Thanks so much for watching! If you would like to hear more about Thorium, please check out: ruclips.net/video/LMBu8ocV5Hk/видео.htmlsi=CeoZxaT-11huwlyJ
Hey Tyler, I want to suggest a video for you, it's from radioactive Drew when he went to the Idaho HTRE, apparently it's still radioactive even though it's on display outside ruclips.net/video/K0kvQJ-j2nk/видео.htmlsi=CnIIAPpq25eJ_TfQ
I shocked a coworker who had been a nuclear technician on a U.S. Navy submarine when I mentioned that the only real difference between a coal fired power plant and a nuclear power plant is where the heat comes from that is used to produce the steam to run the turbine generators that produce the electricity. He was shocked that someone with only a background as an electronics technician would understand this fact. I informed Him that my presentation for my senior year speech class was on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source. I told him that my presentation was only 8 minutes long but that I answered questions on the topic for 20 minutes. I received an A+ for the presentation even though I went 23 minutes longer than I should have. I guess the teacher was just as fascinated by the topic as the class was.
Class presentations can bring up a variety of interesting topics. That was one of my favourite times. Usually because it meant that someone was gonna get a lot more time and we'd have to continue into the next day.
I bet there are a lot of engineering fields where they’d be shocked by how much the public knows. I worked for a company making missiles and they were very uncomfortable with how much info was on Wikipedia. Some of the training I’ve received even said I’m not allowed to share links to some Wikipedia articles lol Edit: if hypothetically there was some kind of info that I wasn’t allowed to share, and that info appeared on a Wikipedia page, then I wouldn’t be allowed to share that page despite the fact that it’s already public. There was no specific page being mentioned so don’t bother asking lol
Sorta like how the coal/nuclear power difference is just a heat source, I got to work on a nuclear power program where all of our work was in power conversion and the nuclear part was purely there as a heat source that we just simulated in the lab with a regular heater.
I think the exhaust was more radioactive than they wanted because the air was directly interacting with the core, after all that would likely be the only way air alone would be enough for cooling.
I'd say that linking the technology to the bombing is pretty accurate, because for most of the world the use of the bomb would be the first time people knew that the tech existed. Not just the bomb technology, but also the enrichment tech, and for the non-engineers, an example of just how much energy could come from nuclear power.
I would guess the radioactive "contamination" spoken of in the strictly air cooled design would arise from passing the air DIRECTLY over the core. The uranium would be bound to the core, but daughter products could receive enough energy to to be pushed out of the fuel assembly, in to the coolant airflow that was then exhausted.
Uranium hasn't been exposed in a fuel rod assembly since the earliest research reactors. Daughter products typically remain inside of the fuel pellet, which is within the (now zircalloy) fuel rods, which are sealed.
@spvillano then I wonder what the militaries issue was with radio isotope contaminates in the coolant air ? I know current fuel assemblies are in zirconium alloy clading, but that wasn't always the case, and this experimental plane reactor was a long time ago. Do you have any insight as to how contamination could occur in a direct air cooled reactor like the original design shown in this video ? Possibly uranium impurities in the coolant air piping absorbing neutrons ? Or possibly metal atoms from the intake turbine passing through the core and getting irradiated then exhausted ?
@@John-ir2zfthere was no contamination, only radiation from the reactor itself, which was a continuous hazard to the crew. The Air Force deemed the entire hot mess (yeah, I intended that) was unfeasible and wanted out. Research continued anyway for 3 years, despite there being no targeted mission for the impractical aircraft. The fuel rods were Ni-Cr rods, with uranium within in pellet form. The Navy wanted a nuclear powered flying boat, using ceramic fuel, but that got canceled before planning could begin. That ceramic fuel was to be the next step in this aircraft as well, but JFK killed the AEC funding for the entire debacle. That said, given the amount of heating required, NOx output and generally ionized air wouldn't do the turbines much good over time, with both nitride and oxide accumulation over operational hours, turbine failure would be highly likely. Of course, during the '50's, there was much talk of nuclear powered cars and all other manner of outlandish notions, like a bunch of five year old kids playing with daddy's gun. Here's one source document that lists other open source available government documents: media.defense.gov/2014/Oct/14/2001329848/-1/-1/0/AFD-141014-032.pdf On a scale of 1 - 10 on insanity scale, this project did earn a solid 20.
You should look into what the USSR tried doing with flying reactors. They learned about the U.S. doing these experiments and didn't want to get caught at a disadvantage. From what I understand they went heavy into experimentation and light on shielding and the flight and ground crews all died within a few years. It would be interesting to hear you separate fact from fiction in those stories.
The bombing is what the living population SAW the headlines/the rubble. There's really no question whether "The secret projects that we didn't know about for years" or "The flash that ended a city and boiled its populace alive" made the bigger impression.
There is a channel called Radioactive Drew that went and visited and even mapped the radiation around the prototype engines as they are sitting outside near EBR-1 in Idaho. It is a pretty interesting video. Its called Radioactive Nuclear Jet Engines in a Parking Lot.
