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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
"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.
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.
...
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.
A group of lab-coated engineers having a barbecue using a 48 million dollar grill.
19 Million Amps, eh? Now all they need is 19 million guitars and the whole planet can rock out.
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
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.
for when you want that extra edge
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
For example
Bert Hickman's coin shrinking
Thaltech's capacitor experiments
Sam Barros's Power Labs page
Bill Beaty's webpage
and many others...
In theory, you could push an infinite current through a perfect superconductor.
In practice, you can't--all real superconductors have a "critical current density"--drive the current above a certain threshold, and it ceases to be a superconductor. It's a "density" because the exact current at which a superconductor stops superconducting is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the wire, but you'd need a very large wire indeed to drive 19 Mega-amps through a superconductor.
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
As if a million tuna cans cried out, and then were silenced?
You must be new here...
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.
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.
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.
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!?
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!
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. "
e
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.
This is critical research - intel needs that much power for its next generation mobile processor.
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.