The entire world uses SI, apart from the USA*, where the obsolete metric system is still viewed as novel, suspicious, and incomprehensible.A deuterium atom and a tritium atom weigh 8.3 x 10-27 kg. You must have found the hydrogen atom mass in grams, not kilograms.Seriously? less than the mass of a hydrogen atom?
Hey, I used to live in Germany and they used pounds! (Though they called them "Pfunde" for some reason.)
* Of course, a German pound was 500 grams.
If you can breed 90% of it you just cut the cost of it by 90%
My mistake proves that it is all of that.The entire world uses SI, apart from the USA*, where the obsolete metric system is still viewed as novel, suspicious, and incomprehensible.A deuterium atom and a tritium atom weigh 8.3 x 10-27 kg. You must have found the hydrogen atom mass in grams, not kilograms.Seriously? less than the mass of a hydrogen atom?
SI is a metric system. But in the English speaking world, "Metric" refers to the outdated cgs (centimetre, gram, second) system, that has largely been replaced by SI.
International System of Units (SI) is some official definitions of the units of the Metric system -- Metrication and History of the metric system
It's really not. SI is a metric system, but it's not the system people call "Metric", outside the USA.
Possibly in the British-speaking world or the Strine-speaking world.
Perhaps you're using "English-speaking" to mean something like "British-speaking", or more likely, "pedant-speaking". Here in the English-speaking world* nobody but scientists gives a hoot which metric units are SI or cgs or whatever. We freely mix and match centimeters with kilograms and so forth, counting on the prefixes to sort out where the decimal points go -- and why the heck wouldn't anyone do that in a so-called "system" where a liter is a cubic decimeter and a hectare is ten thousand square meters? The metric system was designed screwy from the get-go and conventions like cgs and SI just move the screwiness around.
)Yeah, Germans are weird like that. They pretend to speak German, but then they use an incomprehensible "Pfund" for 0.5kg. Which is, as everyone knows, colloquially referred to as "50 Deka(gramm)" (abbr. dag) in German, with parallel words in the other languages of the Hapsburg monarchy. Not only do they pretend like German uses some non-metric pounds, they go as far as pretending not to understand what you're talking about when you talk in normal Dekas.
Apparently a lot of people here have a concept of technological advancement that got stuck in the 70s somewhere?
World energy supply and consumption - the total primary energy production is 14,800 million tons of oil equivalent, or 172,000 terawatt-hours. That's a primary production of 19.6 terawatts and 6.19*1020 joules per year.
The Uranium in seawater would last a similar amount of time (as it is constantly replenished by erosion); And we already have a commercially viable way to turn uranium into carbon emissions free, reliable, clean and safe electricity.It's a long way from there to being commercially feasible, to being able to compete with existing sources.
Let's see how much energy one can get out of the Earth's oceans. Deuterium is 0.0156% by number and the Earth's oceans have mass 1.35*1018 metric tons and salt fraction by mass of 3.5%.
That means 1.30*1021 kg of ocean water. Hydrogen has an average atomic weight of 1.0080 and oxygen 15.999. That gives 18.015 for water. That means that the oceans contain 7.22*1022 moles of water (gram molecular weights, not the burrowing animal), or 4.35*1046 molecules of water. That's 8.71*1046 hydrogen atoms and thus 1.36*1043 deuterium atoms.
Deuterium-deuterium fusion produces about 3.65 MeV, and per deuteron (deuterium nucleus), 1.825 MeV or 2.94*10-13 joules. That gives a total of 3.99*1030 joules.
Checking on
That means that the deuterium in our planet's oceans should last us 6 billion years at present consumption.
Not 6 billions, it has half-life ~700mil years.
Fusion is also nonexistent. It's therefore not cleaner or safer than anything. How clean, and how safe, it turns out to be will be a function of the details of the technology and engineering, if it is ever actually made to work.
You're talking about U-235. The relevant half-life is 4.5 billion years, for U-238. If humanity survives for millions of years and doesn't sink into a permanent anti-nuclear theocracy we'll undoubtedly be using breeder reactors.