You should look up Project Pluto or SLAM, as it too was about flying reactors, in this case a remote-operated nuclear cruise missile. An insane project that was cancelled after it was deemed too impractical.
Russia recently tried to test just such a missile, billed as a global hypersonic cruise missile. It exploded during assembly on its pad, killing the crew assembling it.
So glad you covered this. While it was ultimately a failed program the possibilities that it represented always fascinated me. I always loved imagining gargantuan nuclear powered planes, literal flying fortresses that could stay aloft indefinitely, perhaps with comparatively smaller planes that could dock with them to shift out personnel and supplies.
Thanks for putting that together. I was aware of some of this, but never saw the "closed loop control" use of control rods. You are right - really bad idea. Instrumentation is gonna fail, just exactly when is unknown.
Tyler, did you happen to work at the Waterford 3 facility in Louisiana? I helped with a neutron door replacement several years ago with the architecture firm I work for. Your name sounds very familiar and I’m just curious if you were one of the on-site consultants that helped us out.
With regards to the contamination concerns of open vs closed cycle Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion, fission products will leak out of cladding and into your primary coolant. Primary circuit contamination may be an inconvenience for most applications but when your primary circuit is the atmosphere people tend to get a bit uppity about it.
Inam a software engineer who's deaigned and built software for safety critical systems. Aircraft controlling the rods in both directions is how it would have to be done. There is no such thing as fail safe in aircraft flight critical systems. They are all "fail operational".
i’ve been binging your channel! i’ve been loving it so far. ☢️💕 i haven’t seen any reactions to Godzilla tho. 😮 definitely watch / react to Godzilla Minus One or the original if you haven’t already. 😊
I'm a historian of science (professionally). To begin, historians *do* look at the work and the scientific and technological developments leading up to the bomb. Countless books have been written on it and hundreds of articles. It's just the public doesn't care about that. The reason historians tend to focus more on the bombing than the work leading to it is that the bombing is what created the widespread social and cultural sentiments surrounding nuclear physics. Much of the work leading to the bomb was done in secret--things done in secret by definition to not have widespread social or cultural impacts until they result in widespread changes (whether visible or not) in human experience. It had nothing to do with sensationalism--it's simply that historians tend to focus on the empirical data, and the empirical data is that the public responded more strongly to the bombs than they did to the advent of nuclear power.
Loved the scene with the waldo. Was thinking, "I can *really* break that flask quickly with those!". I figured out the hyperbole at the beginning, the absurdity of "humanity was going through a bad break-up", with well, hand wave... But, for a video about reactors, there's a lot of bomb footage. Shouldn't all coal power plants show coal mine fires and coal dust explosion results or something? Whereas one could even more easily attack the insane notion of a nuclear powered aircraft engine at the time with the abysmal safety record for aircraft of the era. When flight insurance was a really good idea, as aircraft played bumper cars in the air, slammed into mountains, slammed into level ground, disintegrated in the air, exploded when lightning hit, hell, compared to today (despite Boeing's recent contributions to returning the past to us), aircraft were damnably dangerous and crash and burn with the words "nuclear reactor" should never, ever, ever be considered within even the same paragraph, let alone event. I'll not even go into a certain Russian nuclear propelled research team, erm, missile that experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly on its floating pad... Vibration causes fission? Here, I thought it was merely a marital aid. 200 MEV is tiny, OK, my x-rays are thankfully much, much lower! Otherwise, the first x-ray is one's final one. Kinetic energy by fission, you know, the reactor blows up, destroyed the planet and universe and we're all dead, so leave me alone, I'm dead, dammitall! Not that whole gamma and x-ray release that interacts down to heat, nope, magical hand waves of the ignorant. Need I say, I don't suffer fools well. My car works off of gasoline as a fuel, a molotov cocktail it is decidedly not. The SL-1 reactor, a spectacularlly poor design, suffered a prompt critical event when the main control rod was withdrawn too far on startup, resulting in an explosion - a steam explosion that dismantled the reactor into a novel form of modern art and a rod plug pinned one of the workers to the concrete ceiling. Not that anyone in the room cared, as the massive burst of radiation from the failing reactor when the cover popped off rendered them instantly unconscious, never to regain consciousness. I also have concerns over an air as a working fluid and coolant system over NOx emissions, as that much heat does some annoying things to air. If I'm going for a coolant that's basically a gas, I'd go with supercritical CO2 as a coolant, because it works so well on Venus. Well, in the UK, anyway. And the UK proved how wonderful air cooled was at Windscale, having to divert CO2 coolant from the MAGNOX unit under construction to try to extinguish the fire... And their AGR, using CO2 as coolant is working fine, thank you. Put the CO2 into a supercritical state, one has density and unique characteristics to leverage, albeit at some rather extreme pressures. I'll disagree on technical grounds on thorium not being able to displace uranium as a fuel source - where thorium is more abundant than uranium is. Otherwise, thorium is a great idea, it's also a royal PIA as a fuel, due to one really wanting inline reprocessing. Not quite sure how to breed from a molten salt reactor though and we really do need those industrial and medical isotopes. Still, airplane vs breeder reactor, apples being compared to bowling balls. No clue why the windscreen would need to be so thick for a reactor, for a warhead detonating nearby, yeah, for a reactor behind the window, makes zero sense. But then, commonsense and hyperbole ridden drivel never were acquainted with one another. There were also plans related to this idiocy that could be doable and far more manageable, nuclear rockets operating under the same principle, just a different working gas. Doable, but then, wiping one's butt with a chain saw is doable, doesn't make it a recommendable suggestion of a course of action. A total of 32 reactors were launched into orbit, with some reactor coolant metal compounds still floating as "space junk" freely. Shall we say, not extremely well thought out in advance?
