So while we consider that, let's tabulate all our results in one space, so we can easily get to them. We're leaving everything in scientific notation of Joules, because it will make doing calculations far easier.
FOAB = 184.1x10^9 J
Trinity Test = 83.68x10^12 J
Tsar Bomba = 2.1x10^15 J
Class Ic Supernova = 50x10^44 J
Okay, so now that we have our energies tabulated, let's take a look at some of the ways we can make these numbers more manageable. A good way to start is the entire power consumption of the U.S. for a whole year.
In a yeah, the U.S. power grid uses roughly 3900 TWhr (terawatt hours) of electricity. 1 KWhr = 3.6 MJ approximately, so we can do a little math.
Well hey, there's a number that we can work with. We have around 14 ExaJoules that are used each year in the United states. That's not a small amount to sneeze at, now lets look at the amounts of energy released in some of our explosions.
This is just simple division, so lets see how many of these explosions we'd need to run the country for a year.
FOAB: You would need 76,262,901 FOAB's to run the entire U.S. for a year. That's a lot of bombs, and actually seems fairly reasonable considering that we're taking in the entire energy consumption of the U.S. But we're not done, let's look at our Nukes.
Number of Trinity tests needed: 167,782 explosions
Number of Tsar Bomba's needed: 6,686 bombs
Now we can see our numbers are getting significantly smaller, but it's still really really large numbers of these bombs, so we probably shouldn't be setting these off anytime soon to try and run our country.
But wait, we have one more comparison to make. A ballpark estimate says that the supernovas release a crazy amount of energy, and that number is already larger than the energy consumption of the U.S. for an entire year, so instead, we're going to see just how long a supernova can run the U.S. for.
Years from Supernova explosion: 3.56x10^26
That's a looooonnng time. The age of the universe is only 13.7x10^9 years. So one supernova could run the entire U.S. at its current energy consumption for longer than the entire universe has even been around! But is this all really such a great idea? Probably not, and we'll discuss why next.
http://www.tsarbomba.org/images/tsar%20bomba%20chart.gif
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