HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Re: What is this again?

All nuclear and fuel-burning power plants create waste heat.
TB — (archived)

This can create local problems if not handled correctly (over-warming an area of a river, maybe).

But compared to the natural heat loads on the Earth as a whole, our contributions are trivial.

The human race consumes something like 12 to 15 TW of energy, including electricity, transportation, heating, you name it. Almost all of it is generated by burning fuel or nuclear energy (hydro and solar are kind of lost in the noise).

By the laws of thermodynamics, all of it will end up as waste heat at some point. That's human-created heat load.

The sun drops something on the order of 100,000 TW on the Earth. Geothermal energy from radioactive decay inside the Earth runs about 44 TW.

All of this, basically, is radiated back into space (or we'd be a ball of molten iron by now).

I don't think we're going to be cooking our planet with our energy use any time soon.

I think Johannes has some problems with his units and time, which is understandable given the complexity of some of the conversions (I still don't understand completely the unit for specific impulse in rocket calculations).

However, as with any real-world calculation, your results have to make some kind of sense. If, for example, your numbers tell you that four hundred elephants would fit in a phone booth, you might need to check them.

(Feel free to check mine, too!)

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