How to Use megaton in a Sentence

megaton

noun
  • The Soviet Union tested its first megaton-range weapon 62 years ago.
    — Alex Wellerstein, The Atlantic, 5 Sep. 2017
  • Reports from Russia indicate the bomb could be as large as 100 megatons.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 16 Jan. 2018
  • Or from slitting their throats, sticking his pickax in their sternum, or attaching them to a plummeting megaton bomb.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 4 May 2023
  • The flash of light when the 57-megaton nuclear bomb exploded could be seen more than 620 miles away.
    — Lorenzino Estrada, AZCentral.com, 30 Oct. 2025
  • The Obama administration was planning to retire this weapon, which is the last of the megaton-class bombs.
    — Michael R. Gordon, WSJ, 24 Dec. 2020
  • The sources of this electrical power released over 85 megatons of carbon dioxide.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 30 Oct. 2023
  • The use of megaton bombs to kill individuals meant, of course, that many hundreds of thousands of other people would also be killed.
    — Jessica T. Mathews, The New York Review of Books, 20 Aug. 2020
  • Then the Mustang and Camaro got redesigned, losing their megaton-blast V-8s in the process.
    — Ezra Dyer, Popular Mechanics, 3 Aug. 2016
  • By her calculations, even an area the size of London could grow enough seaweed to sequester ten megatons of carbon dioxide per year.
    — Saima May Sidik, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Jan. 2024
  • From the caldera spewed 24 cubic miles of ash, rock, and gases into the air, including 60 megatons of sulfur.
    — Monica Cull, Discover Magazine, 2 Jan. 2025
  • And underground tests up to 5 megatons, with the antiballistic missile warhead.
    — Glenn Zorpette, IEEE Spectrum, 2 Sep. 2024
  • Most hydrogen bombs are rated in megatons, the equivalent of 1,000 kilotons.
    — Popular Mechanics Editors, Popular Mechanics, 7 Feb. 2018
  • The four-megaton weapon did not detonate only because its fourth and last safety switch held in place, the other three 50-cent pieces of equipment having armed themselves.
    — Michael Auslin, The Atlantic, 5 Nov. 2017
  • The country’s capacity to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is tiny in comparison now — in the low single-digit megatons so far.
    — Justine Calma, The Verge, 11 Apr. 2024
  • The explosion blew the silo blast doors off and sent chunks of debris flying everywhere, including the nine-megaton nuclear warhead that sat atop the missile.
    — Vince Guerrieri, Popular Mechanics, 18 Sep. 2020
  • Over the first 18 days of August alone, Arctic wildfires emitted 42 megatons of carbon dioxide.
    — Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • The band ended Hiroshima-style, with a ten-megaton rage detonation just before a Paris gig in 2009.
    — Kyle Smith, National Review, 11 Sep. 2019
  • The blast, which was later attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.
    — Fox News, 23 June 2017
  • Likewise, a typical reactor today produces 21 metric tons of waste, not 21 metric megatons.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2018
  • Every year, krill remove as much as 23 megatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to new research published by the World Wildlife Fund.
    — Joshua Goodman, Fortune, 13 Oct. 2023
  • The most powerful is Russia’s Tsar Bomb at fifty megatons, some 3,333 times more powerful than Little Man.
    — Literary Hub, 18 Aug. 2025
  • That brought the total for June, July, and the first part of August to more than 180 megatons, roughly three and a half times more than the country of Sweden emits in a year.
    — Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • Among the casualties are the region’s rich kelp forests, which contribute upwards of $52 billion to the global economy and sequester nearly a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every year.
    — JSTOR Daily, 17 Oct. 2025
  • The larger circle showed the range of a 9 megaton two-stage thermonuclear bomb, and the smaller circle showed the range of a 15 kiloton bomb comparable in strength to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — not the other way around.
    — New York Times, 2 Sep. 2017
  • The strongest flares release energy equivalent to millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time, or about one tenth of the total energy emitted by the entire Sun in one second.
    — Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 31 Mar. 2023
  • TerraPower expects a typical 1,200-megawatt traveling wave reactor to produce 5 metric tons of waste per gigawatt year, not 5 metric megatons.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2018
  • Plastic production is on course to triple by 2060, less than 10% of it is recycled, and around 8,000 megatons now pollute the planet, according to a review of recent studies published Sunday by The Lancet.
    — Alexander Smith, NBC news, 4 Aug. 2025
  • The roughly 180-foot-wide meteor’s explosion above a remote region of Russia released the energy equivalent of three to 50 megatons of TNT while leveling about 830 square miles of Siberian forest.
    — Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 24 June 2026
  • The energy released would equal more than 1,000 megatons of TNT, or tens to hundreds of nuclear weapons, according to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization promoting space exploration.
    — Eric Lagatta, USA Today, 16 Apr. 2026
  • Acidic answers Global plastic use has grown from 20 megatons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.
    — Devika Rao, TheWeek, 3 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'megaton.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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