Going Nuclear on Banana’s…….and some other interesting banana stuff

Going Nuclear on Banana’s…….and some other 

interesting banana stuff

Banana’s botanically speaking are actually berries, but that’s not the topic I am going to writing about. In fact I am going to be telling you about how we could actually power our world with bananas. Sounds bananas, right?

Here is another fun fact on bananas…. They are the most radioactive foods we eat. That doesn’t mean that you put a detector near it and it will madly go ticking .Compared to other foods a banana is one of the most radioactive of them all.  From the ground to the Uranium powering nuclear submarines everything is radioactive.  We are constantly bombarded with radiation from outer space i.e. cosmic radiation. This radiation is known as background radiation. Now setting aside this ever present background radiation you must be wondering how in the world is a banana radioactive.

But here are a few more interesting things about bananas and radioactivity…..

1.      Radiation is lethal and it pretty much destroys a living organism. But what if someone was exposed to as many bananas to give radiation sickness. For this to take place you would need a whopping 5 million bananas.

2.      Besides bananas, Brazil nuts are also radioactive since they contain the element Radium in them as they grow in soils containing Radium.

3.      Tobacco is also radioactive again because it grows in soil containing Polonium ²¹⁰ and excessive smoking leads to lung cancer.

Bananas are one of the richest sources of Potassium in the food group.  Now just like all atoms, Potassium too does have a couple of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes that can be found in bananas.  Potassium 40 is the nasty radioactive isotope who has been messing around with our beloved banana. K⁴⁰ or Potassium 40 disintegrates or decays by emitting an electron or more scientifically called a Beta particle, or an anti electron (opposite of a electron) and is also known as Antimatter .Don’t panic and  sudden stop buying bananas because there radioactive. Only 0.1% of the potassium in a banana is K ⁴⁰.This radioactive K⁴⁰ is just a residue of the formation of earth about 4.5 billion years ago. But it has a half life of 1.25 billion years and is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this topic: could I make electricity by harnessing the power of the all mighty radioactive banana and maybe power something?

Let’s get down to the math

How many Bananas would I require to produce 2000W of electricity?

But before that let’s get some facts right…..

·         On an average one banana produces an anti-electron in 75 minutes.

·         And just for the sake of the math let us take that 50% of the anti-electrons energy is absorbed to boil the water to produce steam. (The structure of the power plant would be basically the same as your normal nuclear power plant.)

After calculating on an average a banana would produce around 9.11*10^-31 W and to just produce 2000W of electricity I would need around 2.2 *10^20 bananas.

So to just produce 2000W of energy I would need more than 220000000000000000000 bananas, which I guess is more than the world’s production and is also pretty worthless considering the amount of energy it would produce. Also factoring the size you would require to build such contraption is just mind-blowing.

So maybe the humble banana is not so humble after all ………