Consider this: If they had nuclear-powered bombers, would the enemy be less likely to shoot them down? There's an old saying: "What goes up must come down." If you shoot down a flying nuclear reactor, the plane will crash, hit the ground, and essentially become a dirty bomb. So, shooting down such a bomber over your region would be like setting off a bomb on yourself.
Which would you prefer going off two miles from you? A dirty bomb, which might contaminate a few blocks or a thermonuclear warhead, which would vaporize a few blocks?
I honestly would love to hear your thoughts on thorium reactors. Biggest argument for is the fuel can't be used to make weapons grade material say like in a breeder, but not sure what the energy difference is, what it does in a reactor, why it is really different and what is the difference in material extraction from the ground to be used as fuel...is it cheaper than U.
It is a rumour spread in Internet. Noone use commerical nuclear reactor to make weapon. None. It is simply too inefficient and time consuming. On theory Russian RMBK reactors, Canada CANDU reactors are weapon making friendly reactors. But Canada does not make atomic bomb, South Korea does not make nuclear bombs. Even Russia does not make weapon grade plutonium from RBMK reactors. Just forget the weapon making argument. If they want to make atomic bombs, they will have their dedicated factories and equipment to make them.
Between this and Project Plowshare, it reminds me a lot of how AI is being applied now. A very useful technology in its own area, but then being applied carelessly by people with big ideas and small consideration of potential consequences.
Except in the case of this and Ploughshare, they did some basic testing and figured out that they were not good ideas, so it seems like they had at least some level of consideration for the consequences.
As long as we don't connect AI directly to heavy weaponry or depend on it for critical decisions, it's fine. The AI doomsday people don't know what they are talking about, listen to AI researchers instead of doomsayers.
@@iKvetch558 Project Plowshare detonated 27 nukes, and this flew a barely shielded nuclear reactor over US soil for 5 years. Those weren't safety tests, they were implementation tests. Much like a lot of the AI test implementations going on right now.
5:00 i think a big difference with a sub vs a plane is a sub has alot of access to water that it can use to propel itself forward, while an airplane has to carry all that.
I'd say that airplanes suffer from a severe lack of buoyancy. P.S. But hear me out! Nuclear powered airships (filled with helium, of course)! 🙌 P.P.S. Jk, don't do it!
Use co2 as the turbine loop ..... could be the most amazing vapor trails. all that cooling would be good for efficiency I am guessing. No passengers but would be cool.
Do you think that fast neutron/plutonium breeder reactors are a solution to long-term nuclear reactor use? Outside of something like a traveling-wave reactor I’m not sure how such a system could compete with something like a PWR…
Im more worried that if the plane would crash, how would they contain the core. Its not like a sinking submarine letting water in the core to seal it and avoid heating too much. Since air is used as a coolant, if it crashed the core is most likely to be cracked open or to heat up and melt in the possibility that the safety system to shut it down have been broken in the crash. It would so much more difficult to make a system that would be crash proof in my opinion. Assurance for that would be astronomic. Edit: just thought about it, what if the reactor need to be shut down while the plane is still in the air. That would be concerning if the only mean of propulsion is shut. If anybody has any idea let me know.
Would love to know your thoughts on everything nuclear in Australia with or PM saying it will make us all glow in the dark... Nuclear sea plane that never goes over land makes sense. Air-aircraft carrier maybe
It sounds like a very stupid idea to put a nuclear reactor in an airplane. If the reactor had an automatic shutdown in the event of a failure, the plane would drop and cause a nuclear disaster in any case + the intention was apparently to transport atomic bombs continuously... But the USA transported atomic bombs for several years in such a way that the bombs were constantly in the air, except when the plane happened to drop...
He finally does a video on the Flying Nuclear Reactor🎉. I can see why they were contemplating it, but like you anyways say; "This has 'bad idea' written all over it!" If I were that nuclear reactor, I would refuse to split a single atom until they put me back on Terra Firma. Some things aren't meant to take to the skies...
There actually is nuclear powered train concept, b it not real i think. nuclear reactor that is 3x2 feet and boils water, steam, spins turbine, makes electricity, then that electricity is used for the electric motors that run the train
TBF bfore the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the majority of the world really weren't aware of the potential for nuclear technology. There may have been those that were paying attention and were aware of the trinity tests but i doubt that was many people.
