One gram of uranium has 20 billion calories – radiation aside, would that many calories at once kill you?

Question

One gram of uranium has 20 billion calories – radiation aside, would that many calories at once kill you?

In:

Answer 1

So leaving aside the obvious answers of “No, it’s not food so you’re body won’t absorb it”, the answer is yes.

A calorie is a unit of energy. While you can’t take in 20 billion calories from uranium, we can still work out what 20 billion calories would do to the human body.

I’m going to assume those are small (thermochecmial) calories (equal to about 4 joules), instead of food calories, not that it really matters here. It just changes the size of the final crater by a bit

Napkin math. You weigh 80kg. about 50kg of that is water. body temp is 37. Starting from body temp, it takes about 2500 kilojoules of energy to convert 1 kg of water to steam. So about 125 megajoules to flash all the water in your body into steam. 20 billion calories is about 80 gigajoules. of energy. Which means after introducing 20 billion calories of energy into your body, you would still have about 79.9 gigajoules of energy left to expect, after you vaporize.

The answer is you explode, and take out a significant area of your local neighbourhood.