Like many people, I am saddened and distressed by the massive oil leak destroying the Gulf of Mexico, for a whole bunch of reasons.

As a child who grew up sketching mushroom clouds during the height of the cold war, I was intrigued when I came across this vid from the youtube, plotting the Nuclear explosions across the world last century.

I was and was staggered the number of devices popped was as high as 2053.

I wondered what the equivalent energy from these blasts would represent in terms of the oil gushing out from the seabed would be?  So here is some simple maths...

• 1 gallon of oil is about 145 MJ of energy.
• 1 nuclear blast, about the size of Hiroshima is about 80 TJ of energy.

Some simple division has

• 1 nuclear blast = 550,000 gallons of oil
  

Taking the British Petroleum company's worst estimate, 2.5 Million gallons per day

(experts have this much higher...)

That's about 5 nuclear blasts per day in the Gulf.

As of the 9th of July, 2010 they oil has been gushing for around 80 days.

That a total of 400 Nuclear blast equivalents.

It's also a kinda scary number.

Sam,

@samotage

• energy
• oil
• nuclear

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