Unless you wanted a platform to fly perpetually, the economics of nuclear powered planes don't make sense, so there's really only a military, industrial, or political application here, not commercial. I'd trust certain kinds of nuclear reactors to be planes - ones where a crash would spread the radioactive constituent parts over a small area, and where they wouldn't readily enter the water cycle. That pretty much narrows it down to molten salt reactors running at close to ambient pressure with the fission daughter products tightly bound to the salt (save for the gaseous ones, which should be exhausted as the plane flies to dilute them). Which is what they were developed for the in the first place, so they have that going for it. Yo'd need a lot of shielding to make it practical. And you'd also want redundancy, which means a giant plane with a lot of lifting surface, a lot of control authority, and at least two separate reactors to avoid common-mode failure. Which you could afford since fuel economy can be tossed out the window without making it meaningfully more expensive. So, in principle I wouldn't trust a nuclear reactor to fly on a plane. But I might trust two particular kinds of reactors to fly on a giant superplane. If we can figure out a justification for said superplane.
Aren't most salts really soluable in water though? I wouldn't want hot radioactive salt spread near a crash site. Keep nuclear reactors on ground and water please.
We know for a fact as nuclear technology advances so does Radiation shielding gets better and lighter with new advances in material sciences so a nuclear reactor in a aircraft... eh maybe?
Except the problem of crashing still remains. You’re releasing radioactive materials. The shielding of them is not the problem, except for when the plane hits the ground at high speed
@@andrewreynolds912 yeah. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s nice in theory. Practically, just not safe. As he said, subs are safe because even in the worst environmental contamination, there’s a big quantity of water keeping everyone safe
@@ViscusRUclips yep... and even then it's much safer with it being near waste or if a ship sinking that had a nuclear reactor is far more safer than a plane crashing
Radiation shielding from advanced plastics infused with metamaterials like graphene/h-BN could do it now. Although the explosions would degrade the structure too much.
@@Takyodor2 nuclear material dropped from orbit disperses enough to not be a problem. It's big chunks that you have to contend with e.g The nuclear bomb dropping ship or it's bomb falling from the orbit, And that's if you have a high orbit. It was never designed to take off using nuclear so it would be built in orbit.
@@Takyodor2 if it starts falling you eject the crew module and blow it up. Assuming you built it at a far enough distance and the bombs are designed to detonate if they go to low. From my understanding the yield of the bombs weren't supposed to be that destructive. Somewhere between tactical and warhead level. But I'm all on the side of hydrogen nuclear thermal now; Mostly because lifespans might increase this decade due to protein folding AI.
To me that bombing seems to have been done not to kill the world or the country because they did an air explosion and that caused almost no ground radiation that I used to presume would happen when we used nuclear bombs. So we did kill many but we did not kill the ground the city was on and then have it get worse and worse. OK, fair it was bad enough, yes I get that but to me it seems it could have been much worse, but as I understand it the point was to try and keep another country from joining into a war and OK, when I think about this this attack was against the general population and not against the military which from a dumb humans standpoint that seems wrong but then I suppose everything I see Russia do seems wrong and we tend to do fuck all. OK, again not really true, but just because you want a lake, an oil chunk of land etc... why should you just declare war and take it because its only a few hundred mines outside your current boarder, fuckem lets just take it no one will actually try and stop us. Now when you live in Canada you don't just see a nice place 100 miles outside your boarder and take it you try and make a deal to trade for it right.
Наука
Thanks so much for watching! If you would like to hear more about Thorium, please check out: ruclips.net/video/LMBu8ocV5Hk/видео.htmlsi=CeoZxaT-11huwlyJ
Hey Tyler, I want to suggest a video for you, it's from radioactive Drew when he went to the Idaho HTRE, apparently it's still radioactive even though it's on display outside
ruclips.net/video/K0kvQJ-j2nk/видео.htmlsi=CnIIAPpq25eJ_TfQ
Just don't let Boeing near it 😂
If it's Boeing, it's blowing (up)!
😂
I couldn’t have thought of a funnier comment
C'mon bro can't even spell BOEING right??
@@protonjones54 Thought I put the I in oh well. What the fuck do I care you got the joke lol
21:09 "...to remind them that a mobile nuclear meltdown was simply not something to contend with."
Folse: *"Mobile Chernobyl?"*
I shocked a coworker who had been a nuclear technician on a U.S. Navy submarine when I mentioned that the only real difference between a coal fired power plant and a nuclear power plant is where the heat comes from that is used to produce the steam to run the turbine generators that produce the electricity. He was shocked that someone with only a background as an electronics technician would understand this fact. I informed Him that my presentation for my senior year speech class was on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source. I told him that my presentation was only 8 minutes long but that I answered questions on the topic for 20 minutes. I received an A+ for the presentation even though I went 23 minutes longer than I should have. I guess the teacher was just as fascinated by the topic as the class was.
Class presentations can bring up a variety of interesting topics. That was one of my favourite times. Usually because it meant that someone was gonna get a lot more time and we'd have to continue into the next day.
