It should be mentioned that the Plutonium-238 in the pacemakers primarily emits alpha radiation which is easily blocked. That's why it didn't require an enormous amount of shielding and why it is preferred in RTGs.
If anyo e wants an actually good account of Russian lighthouses look up The Soviet Unions Deadly Abandoned Nuclear Generators. It also has amazing footage of the Lia incident cleanup.
@@RobertCraft-re5sf I think I've seen that one. That about the small portable reactors the Soviet Union built and then just left abandoned? And a group of 3 guys from (I think) Lithuania found one in the forest and used it to keep warm when they were gathering firewood?
probes especially, the iconic Voyager probe uses an RTG. Some of the non-critical instruments have had to be gradually shut down, as the half life of the material means the RTG produces a bit less power every year compared to the last, but it's still out there and working. It uses Pu-238, which has a halflife of about 90 years, so it's still got plenty of juice left tho
@@sage5296 sadly they are near the end of it's usable lifetime. While they continue to provide power, there is a point when they don't generate enough to keep the instruments running. But my favorite thing is the software update they deployed last year.
My grandmother had a radioisotope pacemaker....'72 or '73....the mercury batteries of the time had to be changed every six months, and some patients couldn't withstand surgery that often, so the radioisotope version was an option.
Predicting future technology was a big industry back in the 50s. An artist named Frank Tinsley was a major player. I can't think of one thing he predicted that came to exist.
Recently watched a prediction programme from 1972 on how life in the year 2000 could be. Some of that came true earlier, some later, some hasn't as of yet.
Arthur Clarke, Isaac asimov, and Robert Heinlein were all part of a military "futurists" program, mean to predict how society, logistics, and communication would advance and change. we got ALOT of good books because of all that 😂
RTG's really are fantastic devices. Just don't forget about them. I don't know if they are still in use here on Earth. For space missions beyond Jupiter, RTG's are crucial as at that distance, the sun is just too weak to power solar cells. Certain satellites also use them. I believe all military satellites use them as well as satellites in geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is far beyond where astronauts normally go. At the end of their life, they are boosted into a graveyard orbit even more farther out.
Well 14 years ago she says to me your going on a trip to Ibiza her Bobby John's just gone 66 up north lother says your like 007 wee English fellows I swear to god it's non stop list of fuck orders of scrap iron because of my sweating I'm more catholic than the 1 that berried me for carrying the cross about like monty IPphone py
Nuclear rocket engines would have been interesting to include, especially the SLAM missile, which carried several nuclear warheads to drop along the way as it casually spewed radiation out of its fission-heated jet engine. And don't forget the USNS Savannah, the only US commercial nuclear ship I believe.
NS Savannah functioned just fine (I recall her record being fairly uneventful). But her cargo hold was undersized for efficient freight use, and a lot of civilian ports didn't want to let her dock or get particularly close on the off chance she'd have a problem while moored there (even a conventional fire) that might cause local contamination. Can't blame them, really, given she was first of her kind and an unknown. It's not so much that she was a fundamentally bad concept or had operational problems. But the risk/reward ratio wasn't there.
I watched another TH-cam video on the RTG issue claiming there were thousands in use in more than just the lighthouses and were still many out there to this day. There’s even a video of a team training to recover the exposed core of one that was found by some woodcutters, who used it to keep warm, and showed the retrieval of the core. Long tools, hazmat suits, a foreman with a stopwatch to limit exposure time, and a thick lead lined containment vessel on a truck. Quite the undertaking. Sorry - no links. This was many months ago
It was cool to see a glimpse of the "airplane" reactor at EBR1 in Idaho. I used to work next door on another project. You are highly unlikely to be in the area, but if you are, definitely visit. There is so much crazy history there to see.
Yeah... they are not often "batteries" , and "nuclear electric" is almost meaningless. Most existing applications of nuclear power create electrical energy through the seebeck effect, or through heating of water to steam. Alpha/Betavoltaics are closest to "nuclear batteries" and work similarly to solar cells, but are not in use in spacecraft as often as RTGs.
