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Comment by threwrfaway | Hacker News Reader

"230 tons of TNT"

I hate units of TNT. Ill do psi. Love the foot. The calorie is metric! But what on planet earth is "ton of TNT"?

The energy that was dissipated (using 0.5 mv^2) was 1TJ, or the 280 000 kWh.

It's the most common unit for describing the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. So, it's a lot smaller than the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII, but a lot bigger than a Davy Crockett. That's a sort-of-useful frame of reference.

The only other things I can think of that would create a similar kind of blast are a volcanic eruption or something like that fertilizer explosion in Beirut in 2020 (~1100 tons TNT equivalent.)

Plus any kids that played with firecrackers has a visceral sense of how much power is in fractions of a stick of dynamite

To be clear, I know what it is. In fact, I'm probably one of the few in the site who could guesstimate how much energy it is without looking it up (covalent reactions, per mole are equally energetic to within a fairly narrow margin; thats why, hydrocarbons are more less equally energetic)

But it's meaningless, unless you're a demolitions engineer. What's the volume of a ton of TNT? I guess - within a factor of two - about the same as a ton of water? So a cubic meter? Who knows?

TNT explosion unit is ACME friendly!... meep meep!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

From now on I will use the gigacalorie for this kind of thing.

They probably need an "Equivalent football field lengths of burgers eliminated" to assist certain countries.

I think "tons of TNT" make sense for an explosion? At least it works for A-Bomb equivalents, in this case it was like, huh, ~1/50th of Little Boy.

Just to add to the confusion, that's metric tonnes, so it should be "tonnes" or "metric tons", but not "tons"

Meh, a metric ton is 0.9 of a US ton, well within the error bars for this sort of thing.

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