I bet there are a lot of engineering fields where they’d be shocked by how much the public knows. I worked for a company making missiles and they were very uncomfortable with how much info was on Wikipedia. Some of the training I’ve received even said I’m not allowed to share links to some Wikipedia articles lol
Edit: if hypothetically there was some kind of info that I wasn’t allowed to share, and that info appeared on a Wikipedia page, then I wouldn’t be allowed to share that page despite the fact that it’s already public. There was no specific page being mentioned so don’t bother asking lol
It’s always fun to shock an insider like that haha
Sorta like how the coal/nuclear power difference is just a heat source, I got to work on a nuclear power program where all of our work was in power conversion and the nuclear part was purely there as a heat source that we just simulated in the lab with a regular heater.
I think the exhaust was more radioactive than they wanted because the air was directly interacting with the core, after all that would likely be the only way air alone would be enough for cooling.
it's like a mini windscale, cute
I'd say that linking the technology to the bombing is pretty accurate, because for most of the world the use of the bomb would be the first time people knew that the tech existed. Not just the bomb technology, but also the enrichment tech, and for the non-engineers, an example of just how much energy could come from nuclear power.
When I co-op in 1980, one of the Technicians I worked with told me they worked on a Nuclear Powered Aircraft. Wild stuff.
You could continually fly over your enemies land with no chance of them shooting you down.
I would guess the radioactive "contamination" spoken of in the strictly air cooled design would arise from passing the air DIRECTLY over the core. The uranium would be bound to the core, but daughter products could receive enough energy to to be pushed out of the fuel assembly, in to the coolant airflow that was then exhausted.
Uranium hasn't been exposed in a fuel rod assembly since the earliest research reactors. Daughter products typically remain inside of the fuel pellet, which is within the (now zircalloy) fuel rods, which are sealed.
@spvillano then I wonder what the militaries issue was with radio isotope contaminates in the coolant air ?
I know current fuel assemblies are in zirconium alloy clading, but that wasn't always the case, and this experimental plane reactor was a long time ago.
Do you have any insight as to how contamination could occur in a direct air cooled reactor like the original design shown in this video ?
Possibly uranium impurities in the coolant air piping absorbing neutrons ?
Or possibly metal atoms from the intake turbine passing through the core and getting irradiated then exhausted ?
@@John-ir2zfthere was no contamination, only radiation from the reactor itself, which was a continuous hazard to the crew. The Air Force deemed the entire hot mess (yeah, I intended that) was unfeasible and wanted out. Research continued anyway for 3 years, despite there being no targeted mission for the impractical aircraft.
The fuel rods were Ni-Cr rods, with uranium within in pellet form. The Navy wanted a nuclear powered flying boat, using ceramic fuel, but that got canceled before planning could begin. That ceramic fuel was to be the next step in this aircraft as well, but JFK killed the AEC funding for the entire debacle.
That said, given the amount of heating required, NOx output and generally ionized air wouldn't do the turbines much good over time, with both nitride and oxide accumulation over operational hours, turbine failure would be highly likely.
Of course, during the '50's, there was much talk of nuclear powered cars and all other manner of outlandish notions, like a bunch of five year old kids playing with daddy's gun.
Here's one source document that lists other open source available government documents:
media.defense.gov/2014/Oct/14/2001329848/-1/-1/0/AFD-141014-032.pdf
On a scale of 1 - 10 on insanity scale, this project did earn a solid 20.
You should look into what the USSR tried doing with flying reactors. They learned about the U.S. doing these experiments and didn't want to get caught at a disadvantage. From what I understand they went heavy into experimentation and light on shielding and the flight and ground crews all died within a few years. It would be interesting to hear you separate fact from fiction in those stories.
I disagree. Mobile Chernobyl was fantastic 😂
The bombing is what the living population SAW the headlines/the rubble. There's really no question whether "The secret projects that we didn't know about for years" or "The flash that ended a city and boiled its populace alive" made the bigger impression.
Dude you need to cover the Video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R Chernobyl Series
There is a channel called Radioactive Drew that went and visited and even mapped the radiation around the prototype engines as they are sitting outside near EBR-1 in Idaho. It is a pretty interesting video. Its called Radioactive Nuclear Jet Engines in a Parking Lot.
You should look up Project Pluto or SLAM, as it too was about flying reactors, in this case a remote-operated nuclear cruise missile. An insane project that was cancelled after it was deemed too impractical.
Russia recently tried to test just such a missile, billed as a global hypersonic cruise missile. It exploded during assembly on its pad, killing the crew assembling it.
"Mobile Chernobyl" was friggin good.
So glad you covered this. While it was ultimately a failed program the possibilities that it represented always fascinated me. I always loved imagining gargantuan nuclear powered planes, literal flying fortresses that could stay aloft indefinitely, perhaps with comparatively smaller planes that could dock with them to shift out personnel and supplies.
