can handle the power load of today's processors. ;)
"...discharged about 19 million amps of current through an aluminum cylindrical shell about the size of a tuna can."
Hey bro, I'm gonna go online. Can you hand me my cantenna?"
Zolt!
Bro? You there?
I was wondering how they were going to stop people from using cantennas...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Millionths of a second! But I want it now!
"Shocking"
The idea isn't (only) to determine the accuracy of modeling for new weapons. Those same models (IIRC) are used to predict the yield and failure rate on current warheads that were constructed years agoand have been "sitting around" since.
While I don't see the US using these, it's still a good idea to build models that let us predict what would happen if we did and at what point the risk of failure warrants switching old devices out for new (or deactivating them).
In this case, the more data the better.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Ok, someone had to say it.
The article is about a machine that can produce a very high pressure, generated in a short amount of time. This is actually much more interesting (of cause a matter of opinion) than the ability to generate a lot of amps.
... the fabrication tools used to build the hardware, and the diagnostic tools used to measure the results, making this one of the best-predicted and best-understood high-precision implosion experiments ever.
Amps without voltage don't really say anything after all. Besides it's the high level of voltages that are exciting, just think of lightning. Having a lot of amps stored in some battery or something similar is just not that exciting....
But back to the article. This machine can generate a very high pressure in a very precise way. As the article states;
Now, that's exciting. Who don't love a good implosion? And the machine is much more than that. It's also all the measure end diagnostic tools. I guess anyone on SlashDot would like to get their hands on this nerdish kind of equipment.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
--whoa, I guess it is the amps. Sorry!
...and I'd never need to plug into a wall socket again. Ahhh... the future's so bright I gotta wear shades. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I can run my Voodoo 5 card at full power...
;)
Oh this joke was sooo 2000, I should mod myself down.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
once enough electrons cross between the anode and cathode they'll cause their own p.d to be formed across the electrodes and thus cancel out the orignal driving voltage. unless you can contruct a circuit with zero resistance all the way around so no charge is built up; at which point you'll have zero potential difference around the whole circuit, e.g. no current will flow. circular argument, granted :)
Here is the pdf document.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I hope this is a step to getting the national ignition facility back on track.
a nl-is-leaderless.html
the "tuna can" is a lot bigger than the NIF-envisioned holraum, but perhaps a step on the way?
So many disgruntled employees:
http://lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com/2005/05/l
First thing that went to my mind... [01:33] (hilo21) ima looking for a site that seels amp [01:33] (hilo21) ima looking for a site that seels amps [01:33] (hilo21) iam looking for a site that seels amps [01:34] (hilo21) I am looking for a site that sells amps [01:35] (nexxai) how bout you look for a site that teaches english? [01:35] (hilo21) fuck you [01:36] (nexxai) Lemme guess, you'd kick my ass, but can't read the road signs to get to my house?
And I for one would like to welcome our 19-million amp tuna can sized overlords...
I RTFPDF (funny abbreviation), but I have not seen any details on what was thesolution to, in my opinion, the greatest challenge: the switch.
Since I graduated electrical engineering, there has been great progress in the field of solid-state switches. Yet, I think the losses incurred in such a switch would make this experiment unviable.
A mechanical switch is definitely out of the question, unless they managed to accelerate one of the contacts in some, to me inimaginable way. Maybe with explosives.
In the hihg-voltage experiments a spark gap is a very good and viable alternative, but here we don't deal so much with high voltage as high currents.
As I said, I RTFPDF, but the PDF didn't contain any solid technical data, let alone details.
Sigged!
Discharging through an aluminum cylinder like this is how they produce compact toroids. It's funny TFA doesn't mention this. Tack on the word weapon to the search terms - they're interesting, but I haven't heard of them going beyond the experimental phase.
...they remained on the earth during this run, they were merely making 80% of all the current on the earth. Currently. Well, currently at that time...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"During the few millionths of a second that it operated,"
Soooo..we now have a tazer capable of taking down a small moon?
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
resistance = resistivity*length/area
It turns out that the resistance is near 1 ohm at .981 Ohms. This means that the power would be found with the following equation.
P = I^2*R
Therefore we can estimate the total power to be a huuuuuge amount, 354.14x10^12 Watts.
But, as you can see here, they were generating the same current level over 4 years ago, so this is hardly a new result.
Shocking.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
This came just in time to meet the power requirements for Nvidia's Next Gen 8800GTX.
useful? What was this actually good for?
/.
Maybe TFA mentions it, but, you know, this is
So, what's the big deal?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why does all of southern Nevada smell like burnt tuna this morning?
This is weird.
This reminds me of when I was a child, my grandmother has this "appliance" that would pass electrical current through hotdogs to cook them.d oggfi/hotdogcooker.html
http://www.exo.net/~pauld/activities/electric/hot
All the worlds indeed a
when asked if they had any comments regarding the announcement, a scientist was quoted as saying "... but this one goes to eleven"
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
Missile Defense? Weather Modification? Seismic Weaponry? EMP generation? Air conditioning? Mind Control? Insurgent Eradication? Tell us, please!
Then why are you reading Slashdot?
"Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!"
~Harcourt Fenton Mudd
Actually it was only about 7 million amps but they had a couple of CD writers nearby.
There is another article out there that talks about how Intel funded this project. Intel is currently looking into ways to power their next Pentium line. Of course they need the power source to last a little bit longer, but they are making progress.
My home electric stove+oven has 2x 50A circuit breakers; my electric water heater, 2x 40A; my electric clothes dryer, 2x 30A (all 230V service in US). There are at least 15 million houses in the US with similar electrical service. Some industrial plating baths use 6000 Amperes at less than 3V. So 19 million amps is a serious underestimate of the current being used in the world.
If my compass needle didn't bounce, then they did not create a current larger than the one that generates the earth's magnetic field.
1.Dont use bastard childs like TkW ;)
2.Power =! Work. So its Watt. Not Watt/s. or anything. WATT. So the Power rating wont change if you make it shorter.
3. Scientific notation, growing out of your ass: 5.61161e-12 TkW you write... well, thats just 5.61kW... maybe you mean something different?!
and 2.36e-12 Trillion Volts... well, thats 2 AA cells, definitively archivable
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
so, if there are 86400 hours a year
There aren't 86400 hours in a year, at least not on this planet. There are 8760 hours in a year. (other than leap year)
There are 86400 seconds in a day.
Does 19 million amps equal "roughly four times all the electrical power on earth"? Hardly. I'm drawing at least 2 amps right now. If a mere 10 million others are doing the same, we've bested them. The power claim may actually be right, but neither the person who wrote the press release or the original Slashdot poster knew enough about the difference between power and current to make that clear. And there's also the bit about the "sophisticated computer codes." I think that's a reference to computer programs and not to the codes used to order a nucleur strike.
I think Jamie and Adam should redo their experiment with the lightning hitting your house using this generator.
In a related story, AMD has announced that it is shipping it's long-awaited 1.2 petahertz Athlon 128 FX 8-core processor. It requires a heatsink about the size of a can of tuna.
OKay, I'll cop to an ignorance of physics. Why did the aluminum cylinder implode? Doesn't increasing the energy in an object normally cause it to expand?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
My girlfriends cat does this everymorning rubbing against my leg.
Stupid cat.
Wow - 19 mega-amps! Bet that thing out put enough of an EMP to fry chips!
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It was one louder. 11 is one louder than 10. Even Nigel understood that.
To hook that up to my nipples?
According to the CIA World Fact book, the world uses 15.29 trillion kWh of power a year, so, if there are 86400 hours a year, then we use 1.769676e-4 Trillion kW a year.
.02 seconds (I think they said for "milliseconds" then, they would need to generate (4x) 1.12232111e-13 TkW to make this thing work.