I live not far from the Quehanna Wilds. In the 1950's the government acquired remote woodland through eminent domain. Built a facility where they experimented with nuclear jet engines. Within 20 years the facility was closed and ended up becoming a contaminated super fund site which was eventually cleaned up. There are still some concrete bunkers remaining that were part of the facility.
Simon, you were giving the Russians a lot of credit. And skipping the NS Savannah. Which was the first nuclear powered merchant ship. It was launched in 1959. It was decommissioned in 1970. It’s still afloat, but all the fuels been removed. She carried passengers as well. She was a beautiful white ship. I built a model of her in 59. Don’t take this wrong. I’ve been mowing through you videoed. And I really enjoy presentation style.
I'm reasonably sure there is a video on this ship fairly recently, but I can't remember which part of Simon's empire it was on 😂... Possibly was also on Oceanliner designs.... I have quite a few nautical based channels in my subs
He was talking about nuclear icebreakers specifically. Which is why he did not count a nuclear merchant Russian ship that operates in the same area as part of the current fleet of seven(?) nuclear icebreakers.
7:48 with cars, I remember a science article back in the eighties saying a pencil sized piece of thorium, in a sealed lead housing and electrical generator, it would power an electric car for a decade.
The world's first nuclear-powered surface warship was the a USS Longbeach (CGN-9); not the Enterprise as many believe. She was followed by others like her, but the concept has fallen out of favor because it's very difficult and costly to refuel them. It basically involves a complete disassembly of the deck and superstructure.
I think the niclear powered bomber missed a huge potential option, set it up as a hybrid, use the reactor to power it while on patrol and loitering, then fire up jet and piston engines for an extra kick when it comes time to deliver the payload, then once youre near the target, start a meltdown/bomb conversion and jettison the reactor as the payload, and then return home on combustion power alone assumimg you get far enough away before she blows. You would likely also need to use the combustion engines to get off the ground, so the nuclear power would be purely for supplemental power and loitering capability.
Personally, the world should revisit using plutonium power sources for low-power implants. Pacemakers, monitoring devices for insulin or other conditions, and even neural stimulation systems (the experimental stuff used to treat drug-resistant depression by regularly pulsing the part of the brain responsible for happiness). They've been proven safe, economically cheaper, and reliable, and don't require complex means of recharging the batteries. Then scale it out via a variant in nuclear batteries, where the nuclear material is safely stored within the molecular matrix, and can slowly recharge a battery to some extent, further extending the lifespan of said devices.
Chapter 6 could easily have been Rockets, with a look into project NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). Works about the same as a nuclear power plant in concept, just trade out the Water for Liquid Hydrogen, and instead of spinning a turbine to generate electricity, you instead force the hot (now gaseous) Hydrogen thru a conventional De-Laval profile bell-shaped rocket nozzle. Specific impulse is around 800-900 seconds in a vacuum, when even the Space Shuttle Main Engines can only manage like 460ish in the same conditions. Most probable application for such a nuclear rocket engine was a replacement for the J-2 engine in the S-IVB third stage of the Saturn-V moon rocket, to allow mostly the same rocket to push projected missions to Mars (only other major modification to the S-IVB being a change from separate LH2 and LOX tanks to a single, larger LH2 tank). We even did long-duration firing tests of hardware that was pretty much flight-ready, it was THAT close to being implemented. And then NASA's budget got cut post-Apollo, and we had to shelve the whole idea. NERVA would have used highly enriched ("weapons grade") Uranium as the reactor fuel, and so it was actually quite lightweight, aside from the need for a radiation shield for the habitable sections of any vehicle propelled by such an engine. Only recently have plans to use a similar engine resurfaced and actually gotten funding, with new plans from NASA being to use Low-Enriched ("Reactor-grade") uranium as the fuel this time, which makes the engine heavier, but still has good performance. Electric Boat Works (the people who design the reactors for the US nuclear submarine fleet) are the contractors for the reactor portion of this new engine, Blue Origin is the contractor for the "rocket stage as a whole", and DARPA is the agency managing it. Super interesting, and maybe we'll see a Mars mission with people in it within my lifetime after all, after I gave up on those dreams when the Constellation program was canceled by Obama.
