Run lightning through [x] usage...

[MDJH]

So I had a hypothetical idea a while back involving a large rotating wire-mesh (of course, in hindsight, it would be more likely to attract lightning if there were pointy ends distrubuted throughout said wire mesh) turning high in the sky, to attract lightning during thunderstorms, and run it through whatever it leads to. (ie. epsom-salt water for electrolysis, lightning electromagnet, etc...)

 

One idea I had for what it would lead through is a flat sheet of tungsten, immersed in water. As the lightning runs through it, the tungsten heats up; 60 watts of electrical power is enough to light a tungsten bulb significantly; imagine if I were to run hundreds of thousands of amps at millions of volts of electricity (implicitly hundreds of billions of watts) through tungsten; that should heat it up very brightly, flash boiling the water and forcing it out of whatever container to turn whatever turbine and generate electricity in a more controllable, presumably more storable manner.

 

However, thinking about blackbody radiation, I'm also curious as to whether or not heating it up with hundreds of billions of watts of electricity would also cause it to emit UV light, or X-ray light... or even gamma gays. How likely would that be to happen?