*blink* *blink* Typo? We would use 17,696,760 kW/hr (I'm human, I don't mind rounding long numbers when the answer doesn't need to be perfect)
This computes to 5.61161e-12 TkW a second.
295,945 kW/sec
So, if this thing ran for
5,918kW/.02sec
So the voltage used would have to have been [4*1.12232111e-13e-13]/19000000 = 2.36278128e-12 Trillion Volts.
0.0236278128 volts? I may have misplaced a decimal point, because that looks like a pretty small amount. But then again something to e-12 is small, even if we're counting it in trillians (e10)?
Now, please take MY numbers with a huge grain of salt, I'm definately a layman in this, but I just thought his choice of not converting to layman human readable numbers was a obfuscating method of displaying the information.
Also, just punching your numbers into google shows that the final number should be 2.36278128 × 10(^-20). So one of us is way off here, and I'm not an electrical engineer, so there is a good chance it's me.
Do you Gentoo!?
Because, If we cant blow up cans of tuna.... Then the terrorists have won
I just heat my tuna in a microwave... sure it is a little slower but my microwave doesn't weight 650 tons.
Seriously, people. Is there anyone on the /. editorial staff who can do basic math?
There are easily 19 million electrical service drops in the U.S. alone, counting homes and businesses and such, and I'll bet each and every single one of them uses more than one ampere ALL THE TIME.
Who lets this crap through, anyway?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
One point twenty one gigawatts!
or else!
Then try www.slashdot.org. You'll be safe there.
World total combined electricity consumption for the year of 2003 was 14767.74849 billion kWh (http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/ta ble62.xls)
Even if they used 4 times the world consumption over a few millionths of a second that's only about 7 to 8 kWh... Cheapskates!
I actually read TFA, saw something about implosions caused by high currents, and an old neuron fired.
r y.html
m l?pg=9
...
Quoting (actually retyping) TFPDF:
The current caused the liner to implode at extreme speeds, with unrivaled symmetry, precision and reproducibility.
This appears to describe the Quarter Shrinker, so here it is:
http://teslamania.delete.org/frames/shrinkergalle
The (short-short) recent Wired article on The Quarter Shrinker:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/start.ht
Giving a new, literal meaning to "blinded by science"
Tag lost or not installed.
Let's a hope a scientist or two was accidentally left behind in the generator room. This planet really could use some new super heroes right about now!
Per this news release here this has already been done by the mentioned generator. They even use the tuna can size reference;
"In the shot, the 650-ton Atlas pulsed-power generator successfully discharged approximately 20 million amperes of current through an aluminum cylindrical shell or liner about the size and shape of a tuna can, causing the liner to implode at very high speeds. "
I don't have my calculator handy -- how many DoE "sunshine units" are there in 1.0000 gumdrops?
The "tuna can" is more likely to be vapourized. One of the goals of tests like this is to determine the properties (particularly radiative opacities) of extremely hot, dense plasmas. A spin-off benefit would be a better understanding of the physics of the solar core, if/when the numbers are declassified.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If so, what color are they?
Of course, someone shows me a recipe for "atoms of tuna" and I'm there!
e
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It would have been 20 million amps, but some jerk forgot to remove his surge supressor...
Sorry for the FORTRAN exponentiation syntax, but that was what was popular when DSOTM was released.
Tag lost or not installed.
We need to lose these treates that prevent us from acutally testing and thus truly knowing that our national security is protected.
We don't have any margin for error nowadays.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
subject says it all, 'nuff said...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'd hate to piss off the practical joker of that lab.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
The intergalactic band Disaster Area was reached for comment about the 19 million amps released by scientists, and had only this to say: "Pfff. Amateurs."
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Why did they use aluminum and not silver? Since silver has a lower resistance.
I'm guessing it was probably for cost reasons, or even availability. It would be easier to get a hunk of almost pure aluminum than it would be pure silver. Even copper would be better and easier to find than either silver or aluminum.
btw would the amperage be greater in the silver? Since an amp is a measurement of electrons moving through a certain length of space in a certain time.
