Comments by "Dr Gamma D" (@DrDeuteron) on "Chernobyl Episode 3 - Open Wide, O Earth - Nuclear Engineer Reacts" video.

  1. to estimate the electric field of a gamma ray, put all the energy (hf) and put in a cubic wavelength (c/f)^3. At 1.22 MeV, that's a picometer cubed. Set it equal to epsilon_0/2 * E^2. You get the Schwinger Limit, the energy required to make an e+e- pair (~10^18 V/m). That's alot, but gamma's have random phase and polarization so they add incoherently (as the sqrt of the number of gammas in a cubic picometer, and number is prob. never bigger than 1). Now lasers are coherent, and you can focus a 5W 516nm freq-doubled YAG laser and ionize air molecules en mass....which requires only 30,000 V/m.
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