In Idaho, at the Idaho National Lab, you can find the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-1) National Historic Landmark. In the parking lot there are two of the reactors developed for the bombers. This is just down the road from the SL-1 reactor, the one that had one of its operators impaled on the ceiling. You can go to visit next time you are in southern Idaho. Very interesting place. I visited there when I went to Nuclear Power School.
Ackshully, there is no such thing as non-radioactive material or absolutely safe energy. Simon could use a copy of Petr Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" instead of pandering to cute hysteria and hype.
The nuclear battery in a pacemaker is an itty bitty RTG, its about the diameter of a TO5 transistor and 3 times as long. The pltonium is a pressed oxide pellet in a welded titanium container wth one side brazed to a copper heat spreader. This is attached to a thermoelectric device then mounted on the lower copper heat sink. The power it makes in electricity is in the miliwatt range. Has 5 curies per serving of plutonium 238.❤
Actually Wilson-Greatbatch used (or attempted to use) a nuclear powered pacemaker. The battery was developed by McDonnel-Douglas for military and space equipment. We looked at these for use as "memory batteries" to hold up volatile RAMs. This became irrelevant after lithium ion batteries were developed, and NVRAMs came into existence.
it wouldnt be hard to make an alpha generator electric car. look up the nuclear boy scout. then look up alpha wave generator. it wouldn't be able to be fast or large, but it would be relatively safe, and an alpha battery lasts about 400 years. requires no charging. f big oil.
It's hard for me to imagine that a nuclear-powered personal car was ever taken seriously by engineers as a thing they could build...right? I'm only an armchair-everything, but by my reckoning the smallest thing we've ever made nuclear-powered (not counting RTG's here), is an attack submarine. Those are somewhat larger than a car, and have the benefit of easy access to basically infinite cooling. I believe the smallest functional reactors IRL would _maybe_ fit into a semi trailer, but assuming you could miniaturize down to trunk-sized...How are you going to cool it? Isn't it going to suck to haul many, many tons of shielding around? Isn't it going to really suck that every car accident involving one is a potential radiological incident? People _can't_ have genuinely thought this would be a thing, right? They may as well have said "we'll use magic".
Not to mention operating it safely would have required much more skill and expertise than you could expect from your average driver. Starting your car would no longer be a simple matter of turning the ignition. Especially in an era before computers were a thing you could feasibly put in a car.
Yup especially the 238 variety. It has to be special made rather than extracted from fuel. The bomb stuff is 239 isotope and you would need lots of it to make a RTG from it. A two kg chunk is about as warm as a coffee mug while 2kg of 238 would be brightly yellow 🔥
@@juslitor I have a solar watch... it's solar/capacitor...no batteries at all. Even in darkness, the capacitor, once charged, runs it for a week or so.
I think the problem with nuclear cars is not with the traffic collisions but with someone taking out the fuel and making a dirty bomb. The Mars rover is essentially a nuclear car.
Fact boy, your intellectual content is brilliant! I would enjoy and warch you more is you coud have the editor figure out how to get rid of the pop and hiss
The Chrysler TV8 sounded mad. A modular tank that was amphibious, around half the weight of current tanks, and able to be powered by either a v8 or a mini nuclear reactor.
Clean and abundant, yeah but never cheap. Pricing was based on the low cost of the fuel for running the reactor, without including construction, maintenance, and decommissioning, which would run into the billions.
Nuclear reactors for Icebreakers makes an incredible amount of sense. Yes it's possible this goes bad, but modern designs in those circumstances can make those things almost impossible and provide complete containment if something goes wrong. Seriously. We should have more nuclear icebreakers.
Giant ships can have nuclear power because it is big enough the reactor can have sufficient shielding to protect passengers without making the weight excessive. Nuclear batteries are safe because they are powered by an alpha emitter, for which shielding is easy.
The US also had a nuclear powered lighthouse in the Chesapeake Bay, granted if I remember correctly, it was only for a couple years before switching to a different power source.