It was *one* perfectly ordinary Marshall head, with *one* custom front panel. In other words, a movie prop.
Sounds like the love scene from a Bulwer-Lytton romance novel contest.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Sandia National Labs' Z-machine has been pumping out 20+ million amps for quite some time.
Was it packed in oil or water?
This is critical research - intel needs that much power for its next generation mobile processor.
and when the Z-machine gets refurbished (to become ZR) next year, it'll be pumping out 26+ million amps.
Maybe they're just getting ready for the power supply testing for when the Pentium 5's are ready....
"current equal to about four times all the electrical current on Earth. ... discharged about 19 million amps"
This is utter nonsense. A 100W light bulb uses 5/6A. Are they saying there are less than 6 million light bulbs in the world? Or fridges, or AC, etc.
We are one step closer to giant military robot mechs!
I put something like that through my Pringles can and was able to ping a server in Tokyo.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Damn! He was talking about fruits, not computers!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Why do we need a rail gun to put a factory in orbit? We got the ISS up there with plain old rocket technology.
Reflecting the sun away from hurricanes? And why would we even want to do this? Hurricanes get their energy from the sun only indirectly, in the form of heated water. Unless you're planning to reflect the sun away from the tropical regions of the ocean for months at a time (which would have God only knows what side effects), you wouldn't cool the water appreciably, and wouldn't effect the strength of the hurricane.
You do know that hurricanes still blow at night, right?
Sean
Anyone have this document in HTML form or something other than PDF that crashed my computer?
kensavage knows more than god
"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you... better get the hell out of the way!"
Pretty cool. Reminds me of this: http://teslamania.delete.org/frames/shrinkergaller y.html
Not sure I understand the practicality of either, but they are still cool.
so next time we have roling blackouts here in san francisco we know it's because some nerd at the DOE is warming up his tuna sandwich?
Given that modern CPUs have current requirements in the 50-100A range, this is clearly nonsense. I guess the title meant to say "amps at 220V" or the like. It would still be an useless comparison.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think Hotblack Desiato would have laughed, laughed at this figure. "Is that all?" ;)
They should have fired this pulse through a coil. The resulting EM pulse would surely have had some interesting effects, though I wonder what the voltage was (in order to find out the power).
Is there any way to focus an EM pulse so that it only comes out one side of a coil? Would a metal parabolic reflector concentrate the pulse to one side? (I'm guessing "yes", but I'm not sure if some portion of the pulse would simply bleed through the reflector.)
I have to admit that the little evil looking-for-trouble guy in me wants to install something like that in my trunk, facing backwards, charged by a large capacitor... Cop on your tail doing some fundraising? Push a button and kill his engine dead.
Complications to this would include things such as: metal frames and structures being in the way, etc. Plus actual property damage, which isn't cool. It would be cool if you could just disable it...
Reminds me of the story by Arthur Clarke "Technical Error":e w.php?callnumber=mf169
http://math.cofc.edu/faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mfvi
The grandparent has the assumption that "generating" means "creating out of thin air." It doesn't. The original article is completely technically right because all current and power is generated from other sources. There weren't 19 million amps of current flowing before the device was activated. There were 19 million when it was. Obviously it generated the current.
Everybody's well aware that mass-energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but that doesn't deserve an informative modifier for saying the article is incorrect when claiming that amperage was generated. By that logic, all generators are misnamed, aren't they? So, yes, please mod the parent up for pointing out the grandparent's silliness.
Countless calculations based upon milliseconds (0.02 sec) when the article states,a few millionths of a second (0.0000002 sec) is enough to get zero credit in any reputable engineering curriculum.
More so, the information is scant thus we haven't enough to go on to even make a sound engineering judgement.
We know very little about the geometry and properties of the material other than a reference to aluminum that was a cylindrical shell.
We don't know if the material is purely aluminum[versus a composite alloy predominantly made of Al] and whether as another poster pointed out treated it as a thin wall vessel or a thick walled vessel.