Thanks for putting that together. I was aware of some of this, but never saw the "closed loop control" use of control rods. You are right - really bad idea. Instrumentation is gonna fail, just exactly when is unknown.
Tyler, did you happen to work at the Waterford 3 facility in Louisiana? I helped with a neutron door replacement several years ago with the architecture firm I work for. Your name sounds very familiar and I’m just curious if you were one of the on-site consultants that helped us out.
With regards to the contamination concerns of open vs closed cycle Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion, fission products will leak out of cladding and into your primary coolant. Primary circuit contamination may be an inconvenience for most applications but when your primary circuit is the atmosphere people tend to get a bit uppity about it.
Inam a software engineer who's deaigned and built software for safety critical systems. Aircraft controlling the rods in both directions is how it would have to be done. There is no such thing as fail safe in aircraft flight critical systems. They are all "fail operational".
Sheilding is becoming less and less of a weight concern because of meta materials like graphene/h-BN
i’ve been binging your channel! i’ve been loving it so far. ☢️💕
i haven’t seen any reactions to Godzilla tho. 😮
definitely watch / react to Godzilla Minus One or the original if you haven’t already. 😊
that very beginning of the video out of context is really funny
Curious if you've done a video on the advantages/disadvantages of SMRs?
I'm a historian of science (professionally). To begin, historians *do* look at the work and the scientific and technological developments leading up to the bomb. Countless books have been written on it and hundreds of articles. It's just the public doesn't care about that. The reason historians tend to focus more on the bombing than the work leading to it is that the bombing is what created the widespread social and cultural sentiments surrounding nuclear physics. Much of the work leading to the bomb was done in secret--things done in secret by definition to not have widespread social or cultural impacts until they result in widespread changes (whether visible or not) in human experience.
It had nothing to do with sensationalism--it's simply that historians tend to focus on the empirical data, and the empirical data is that the public responded more strongly to the bombs than they did to the advent of nuclear power.
I'd like to think this is possible i think with fusion it would probably fare better. Another thought would be a radio thermal generator.
Loved the scene with the waldo. Was thinking, "I can *really* break that flask quickly with those!".
I figured out the hyperbole at the beginning, the absurdity of "humanity was going through a bad break-up", with well, hand wave... But, for a video about reactors, there's a lot of bomb footage. Shouldn't all coal power plants show coal mine fires and coal dust explosion results or something?
Whereas one could even more easily attack the insane notion of a nuclear powered aircraft engine at the time with the abysmal safety record for aircraft of the era. When flight insurance was a really good idea, as aircraft played bumper cars in the air, slammed into mountains, slammed into level ground, disintegrated in the air, exploded when lightning hit, hell, compared to today (despite Boeing's recent contributions to returning the past to us), aircraft were damnably dangerous and crash and burn with the words "nuclear reactor" should never, ever, ever be considered within even the same paragraph, let alone event.
I'll not even go into a certain Russian nuclear propelled research team, erm, missile that experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly on its floating pad...
Vibration causes fission? Here, I thought it was merely a marital aid.
200 MEV is tiny, OK, my x-rays are thankfully much, much lower! Otherwise, the first x-ray is one's final one.
Kinetic energy by fission, you know, the reactor blows up, destroyed the planet and universe and we're all dead, so leave me alone, I'm dead, dammitall!
Not that whole gamma and x-ray release that interacts down to heat, nope, magical hand waves of the ignorant. Need I say, I don't suffer fools well.
My car works off of gasoline as a fuel, a molotov cocktail it is decidedly not. The SL-1 reactor, a spectacularlly poor design, suffered a prompt critical event when the main control rod was withdrawn too far on startup, resulting in an explosion - a steam explosion that dismantled the reactor into a novel form of modern art and a rod plug pinned one of the workers to the concrete ceiling. Not that anyone in the room cared, as the massive burst of radiation from the failing reactor when the cover popped off rendered them instantly unconscious, never to regain consciousness.
I also have concerns over an air as a working fluid and coolant system over NOx emissions, as that much heat does some annoying things to air. If I'm going for a coolant that's basically a gas, I'd go with supercritical CO2 as a coolant, because it works so well on Venus. Well, in the UK, anyway. And the UK proved how wonderful air cooled was at Windscale, having to divert CO2 coolant from the MAGNOX unit under construction to try to extinguish the fire... And their AGR, using CO2 as coolant is working fine, thank you. Put the CO2 into a supercritical state, one has density and unique characteristics to leverage, albeit at some rather extreme pressures.
I'll disagree on technical grounds on thorium not being able to displace uranium as a fuel source - where thorium is more abundant than uranium is. Otherwise, thorium is a great idea, it's also a royal PIA as a fuel, due to one really wanting inline reprocessing.
Not quite sure how to breed from a molten salt reactor though and we really do need those industrial and medical isotopes. Still, airplane vs breeder reactor, apples being compared to bowling balls.
No clue why the windscreen would need to be so thick for a reactor, for a warhead detonating nearby, yeah, for a reactor behind the window, makes zero sense. But then, commonsense and hyperbole ridden drivel never were acquainted with one another.