"American's threw out the idea about the direct cycle system" "these ideas never left the drawing board" Look up Project Pluto!!! A nuclear powered ICBM that would have left a trail or irradiated particles wherever it went, and got so far in development that they built and tested working prototype engine with zero failures during testing. There is a video here on TH-cam about it.
And also, I had quite a bit of fun with my Geiger counter after an angiogram. Unfortunately it only gave me the ability to make my meter sing. I was not able to shoot lightning bolts from my hands. Apparently only casino carpets in winter grant me that power...
Would be nice to have one of those ex-Soviet RTG's to offset some of the power bill in my house. Idea's totally impractical of course, but IMO everyone's overly scared about nuclear stuff. With nuclear technology, if you respect that it CAN kill you if you are careless, you won't be careless, and it won't kill you. Which is exactly like working with high explosives. That being said, I think RTG's belong on space probes, and large centralized nuclear reactor complexes that can afford a proper security detail as well as extremely durable concrete enclosures for the reactors are the far more sensible choice for providing power to the masses.
These made about 500W of electrical power from about 25kW of heat. The core is a beer can sized chunk of strontium 90 in a titanium can. This was placed inside of a hefty tungsten copper heat spreader surrounded by lots of thermocouples made of platinum silicide. When whole the device doesn't make much radiation exposure, but the can if freed from it can give a lethal dose in an hour. When new they glowed bright red hot like a burner on a stove.😮 I would have used them to power a heat engine using pentane or other lower boiling poit fluid to turn an alternator. It would give about 4 to 6kW of electrical power from the 25kw of heat.❤
The 2020 luxury Le Commandant Charcot icebreaker (PC2 rated) cruise ship is the equal of the best Russian nuclear icebreakers but still less expensive for holidays.
Implanting lithium powered pacemakers in the human body? We are made of 60% water , and lithium is known to go BOOM when it touches water. Who comes up with these things? Doctor Doofenshmirtz ?
Decent video but you could have expanded on it even further by using examples of RTGs also being used for decades in the space program on such applications as the Voyager probes and more recently the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.
The Atomic plane was never meant to fly! It was designed by the same guy at Oak Ridge who made the first Salt Reactor. He knew it was not going to work as a plane but the military were handy in throwing cash at them to research their other reactors. Check out videos by Kirk Sorrenson for better information!
Someone approached Feynman to say reactor + plane is a new invention; sign this patent application. Apparently the patent office is sloppy enough to accept this without seeing a nuclear powered plane actually invented.
It seems, that I am living in a Simon Shistler world. I am not complaining, I think kids wouldlove thisway of learning about the wonders of the world! And beards!
I thought you did one on the lighthouse reactors a while ago, covering Russia refusing to comply with further tracking down and dismantling and even planning to make more?
Nuclear is perfect for icebreakers, military submarines, remote mines and production facilities, deep space probes,and lighthouses if they are remote and ultimatic. So there's nothing weird here, except the accent.
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
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Cricky that thing looks like it houses used uranium and from your face it probably does
Is it nuclear powered?
@@azdirtrider88😅😅😅😅
It should be mentioned that the Plutonium-238 in the pacemakers primarily emits alpha radiation which is easily blocked. That's why it didn't require an enormous amount of shielding and why it is preferred in RTGs.
The Ford Nucleon inspired a series of nuclear powered cars in the universe of the Fallout games. The most notorious example is the "Chryslus Corvega"
I think you can still buy scale models of that Nucleon too.
It leak.
"A small, rear mounted nuclear reactor"
How fun was that to say?
heck... do they have a Chrysler Turbine derivative in there?
Nerd
I think we need a megaprojects video on Simon's video empire
I second that!😁👍
Indeed, at this point I’ve lost count of how many channels he has
I'm saying, does ANYONE know how many channels he's got!?!?!? I bet he's done forgot after handing over writing AND videos on some channels lol
NOW WE ARE TALKING!
Megaprojects:Megaprojects?
