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Black hole explosions? QUANTUM gravitational effects are usually ignored in calcu- lations of the formation and evolution of black holes. The justification for this is that the radius of curvature of space- time outside the event horizon is very large compared to the Planck length (G/c3)1/2 ~ 10-33 cm, the length scale on which quantum fluctuations of the metric are expected to be of order unity. This means that the energy density of par- tiles created by the gravitational field is small compared to the space-time curvature. Even though quantum effects may be small locally, they may still, however, add up to produce a significant effect over the lifetime of the Universe ~ 1017 s which is very long compared to the Planck time ~ 10-13 s.