FYI: unprocessed uranium isn't radioactive enough to do a lot of harm. At least as eaten. BUT uranium is incredibly toxic as a heavy metal so it'd still kill you quickly.
Meme is referring to nuclear reactors, not complete antimatter annihilation.
Nuclear reactors don't "burn" everything --- most of the matter stays (this is what nuclear waste is). So you can only apply E=mc^2 to the difference in mass, not the mass of the fuel.
Calories are just a measure of the energy released by a material.
Normally they're measured by burning the material, so it's not really accurate to say that you can get that many calories from uranium. On the other hand the whole concept is fucking stupid anyway, because it's measured by burning the material. Technically, a kilo of dry sawdust has 4800 calories (more than double the daily calorie requirement of the average person).
I just googled around and I think the meme inflated the numbers. Fast neutron reactor gets 28GJ/g, which is "only" about 7 million food (kilo) calories.
You know it's funny, technically a calorie is just a measure of how much energy it takes to heat up 1 gram of water 1° C I never really thought about it but it could totally be applied to other things and nuclear reactor plants that literally just heat up water to spin a turbine would be the perfect thing to measure in calories. So would regular electric plants for that matter. It might just be literally calories.
Oh shoot that would be some wild math to figure out how hungry they all are.
The numbers don't add up. If you can get 21 billion US food calories from total annihilation (which I checked is right), you'd get nowhere near 18 billion food calories from a fusion reaction. Maybe it works if you assume "calories" for the fission reaction means metric calories, since US food calories are metric kilocalories.
I hate the way the word "calorie" ended up with two wildly different definitions.
Given that mass behaves the same regardless of what is providing that mass in a gravity field, I imagine it simply the ratio of the weights. I’m assuming NewtonIan physics here.
Osmium is 22.59 g/cm3.
Uranium is 19.1 g/cm3
I would therefore expect about 10% more energy if it was made of osmium, simply equating mass and energy here with the famous crazy-haired guy equation.
Picking a higher density of the material just means the one gram would occupy less volume, it doesn't affect how much energy that gram is equivalent to in terms of E=mc2.
For that calculation, as the equation implies, only the mass matters; a gram of feathers is equivalent to the same amount of energy as a gram of lead for that equation.
Now, this equation is in fact a simplified assumption; if you launch your feather at relativistic speed, then we're talking
This is true. This is why I compared them using the fixed volume of one cubic centimeter rather than using something like specific gravity. The only thing that differs is the mass, which is of course, directly proportional to the energy.
Well, its an Actinium (94), but it works better than Uranium. Alternatively you can also use Polonium to eliminate the need to eat for the rest of your life, it was even tested
None of that wimpy and watered-down regular bleach, though. Go for the liquid chlorine used in pools, it's typically about twice as strong. You can get it at Walmart (or Lowes} when it is in-season.
This just gives me spec-evo ideas for a person who does the shin-godzilla schtick where they ingest radioactive material and then use their inner fluids, either blood or some secondary circulatory system, as a coolant for the internal bio-reactor digestive system.
Either developing sail-hawks and sail-backs to expose as much surface area as possible, or Kit-Fisto style tail-locks with the same purpose.
Maybe a mix of both with the sail fans migrating to be like bat wings for that extra surface area cooling combined with high altitude chill.
Surprisingly I'd actually imagine this creature getting smaller, more use out of every bit of material they can find, and smaller creatures radiate heat more quickly than larger ones, so even more bio-coolant features to keep the reactor from making biological corium.
I think a gram of uranium will be able to pass through your digestive system without killing you. I wouldn't call it safe but that ammount of radiation isn't lethal. I don't know if it'd be poison, though.