1:05 - Chapter 1 - Icebreakers
3:05 - Mid roll ads
4:30 - Back to the video
6:45 - Chapter 2 - Cars
9:55 - Chapter 3 - Aircraft
14:00 - Chapter 4 - Pacemakers
17:45 - Chapter 5 - Lighthouses
Nicely done 👌
If anyo e wants an actually good account of Russian lighthouses look up The Soviet Unions Deadly Abandoned Nuclear Generators. It also has amazing footage of the Lia incident cleanup.
Thanks, dude. Simon drones on and on sometimes...
Golden. All the kudos.
@@RobertCraft-re5sf I think I've seen that one. That about the small portable reactors the Soviet Union built and then just left abandoned? And a group of 3 guys from (I think) Lithuania found one in the forest and used it to keep warm when they were gathering firewood?
The Soviets weren't the only ones to build RTGs. The USA built them as well, both for use in spacecraft and for powering equipment in remote areas.
probes especially, the iconic Voyager probe uses an RTG. Some of the non-critical instruments have had to be gradually shut down, as the half life of the material means the RTG produces a bit less power every year compared to the last, but it's still out there and working. It uses Pu-238, which has a halflife of about 90 years, so it's still got plenty of juice left tho
@@sage5296 sadly they are near the end of it's usable lifetime. While they continue to provide power, there is a point when they don't generate enough to keep the instruments running.
But my favorite thing is the software update they deployed last year.
Baltimore Harbor Lighthouse had an RTG in the sixties.
My grandmother had a radioisotope pacemaker....'72 or '73....the mercury batteries of the time had to be changed every six months, and some patients couldn't withstand surgery that often, so the radioisotope version was an option.
Predicting future technology was a big industry back in the 50s. An artist named Frank Tinsley was a major player.
I can't think of one thing he predicted that came to exist.
Recently watched a prediction programme from 1972 on how life in the year 2000 could be.
Some of that came true earlier, some later, some hasn't as of yet.
Arthur Clarke, Isaac asimov, and Robert Heinlein were all part of a military "futurists" program, mean to predict how society, logistics, and communication would advance and change. we got ALOT of good books because of all that 😂
RTG's really are fantastic devices. Just don't forget about them. I don't know if they are still in use here on Earth. For space missions beyond Jupiter, RTG's are crucial as at that distance, the sun is just too weak to power solar cells. Certain satellites also use them. I believe all military satellites use them as well as satellites in geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is far beyond where astronauts normally go. At the end of their life, they are boosted into a graveyard orbit even more farther out.
We should pile them up in one of the Lagrange points for easy collection later, enough of them collect there and we get a mini moon on the other hand
Well 14 years ago she says to me your going on a trip to Ibiza her Bobby John's just gone 66 up north lother says your like 007 wee English fellows I swear to god it's non stop list of fuck orders of scrap iron because of my sweating I'm more catholic than the 1 that berried me for carrying the cross about like monty IPphone py
Don't the russians operate a whole fleet of RTG powered lighthouses up north?
There is thousands of them unaccounted for from the Soviet era
the Apollo 13 RTG survived reentry and was recovered from the ocean, because the LEM returned to earth.
Nuclear rocket engines would have been interesting to include, especially the SLAM missile, which carried several nuclear warheads to drop along the way as it casually spewed radiation out of its fission-heated jet engine. And don't forget the USNS Savannah, the only US commercial nuclear ship I believe.
NS Savannah functioned just fine (I recall her record being fairly uneventful). But her cargo hold was undersized for efficient freight use, and a lot of civilian ports didn't want to let her dock or get particularly close on the off chance she'd have a problem while moored there (even a conventional fire) that might cause local contamination. Can't blame them, really, given she was first of her kind and an unknown.
It's not so much that she was a fundamentally bad concept or had operational problems. But the risk/reward ratio wasn't there.
Surprised car-sized laser-equipped autonomous rovers on Mars weren't part of this list!
Frickin' "lasers"
I watched another TH-cam video on the RTG issue claiming there were thousands in use in more than just the lighthouses and were still many out there to this day. There’s even a video of a team training to recover the exposed core of one that was found by some woodcutters, who used it to keep warm, and showed the retrieval of the core.
