2400 Miles On Just Ten Ounces Of Uranium
by Volker Weber
Photo Carl Madson
Comments
E=mc^2, right?
Assuming only 1% efficiency in converting those 10oz (0.28kg) of Uranium into energy, then this vehicle consumed 252 terrajoules over those 2400 miles.
That is 105 gigajoules every mile.
Assuming an average speed of 60mph (1 mile in 60 seconds), this is 1.75 gigajoules/second == 1.75 gigawatts, slightly more than the 1.21 gigawatts required to move a Delorean back and forth in time if memory serves...
Someone else can do the conversion to PS. I'm tired. But it does seem slighly more powerful than the average Beamer...
wow, what an amazing car
Chris, that should be around 2379337PS.
Might be "only" around 1/100th of the thrust of a spaceshuttle at its launch.
That's not a car - that's a speedboat: two oversized torpedos with an engine in the middle...
Can't even find a parking place for a Smart in town ...
Where's Anakin?
@Chris: Obviously splitting hair now, not cores, but from the small reactor that is undoubtedly built into this car you'll just get a small fraction of that "m" available as energy anyway (more or less the energy required to stabilise the original atom core in comparison to the energy required to stabilise two smaller cores). Quoted from wikipedia this can be around 190 MeV per Uranium atom:
So, from Wikipedia I get
1 atomic mass unit roughly 931.49 MeV/c2, hence for an Uranium atom with 238 amu you get about 221694 MeV. In comparison to your total energy conversion of e = mc^2, nuclear fission may then have an efficiency of about 0.08 %.
...so we can expect this car's efficiency to be a little higher :)
Thanks Frank. I knew fission was inefficient (couldn't be bothered to look up exactly how inefficient at the time) hence my guess at 1% which it turns out was out by a factor of about 12.
And of couse this also assumes that the 10oz of Uranium was completely spent over the 2400 miles and is now only suitable for recycling as paperweights.
Whichever way you look at it this car uses altogether too many gigawatts unless, as I suspect, it doesn't use uranium at all but in fact runs on chicken guano.
Philipp, touché, mon amis! ... ;)