There were also plans related to this idiocy that could be doable and far more manageable, nuclear rockets operating under the same principle, just a different working gas. Doable, but then, wiping one's butt with a chain saw is doable, doesn't make it a recommendable suggestion of a course of action. A total of 32 reactors were launched into orbit, with some reactor coolant metal compounds still floating as "space junk" freely.
Shall we say, not extremely well thought out in advance?
Yes, heat is kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules. More precisely: Only the kinetic energy of their disordered movement is called heat energy.
Consider this: If they had nuclear-powered bombers, would the enemy be less likely to shoot them down? There's an old saying: "What goes up must come down." If you shoot down a flying nuclear reactor, the plane will crash, hit the ground, and essentially become a dirty bomb. So, shooting down such a bomber over your region would be like setting off a bomb on yourself.
Which would you prefer going off two miles from you? A dirty bomb, which might contaminate a few blocks or a thermonuclear warhead, which would vaporize a few blocks?
I honestly would love to hear your thoughts on thorium reactors. Biggest argument for is the fuel can't be used to make weapons grade material say like in a breeder, but not sure what the energy difference is, what it does in a reactor, why it is really different and what is the difference in material extraction from the ground to be used as fuel...is it cheaper than U.
It is a rumour spread in Internet. Noone use commerical nuclear reactor to make weapon. None. It is simply too inefficient and time consuming. On theory Russian RMBK reactors, Canada CANDU reactors are weapon making friendly reactors. But Canada does not make atomic bomb, South Korea does not make nuclear bombs. Even Russia does not make weapon grade plutonium from RBMK reactors. Just forget the weapon making argument. If they want to make atomic bombs, they will have their dedicated factories and equipment to make them.
Between this and Project Plowshare, it reminds me a lot of how AI is being applied now. A very useful technology in its own area, but then being applied carelessly by people with big ideas and small consideration of potential consequences.
Except in the case of this and Ploughshare, they did some basic testing and figured out that they were not good ideas, so it seems like they had at least some level of consideration for the consequences.
As long as we don't connect AI directly to heavy weaponry or depend on it for critical decisions, it's fine. The AI doomsday people don't know what they are talking about, listen to AI researchers instead of doomsayers.
@@iKvetch558 Project Plowshare detonated 27 nukes, and this flew a barely shielded nuclear reactor over US soil for 5 years. Those weren't safety tests, they were implementation tests. Much like a lot of the AI test implementations going on right now.
5:00 i think a big difference with a sub vs a plane is a sub has alot of access to water that it can use to propel itself forward, while an airplane has to carry all that.
I'd say that airplanes suffer from a severe lack of buoyancy.
P.S. But hear me out! Nuclear powered airships (filled with helium, of course)! 🙌
P.P.S. Jk, don't do it!
@@Darth_Niki4naw, I wanna see one float. Hell, replace the fuel with lead.
Lead balloons are always entertaining.
Use co2 as the turbine loop ..... could be the most amazing vapor trails. all that cooling would be good for efficiency I am guessing. No passengers but would be cool.
You should make a video about the Nuclear Playground mod for People Playground.
Hmm, what about moisture and particles/dust in the air? wont that be more prone to make radioactive exhaust?
Do you think that fast neutron/plutonium breeder reactors are a solution to long-term nuclear reactor use? Outside of something like a traveling-wave reactor I’m not sure how such a system could compete with something like a PWR…
Mobile Chernobyl 💀🤣
Im more worried that if the plane would crash, how would they contain the core. Its not like a sinking submarine letting water in the core to seal it and avoid heating too much. Since air is used as a coolant, if it crashed the core is most likely to be cracked open or to heat up and melt in the possibility that the safety system to shut it down have been broken in the crash. It would so much more difficult to make a system that would be crash proof in my opinion. Assurance for that would be astronomic.
Edit: just thought about it, what if the reactor need to be shut down while the plane is still in the air. That would be concerning if the only mean of propulsion is shut.
If anybody has any idea let me know.
it would be interesting if you checked out that chernobyl guy
Would love to know your thoughts on everything nuclear in Australia with or PM saying it will make us all glow in the dark... Nuclear sea plane that never goes over land makes sense. Air-aircraft carrier maybe
It sounds like a very stupid idea to put a nuclear reactor in an airplane. If the reactor had an automatic shutdown in the event of a failure, the plane would drop and cause a nuclear disaster in any case + the intention was apparently to transport atomic bombs continuously... But the USA transported atomic bombs for several years in such a way that the bombs were constantly in the air, except when the plane happened to drop...
i know when T. Folse drops im watching
He finally does a video on the Flying Nuclear Reactor🎉. I can see why they were contemplating it, but like you anyways say; "This has 'bad idea' written all over it!" If I were that nuclear reactor, I would refuse to split a single atom until they put me back on Terra Firma. Some things aren't meant to take to the skies...
I'm of a different mind. Let everything fly
Thorium reactors are Uranium reactors.. Just U-233 .