Long tools, hazmat suits, a foreman with a stopwatch to limit exposure time, and a thick lead lined containment vessel on a truck. Quite the undertaking.
Sorry - no links. This was many months ago
That would be the Lia nuclear incident.
It was indeed the Lia incident, and if it is a radiological/nuclear incident the first channel that comes to mind is plainly difficult
@@micha_el_ I second the Plainly Difficult channel. One of the top on youtube!
@@WouldntULikeToKnow. PD is great, I thought this comment was talking about that video
@@micha_el_ Kyle Hill also has a video about this as part of his Half Life Histories series
It was cool to see a glimpse of the "airplane" reactor at EBR1 in Idaho. I used to work next door on another project. You are highly unlikely to be in the area, but if you are, definitely visit. There is so much crazy history there to see.
Nuke powered pace maker vs lithium, i think id rather have the nuke one honestly lol
Huel is carnation instant breakfast, and it also came in strawberry. A Canadian legend.
I love me some carnation instant breakfast.
It’s ultra processed garbage is what it is. Its certainly not food
@@UkDave3856 It's not meant to be food though
@@maxbracegirdle9990 that’s not what they claim in their many TH-cam sponsorships. They regularly claim that their product is a meal replacement
Congratulations on winning at life Mr Whistler.
Nuclear batteries are used in spacecraft. Think nuclear electric.
Batteries are still crude and not as good as we need.
They are basically self-heating thermopile batteries. They provide a constant, low wattage.
Yeah... they are not often "batteries" , and "nuclear electric" is almost meaningless. Most existing applications of nuclear power create electrical energy through the seebeck effect, or through heating of water to steam. Alpha/Betavoltaics are closest to "nuclear batteries" and work similarly to solar cells, but are not in use in spacecraft as often as RTGs.
I bet that Huel crap tastes like it's nuclear powered! Lol
It does
You can buy it in Tesco (UK)
It's not just the taste, the texture...🤮
4:27 to get past sponsor
I live not far from the Quehanna Wilds. In the 1950's the government acquired remote woodland through eminent domain. Built a facility where they experimented with nuclear jet engines. Within 20 years the facility was closed and ended up becoming a contaminated super fund site which was eventually cleaned up. There are still some concrete bunkers remaining that were part of the facility.
The Baltimore Harbor Lighthouse was powered by Strontium-90 at one time.
The video starts at 17:40
Some nuclear powered ideas bombed .😅
Like that joke
I think a nuclear powered watch would be still be safer than a Lebanese pager
🤣👍🤙
Operation Grim Beeper...
Even safer than a Kibbutz!
The terrorist state could mess with watches just as easily as a pager.
To soon? Nah we good.
I'm sure there's probably a couple light house cores around but at least the vast majority have been cleaned up.
I am over 80, well past my half life. 😅
Ha! Good one! 😂
You're past the US life expectancy.
Well. Unless you live until you are 160 or more. Some of the new technology I have been reading about might make that possible.
Somehow, I was talking about nuclear battery powered Soviet lighthouses 20 minutes vefore this was uploaded.
Thanks, Kyle Hill
$48000 doesn't sound all that bad for visiting the North Pole.
Safer and cheaper than a visit to the titanic
It's unfortunate nuclear radiation is so harmful, we could all have our own nuclear generators
1:17 for a second I thought he said Akimov, and was like ..."they really named a ship that after Chernobyl."
Simon, you were giving the Russians a lot of credit. And skipping the NS Savannah. Which was the first nuclear powered merchant ship. It was launched in 1959. It was decommissioned in 1970. It’s still afloat, but all the fuels been removed. She carried passengers as well. She was a beautiful white ship. I built a model of her in 59.
Don’t take this wrong. I’ve been mowing through you videoed. And I really enjoy presentation style.
I'm reasonably sure there is a video on this ship fairly recently, but I can't remember which part of Simon's empire it was on 😂... Possibly was also on Oceanliner designs.... I have quite a few nautical based channels in my subs
Mowing? ...I'd like a nuke mower, can we get on that???
Hit me in my nostalgia would ya. I remember the Savannah down at patriots point as a wee lad.
Hey was ist Life so Short? You know?
