ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 271
At the back of my head, I seemed to recall Hathaway talking in terms
of a gigawatt or two. I found it difficult to visualize a gigawatt and said as
much to Marckus.
I didn't want another physics lesson, but I realized too late I was going
to get one.
"At the low end of the scale, Hutchison was using 400 watts to achieve
the effects you're talking about," Marckus said. "Four hundred watts are
the heat and light you get from four light bulbs." A kilowatt—a thousand
watts—represents the heat you get from a one-bar electric fire. A
thousand kilowatts are a megawatt and a thousand megawatts are a
terawatt. A thousand terawatts, Marckus told me, were a gigawatt.
"You know now what a gigawatt is?" he said. "A gigawatt is the equivalent
energy release of the Nagasaki bomb. And that's what Hutchison was
pulling out of his 110-volt AC wall socket to turn steel into lead.
"Transmutation is real. The reason most people don't use it to turn
lead into gold is that the power requirements cost more than the gold."
"Why would INSCOM be interested in alchemy?" I asked.
Marckus smiled again, but the look in his eyes was intense. "Transmutation
has other purposes. You can use it to change the rate at which
radioactive elements decay or you can turn the whole process around."
Marckus was putting me through the hoops again.
"Go on," I told him.
"Think of it," he said, leaning forward, "transmutation, if you can
do it the Hutchison way, is a cheap method of enriching uranium,
for example. There's another thing, too. Remember when you were
heading for Puthoff's place and you asked me for a no-brainer on the
power potential of zero-point energy? I gave you the shoebox analogy and
how much untapped energy there is in it?"
He swilled the dregs of his beer around, drained them, then set the glass
down and looked at me. "Maybe Hutchison doesn't know it. Release that
energy slowly and you've got a safe, clean reactor that can go on pumping
out power forever. Speed up the process and make all the right connections
and you've got a bomb; one that'll make a thermonuke look like a child's
firecracker. No wonder they shredded the report at Los Alamos."
I was about to remind him that it had merely been "routinely
destroyed," but stopped myself. Standing next to the coffee machine at
the Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin, Puthoff had coolly relayed
his belief that there was enough energy in my cup to boil the world's
oceans many times over. And then I remembered the Schaubergers' fears
over the Americans' hijacking of the implosion process—its potential use
in the development of a giant bomb.