The best way of doing this, is to have a big steel hollow sphere with vacuum inside. A detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the center would warm the sphere and some steam engines on the outside could harness this power.
The problem is, that the vacuum should be very high and the sphere quite large, so the outside pressure is an important factor. So you should place this gadget into orbit, where the cooling is not very simple. Nor the electricity transport back to Earth.
Otherwise, it's a good solution. This way we could have had fusion electricity some time ago. Perhaps with small hydrogen bombs a.k.a. neutron bombs. Otherwise those steel spheres would have to be too big to be stable on Earth.
The sphere would need to be extremely large to be able to absorb the energy of a nuclear weapon without being blown apart. Most of the radiated energy (being of the form of soft x-rays and UV) is going to be absorbed in the first cm or so of material. Assuming you use iron (a good choice as iron is plentiful), the limit is around the 100 kJ/m^2 range, which means that for a 100 kiloton (418 terajoule) nuclear weapon your shell would have to have a surface area on the order of 4.18 billion m^2, or a radius of 31 km. Assuming you could design an ultra-materi...
This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.
This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.
Rules for this thread:
If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :