AboutBill Mihalovits Expertise I can answer questions about general construction and safety of plants, specific questions about operations, training, reactor theory, and thermodynamics. Will also consider other aspects as requested.
Experience Over 33 years in the nuclear power field, licensed senior reactor operator, and instructor.
Question How much more energy than a Nuclear bomb can one Nuclear Reactor make?
Answer There's no easy answer to that. You have several things to think about: how big is the nuclear bomb? How big is the nuclear plant? How long will the nuclear plant run? Are talking about all of the energy released or just the blast energy and thermal energy? What about the energy from fallout radiation?
Keeping it simple, lets look at all of the energy directly released from a 1 megaton bomb. One megaton is equal to 10 to the 15th power of calories or 4.2 x 10 to the 15th power Joules (4.2e15 joules)
1 watt is equal to 1 joule per second. So, a 1000 MW nuclear station is 1000 Megajoules or 1000 x 10 to the sixth or 1 x 10 to the ninth joules per second. Divide 4.2e15 by 1e9 gives you 4200000 seconds to for a nuclear plant to produce the same power. Convert that to hours and you get 1166.6667 hours or 48.6111 days.
To read about a project that is converting old Russian nuclear warheads to nuclear plant fuel, go to:
