Boots and Oil Blog: If I have Volts, and I need eV, how do I get that?...: Originally posted in 2011, updated 2.1.18 : Watching some welding work being done today reminded me of a post about electron volts. The l...
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Just running some numbers, and my calculations could be wrong. In the post, I noted that the hydrogen boron fusion reaction ( aneutronic ) yields approx 8 million electron volts. Sounds like a lot, but a joule has a trillion times that much. Not to worry. A gram of hydrogen has 10 billion joules of energy, if my calculations are correct. ( My calculations could easily be wrong, but it is indeed a lot of energy ). How much is 10 billion joules? Over 2.7 gigawatt hours. Remember how Doc Brown went berserk in the movie "Back to the Future", when he realized he need gigawatts of energy?
It may not be that much, though.
Well, the idea is that you won't need much hydrogen in order to produce a bunch of energy. But we knew all of that already, did we not?
Incidentally, I read somewhere that a fusion space engine might have an ISP of a million. Now, running the numbers on that one yields some really interesting observations. For instance, in a chemical rocket, 98 percent or more of the rocket's mass is for fuel. However, if a rocket had an ISP of 1 million, 99 percent of the rocket ship could be devoted to things other than fuel. Wow.
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