On Nuclear power

I had a little thought yesterday and just got around to running the math. I wondered how much energy you could get if you converted all the nukes in the world into power station fuel.

The results are kind of interesting, unfortunately I've had to make some assumptions cause I guess they don't give out too much info on nuclear bombs out. As such this just concerns Uranium as fuel, which sucks because Plutonium is way better but our needs must I suppose.

The amount of Uranium in a nuclear bomb these days is unknown, but the best we can see is between 50kg and 10kg. For the sake of this we'll say they use 25kg (info from here). The amount of uranium used in a nuclear power plant is around 25tonnes every 2 years.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world is around 23,500 (from here). Assuming each of these are uranium weapons (nope but oh well) that comes to around 589,350kg of uranium.

Now, there's 1000kgs in 1 tonne, so that means there's around 23 refuels worth of fuel in nuclear weapons, which is 47 years worth of power from a nuclear reactor. Now this does'nt sound like too much but in 2009, a single nuclear power station produced around 12,300,000,000kWh worth of power (Info here). So that 47 years worth of power would come to 578,100,000,000kWh. Which is a decent amount.

Again this is making at terrible assumption that every nuclear reactor uses Uranium, every bomb is Uranium and I don't even take into account the amount of processing required to convert one kind of Uranium to another. I have'nt taken into account the potential for breeder reactors or reusing nuclear fuel either but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

-Nems
P.S. Another book review on it's way.