We don't know the electromagnetic field constraints and how they faired in comparison to their theoretical cousins.
There is not enough information to go on to make a sound engineering calculation. I'm sure this is on purpose.
Microsoft today announced in conjuction with their partner NNSA ,the successful test of a prototype PSU capable of powering the minimum required hardware for running Windows Vista.
people, the parent pulled some numbers out of his ass while confusing power with amperage, came to some completely bullshit conclusion, and then ratcheted up the hypocrisy by explicitly claiming others can't do math.
I think the point of the project is to invent EMP without nuclear power. That would be strong weapon.
It's several million amperes, but it only operates for a few millionths of a second, so the total charge involve ends up only being a few coulombs.
That must mean that their experiment wasn't actually conducted on Earth, doesn't it?
Did the parrot Voom, or not?
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
We will be mounting the lasers on the heads of sharks.
So, each hour we consume 1.7454e12Wh of energy.
Close enough. I used 365.25 days. Here things break down, though. You have proved that the average power is about 1.74e12 watts. THAT IS THE AVERAGE POWER - it doesn't scale. If you had more information, you might be able to estimate peak usage and so on.
If the power used here was four times the average you'd have power dissipation of about 7.0e12 watts. Doesn't matter how long the duration was from this perspective. (For a 0.02 second discharge, the energy dissipated would be about 140e9 joules, for what that's worth.)
The voltage would be 7e12 W / 19e6 A or about 370 kV.
I am an engineer, but not an EE. I recall some stuff from my circuits classes, but energy and power is used everywhere ...
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I have to really thank you for those links. Bert Hickman's site was a life saver.... found a book I was in need of and could not find elsewhere. Now i can continue to my plans for world domination... or at least not to be bored stiff.
This means that the power dissipated would be 4 times the average (mean or norm) for that period, much like what thoolie is getting at ... somewhere along the way.
Totally bloody useless statistic, unless you have an idea of "the Earth's entire energy production."
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
It is a little-known fact, but CERN is planning on posting a whole series of stories to Slashdot, once the reactor has been built in France. This will allow them to power it up far more rapidly than by conventional means.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
After a bit of thought I wondered why they would need such alot of energy to be released in a short period, then it hit me, they need it for a short pulse energy weapon. Looks like the o'l Star Wars program is still ticking away 20 years later.
Dr. Evil: Welcome to my submarine lair! It's long, hard and full of seamen.
Clark Griswold: "Eddie, doesn't it ever worry you that you live on a test site?"
Cousin Eddie: "Clark, all I know is, my teeth have never been whiter, and I grow 50 pound tomatoes..."
from "Vegas Vacation"
Because the material explodes and ionizes already at pulse start. The Plasma resistivity is many orders of magnitudes lower than the Al.
(In fact, partly-ionized Plasma can have negative resistivity)
However, the shell implodes, so that R drops sharply - at some point resistance sharply rises as well.
Working for necessity's mother.
The material material explodes and ionizes at pulse begining, so that it's initial resistivity does not matter anyway.
What does matter is the inner-shell ionization potential, so that at stagnation (highest pressure and heat) the ions have a few energy-levels at the expected energy.
For this, Helium-like ions are the simplest, and are widely used.
Silver has way too many electrons, and will not ionize sufficiently.
(In my MSc we've used He-like Neon for a much weaker Z-Pinch, ~0.3 MA current)
-- and yes, I WAS a plasma physicist.
Working for necessity's mother.
That's all you need to make the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed to travel across time!
Never underestimate the chemical energy of a single gum drop. The sugarfree kind can still rip off your arms.
I may not be able to remember the sixties because I was there but by the eighties the psychadelics had made way for coke and my memory is pretty good.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I bet you wish you still had them.
I asked a friend of mine who works for Marshall. The "Spinal Tap" amp was a one-off, made for the movie.
Spelling Aluminium without the second i should also lead to a "zero credit in any....."
How long did they have to rub their feet on the carpet to achieve such a current?
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