He was talking about nuclear icebreakers specifically. Which is why he did not count a nuclear merchant Russian ship that operates in the same area as part of the current fleet of seven(?) nuclear icebreakers.
The cut from the first ever mr bean, made my day
20:03 They were decommissioning them until Putin got a little greedy and wanted to take Ukrainian territory!😿
7:48 with cars, I remember a science article back in the eighties saying a pencil sized piece of thorium, in a sealed lead housing and electrical generator, it would power an electric car for a decade.
The world's first nuclear-powered surface warship was the a USS Longbeach (CGN-9); not the Enterprise as many believe. She was followed by others like her, but the concept has fallen out of favor because it's very difficult and costly to refuel them. It basically involves a complete disassembly of the deck and superstructure.
An Icebreaker is a nice party drink. 😅
I think the niclear powered bomber missed a huge potential option, set it up as a hybrid, use the reactor to power it while on patrol and loitering, then fire up jet and piston engines for an extra kick when it comes time to deliver the payload, then once youre near the target, start a meltdown/bomb conversion and jettison the reactor as the payload, and then return home on combustion power alone assumimg you get far enough away before she blows. You would likely also need to use the combustion engines to get off the ground, so the nuclear power would be purely for supplemental power and loitering capability.
Personally, the world should revisit using plutonium power sources for low-power implants. Pacemakers, monitoring devices for insulin or other conditions, and even neural stimulation systems (the experimental stuff used to treat drug-resistant depression by regularly pulsing the part of the brain responsible for happiness). They've been proven safe, economically cheaper, and reliable, and don't require complex means of recharging the batteries. Then scale it out via a variant in nuclear batteries, where the nuclear material is safely stored within the molecular matrix, and can slowly recharge a battery to some extent, further extending the lifespan of said devices.
I love the nuclear car concepts, they definitely scratch my atompunk retrofuturism itch
Its pretty smart to use them in cold climates, good thermo electric couple would work like a dream for producig energy
The RTGs you mentioned that are left or abandoned were not for light houses. They were for cold War listening stations and weather stations.
Chapter 6 could easily have been Rockets, with a look into project NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications).
Works about the same as a nuclear power plant in concept, just trade out the Water for Liquid Hydrogen, and instead of spinning a turbine to generate electricity, you instead force the hot (now gaseous) Hydrogen thru a conventional De-Laval profile bell-shaped rocket nozzle.
Specific impulse is around 800-900 seconds in a vacuum, when even the Space Shuttle Main Engines can only manage like 460ish in the same conditions.
Most probable application for such a nuclear rocket engine was a replacement for the J-2 engine in the S-IVB third stage of the Saturn-V moon rocket, to allow mostly the same rocket to push projected missions to Mars (only other major modification to the S-IVB being a change from separate LH2 and LOX tanks to a single, larger LH2 tank).
We even did long-duration firing tests of hardware that was pretty much flight-ready, it was THAT close to being implemented.
And then NASA's budget got cut post-Apollo, and we had to shelve the whole idea.
NERVA would have used highly enriched ("weapons grade") Uranium as the reactor fuel, and so it was actually quite lightweight, aside from the need for a radiation shield for the habitable sections of any vehicle propelled by such an engine.
Only recently have plans to use a similar engine resurfaced and actually gotten funding, with new plans from NASA being to use Low-Enriched ("Reactor-grade") uranium as the fuel this time, which makes the engine heavier, but still has good performance.
Electric Boat Works (the people who design the reactors for the US nuclear submarine fleet) are the contractors for the reactor portion of this new engine, Blue Origin is the contractor for the "rocket stage as a whole", and DARPA is the agency managing it.
Super interesting, and maybe we'll see a Mars mission with people in it within my lifetime after all, after I gave up on those dreams when the Constellation program was canceled by Obama.
In Idaho, at the Idaho National Lab, you can find the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-1) National Historic Landmark. In the parking lot there are two of the reactors developed for the bombers. This is just down the road from the SL-1 reactor, the one that had one of its operators impaled on the ceiling.
