Black Hole Catalyzed Total Conversion

That has a nice ring to it. Kind of like "Laser Induced, Gravity Sustained Fusion Reactor".

Weird chain of events: a Slashdot article discussing the physics of space war. Leads me back to Project Rho, re-reading the sections on stealth and heat dissipation. Somehow, I ended up on stardestroyer.net, reading about the Death Star power system (I remember something about the importance of heat dissipation, and how Luke might not have had the impact he thought he did). Someone (maybe there, maybe elsewhere) mentioned the possibility of using black holes to convert matter to energy (this was in the context of a system failure not producing a tremendous boom, at least in comparison to the enormous power output before the failure [the Death Star is assumed to produce more power than Sol - blowing it up could easily wreck a solar system - that is, Yavin or Endor, places the heroes were supposed to be protecting]).

I decided to sit down and actually look at what it would be like to have a black hole around for energy conversion.

The idea is actually pretty simple, you feed matter into a black hole (presumably one already electrically charged so you can keep a handle on it). You then harness the Hawking radiation (HR) for energy.

There are several properties of black holes which make this not entirely unreasonable:

Power output (via HR) is inversely proportional to the square of the mass of the hole.

That means every (log) step down in mass, you go up two steps in the power of your reactor! Smaller holes give more power! It also means the black hole will likely not fail-big, but rather fail-evaporate (giving off a huge amount of energy). A small hole (2e10 kg) would produce about 1e11 W. Making it a little smaller (2e8 kg) would yield 1e15 W (probably too much to get rid of...)

Size is proportional to mass

This has good and bad points. A small hole is really small. 2e10 kg being about 3e-20 m (3e-11 of 1 nm) This means you won't accidentally fall in. But it also means you have to try very hard to get matter into the thing to keep it going.

Lifetime is proportional to mass cubed

This is kind of annoying, but the constants make it ok. A small hole (2e10 kg) would have a lifetime of about 21 million years. It does mean that your initial hole (unless you have a really big accelerator) is going to decay fast.

Actually, with a lifetime like that, it's effectively a battery, with no fuel input. A super small hole (2e6 kg, only two million kilograms!) would have a lifetime of 662 seconds! Definitely a problem, especially considering it is giving off a constant 1e19 W! Don't get burned!

People worrying about the Large Hadron Collider producing black holes shouldn't worry. The energy levels are way too low to produce a hole with any meaningful lifetime. It also means we will need a much larger collider (or better production methods - huge lasers?) to produce commercial black holes.