https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
> A series of 50-kiloton bombs would be dropped into the cavern and exploded to heat the water and create steam. The steam would then power a secondary cooling loop for power extraction using a steam turbine. Dropping about two bombs a day would cause the system to reach thermal equilibrium, allowing the continual extraction of about 2 GW of electrical power
Which was building canals etc with nuclear bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
"Shut up"
It’s strange that controlled fusion is an energy sink, but whatever black magic is happening inside an H-bomb manages to unlock so much “free” energy.
E=mc^2. The proportion of the original mass converted to energy in fusion is higher than it is for fission.
The trouble with fusion is that you need really high temperatures and pressures to sustain it. You can easily sustain a fission reaction at a few hundred degrees C, or even lower than that if you wanted to (but the general goal is to boil water to run a steam turbine so >100°C is what you want).
Fusion requires millions of degrees, which would vaporize most things you might want to use as a container, so instead they use strong magnetic fields and then you spend a lot of energy maintaining the magnetic field. A bomb doesn't care about that because sustained operation isn't required and vaporizing everything in the vicinity is kind of the idea.
Moreover, efficiency isn't really the issue. The efficiency of fission is already absurd. Fission of a given mass of uranium generates the same amount of energy as burning 2.7 million times that amount coal -- by mass, it's even more by volume.
The main advantages of fusion are that hydrogen is a lot more common than uranium (though uranium is still pretty available) and that the byproduct of fusion is helium (a non-radioactive noble gas with general usefulness), whereas some of the fission byproducts are variously radioactive or have limited known commercial applications.
The history of fusion research for the past 70 years is trying to figure out a cost-effective way to trigger enough fusion to make net energy without a nuke. So far, we've got bupkis. (The magnetic containment approaches using high-temperature superconductors seem promising, but we won't know they actually work until we've built them.)
Thermonuclear bombs literally create lots of heat, and don’t tend to drive anything that produces work. It’s the opposite of efficient.
Just like lighting gasoline on fire and claiming that that’s more efficient than a combustion energy…
Further fission here requires a fission first stage which represents a huge additional energy input.
I trust the argument. You can look into it yourself. Long story short, it is massively energy positive compared to controlled fusion.
ITER is supposed to be a 10-20x return on energy provided (10x being a basically guaranteed minimum) which means it may or may not be better depending on the specific bomb design, but it’s not massively better.
People talk about fusion as useless and slow but the current record holder in steady state was first turned on in 1983 and hit 0.67 in 1997. It’s not a failure of the underlying technology, it’s a near total lack of investment that’s stalled progress. ITER was started under the first Bush presidency and scaled back to a minimum design. It could have easily been built 20+ years ago if it was an actual priority.
So, fission bombs are the black magic.
It’s a much more efficient version of inertial confinement fusion like at the NIF.