9 ms·

4,000 Amps is a ridiculous amount of current. Though when you have a nuclear power plant nearby... Also, this line made me shudder: > "...stringing an electri

• vacri 11y ago
  One of the lab techs where I went to university had a poster up in the workshop with a series of nails and the current required to melt them. At the end of the series was a thick bolt, marked "1100 Amp Slow-Blow Fuse"...
• centizen 11y ago
  It might still be a little ridiculous - that light is one of the most powerful in the entire world
  • kaybe 11y ago
    I'm rather thinking about solar light testing facilities for space crafts here, such as ESA's Large Space Simulator. The specs say: 'Intensity level with 19 lamps at 20 kW: 2000 W/m' (6m solar beam diameter) [2] (Also, 'On request, the sun simulator can be equipped with 32 kW lamps'.) [1] http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Large_Space_Simulator_LSS http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technolo... [2] http://emits.sso.esa.int/emits-doc/ESTEC/AD1-AO-5580.pdf http://emits.sso.esa.int/emits-doc/ESTEC/AD1-AO-5580.pdf
• esaym 11y ago
  Well as far as energy, depends on voltage. That's just 4000 watts if the voltage is just 1 volt.
  • mw67 11y ago
    But as far as dangerousness, only 0.1A can kill a human, whereas voltage is not so important.
    • chopin 11y ago
      Through your body, yes. With 1V you can't drive much of a current through ones body.
      • thescriptkiddie 11y ago
        Even 48 volts won't drive any appreciable current through dry skin, but you can string four car batteries together and weld with them. It's frightening that people are so ignorant about electricity.
        • TheCraiggers 11y ago
          Eh, as far as the list of frightening things that people don't know about goes, electricity is pretty far down the list for me. Most people just don't come into contact with it often enough, so simply saying things like "don't get near a downed powerline" is probably good enough. Stuff like radon or CO are way higher on that list, in my personal opinion. Hell, even people's general ignorance of their countries' political process and what their (elected or not) officials are doing is way more frightening to me than their ignorance about electricity. Sorry to be so damn pedantic.
          • ethbro 11y ago
            I think it's fair to say "invisible" things are generally all pretty high on the list of frightening things people don't know about. Including but not limited to: software, nuclear radiation, CO and chemistry in general, electricity, microbiology, politics in practice, macro-economics and banking, ... (it's a pretty long list)
            • 11y ago
• bayouborne 11y ago
  I'm unclear on that point, is that current applied after construction, or is it an operational mechanism? If the latter, it seems like that would be a beacon of sorts as well (for some other type of detector)
• brandmeyer 11y ago
  The degaussing facility uses shore power. They could mean 4000 ampere-turns, too. Source: I went through one of these back in the day.
  • zymhan 11y ago
    Oh, it's a degausser? So it's not running regularly while at sea?
    • brandmeyer 11y ago
      It isn't even part of the ship. Its a big coil that the ship pulls into.
    • drostie 11y ago
      Correct. The magnetic signatures seen are the permanent magnetic moments embedded in the steel of the ships, which are picked up by passive magnetic-anomaly detectors. These have to be removed by randomization in a normal all-at-once degaussing process. It is hypothetically possible to have an active-detection process too, but presumably that would take the form of emitting a pulse of electromagnetic radiation and looking for its echoes, in other words it's just another form of vision. The standard problem applies: find a frequency at which water is mostly transparent. Unfortunately the absorption spectrum for water is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water#/media/File:Absorption_spectrum_of_liquid_water.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_... , it has a minimum in the visible range. In addition to being one of the more stunning confirmations of evolution (of course our eyes are only sensitive to the least-absorbed wavelengths of light in water -- our ancestors evolved eyes in the ocean! there weren't many other useful wavelengths down there!) this has the nasty property that it's unlikely that we'd be able to detect a sub this way with any better approach than shining a bright laser or spotlight or what have you, and watching what's reflected back with our own eyes.
      • zimmund 11y ago
        Thanks for your aclaration, it helped me understand the idea :)
• seanp2k2 11y ago
  Some competition car audio set-ups are using tens of thousands of watts, usually at 14.4 or 18 volts, so the amperage can get into the thousands. The wiring used for that is usually multiple runs of 0-gauge or better. 4/0 is a bit less than half an inch and is rated for 300-400 amps.
• dnautics 11y ago
  the luxor hotel also isn't submerged in a giant body of electrically conductive liquid!!