There actually is nuclear powered train concept, b it not real i think. nuclear reactor that is 3x2 feet and boils water, steam, spins turbine, makes electricity, then that electricity is used for the electric motors that run the train
Would be a Nuclear spaceships would be a thing?
all i can think of is the simpsons ireland episode
truly nuclear
You have said you would pin a comment about the topic of thorium reactors. But I do not find it. I would also enjoy a video about the reasons.
phenomena ba ba da ba pa. ba..... good vid
TBF bfore the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the majority of the world really weren't aware of the potential for nuclear technology. There may have been those that were paying attention and were aware of the trinity tests but i doubt that was many people.
"cultural difference"
or maybe point of view. probably the usa would also not consider it heroic if la and ny got nuked as the closing act of wwii.
Hes got one of the most interesting jobs in the world i wish i had his IQ about nuclear engineering lol
Unless you wanted a platform to fly perpetually, the economics of nuclear powered planes don't make sense, so there's really only a military, industrial, or political application here, not commercial.
I'd trust certain kinds of nuclear reactors to be planes - ones where a crash would spread the radioactive constituent parts over a small area, and where they wouldn't readily enter the water cycle. That pretty much narrows it down to molten salt reactors running at close to ambient pressure with the fission daughter products tightly bound to the salt (save for the gaseous ones, which should be exhausted as the plane flies to dilute them). Which is what they were developed for the in the first place, so they have that going for it.
Yo'd need a lot of shielding to make it practical. And you'd also want redundancy, which means a giant plane with a lot of lifting surface, a lot of control authority, and at least two separate reactors to avoid common-mode failure. Which you could afford since fuel economy can be tossed out the window without making it meaningfully more expensive.
So, in principle I wouldn't trust a nuclear reactor to fly on a plane. But I might trust two particular kinds of reactors to fly on a giant superplane. If we can figure out a justification for said superplane.
Aren't most salts really soluable in water though? I wouldn't want hot radioactive salt spread near a crash site. Keep nuclear reactors on ground and water please.
What are the ramifications of Japan releasing the coolant water from their reactors to do the ocean
It's completely safe
The coolant being discharged has been cleaned up, and has less tritium than normal sea water.
We know for a fact as nuclear technology advances so does Radiation shielding gets better and lighter with new advances in material sciences so a nuclear reactor in a aircraft... eh maybe?
Except the problem of crashing still remains.
You’re releasing radioactive materials. The shielding of them is not the problem, except for when the plane hits the ground at high speed
@@ViscusRUclips yea that's what I really worry about
@@andrewreynolds912 yeah. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s nice in theory. Practically, just not safe. As he said, subs are safe because even in the worst environmental contamination, there’s a big quantity of water keeping everyone safe
@@ViscusRUclips yep... and even then it's much safer with it being near waste or if a ship sinking that had a nuclear reactor is far more safer than a plane crashing
Wheres your thorium video pin?
I still don't get how project Orion was supposed to operate safely.
Radiation shielding from advanced plastics infused with metamaterials like graphene/h-BN could do it now. Although the explosions would degrade the structure too much.
@@AkkarisFoxWhat about the part of the nuclear explosion in open air? There would be fission products in the atmosphere, no way around that...
@@Takyodor2 nuclear material dropped from orbit disperses enough to not be a problem. It's big chunks that you have to contend with e.g The nuclear bomb dropping ship or it's bomb falling from the orbit, And that's if you have a high orbit. It was never designed to take off using nuclear so it would be built in orbit.
@@AkkarisFox "The nuclear bomb dropping ship" _is_ project Orion mentioned by OP.
@@Takyodor2 if it starts falling you eject the crew module and blow it up. Assuming you built it at a far enough distance and the bombs are designed to detonate if they go to low. From my understanding the yield of the bombs weren't supposed to be that destructive. Somewhere between tactical and warhead level. But I'm all on the side of hydrogen nuclear thermal now; Mostly because lifespans might increase this decade due to protein folding AI.
1:04 “Nuclear energy” Ohhhh yeah 👍… “the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima” oh no 👎
😂😂😂
To me that bombing seems to have been done not to kill the world or the country because they did an air explosion and that caused almost no ground radiation that I used to presume would happen when we used nuclear bombs. So we did kill many but we did not kill the ground the city was on and then have it get worse and worse. OK, fair it was bad enough, yes I get that but to me it seems it could have been much worse, but as I understand it the point was to try and keep another country from joining into a war and OK, when I think about this this attack was against the general population and not against the military which from a dumb humans standpoint that seems wrong but then I suppose everything I see Russia do seems wrong and we tend to do fuck all. OK, again not really true, but just because you want a lake, an oil chunk of land etc... why should you just declare war and take it because its only a few hundred mines outside your current boarder, fuckem lets just take it no one will actually try and stop us. Now when you live in Canada you don't just see a nice place 100 miles outside your boarder and take it you try and make a deal to trade for it right.
Remember the :shifty (smilie / emoticon) on forums or of the first smart phones? That is tylers face :lol :shifty