You can go to visit next time you are in southern Idaho. Very interesting place. I visited there when I went to Nuclear Power School.
"Combustable dinosaurs" sounds like a metal band ☠
Sounds more like post rock tbh
Great reporting Simon!
Ackshully, there is no such thing as non-radioactive material or absolutely safe energy. Simon could use a copy of Petr Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" instead of pandering to cute hysteria and hype.
100%
Having to swap out your nuclear reactor just as often as you would change your oil is a buzzkill.
The nuclear battery in a pacemaker is an itty bitty RTG, its about the diameter of a TO5 transistor and 3 times as long. The pltonium is a pressed oxide pellet in a welded titanium container wth one side brazed to a copper heat spreader. This is attached to a thermoelectric device then mounted on the lower copper heat sink. The power it makes in electricity is in the miliwatt range. Has 5 curies per serving of plutonium 238.❤
I feel cheated, not having a nuclear powered gyroscopic car.
Actually Wilson-Greatbatch used (or attempted to use) a nuclear powered pacemaker. The battery was developed by McDonnel-Douglas for military and space equipment. We looked at these for use as "memory batteries" to hold up volatile RAMs. This became irrelevant after lithium ion batteries were developed, and NVRAMs came into existence.
Nuclear Powered packed lunch
Retractable reels will never catch on.
They have them on trucks all over the place.
@@BabyMakRhe said Reels
it wouldnt be hard to make an alpha generator electric car. look up the nuclear boy scout. then look up alpha wave generator. it wouldn't be able to be fast or large, but it would be relatively safe, and an alpha battery lasts about 400 years. requires no charging. f big oil.
It's hard for me to imagine that a nuclear-powered personal car was ever taken seriously by engineers as a thing they could build...right? I'm only an armchair-everything, but by my reckoning the smallest thing we've ever made nuclear-powered (not counting RTG's here), is an attack submarine. Those are somewhat larger than a car, and have the benefit of easy access to basically infinite cooling. I believe the smallest functional reactors IRL would _maybe_ fit into a semi trailer, but assuming you could miniaturize down to trunk-sized...How are you going to cool it? Isn't it going to suck to haul many, many tons of shielding around? Isn't it going to really suck that every car accident involving one is a potential radiological incident? People _can't_ have genuinely thought this would be a thing, right? They may as well have said "we'll use magic".
Yeah, that's a point i have thought about too. Maybe they would have needed to refill cooling water every now and then...
Not to mention operating it safely would have required much more skill and expertise than you could expect from your average driver. Starting your car would no longer be a simple matter of turning the ignition. Especially in an era before computers were a thing you could feasibly put in a car.
"Of the late black and white years." --- i was taking a drink and choked... once again point to the basement
Plutonium is, and was, fairly expensive. Pacemakers using it would seem to be cost-prohibitive. 🤔
The rich could pay for it. Not that we want them to live longer though...
Yup especially the 238 variety. It has to be special made rather than extracted from fuel. The bomb stuff is 239 isotope and you would need lots of it to make a RTG from it. A two kg chunk is about as warm as a coffee mug while 2kg of 238 would be brightly yellow 🔥
There's like 2 nuclear pacemakers left I believe
Scary , Bpo ! Just in time for Halloween !
0:30 And why I suppose to want an "nuclear watch" when my Casio works 10+ years on one button battery? 😎
or a solar one, which potentially can go even longer before the rechargeable gives up its ghost.
@@juslitor I have a solar watch... it's solar/capacitor...no batteries at all.
Even in darkness, the capacitor, once charged, runs it for a week or so.
I think they should use this more in like trains, large cargo ships, cruise ships, etc.
6:56 NICE use of the Fallout 3 game view of the city of Megaton going up in nuclear smoke as it were...lol
Aw being one of them mad buggers who actually owns a Reliant 3 wheel van, always heartening to see the old Regal van from Mr Bean :)
Nuclear batteries are coming back!!! Cant wait for these things.
I think the problem with nuclear cars is not with the traffic collisions but with someone taking out the fuel and making a dirty bomb. The Mars rover is essentially a nuclear car.
Love your videos Fact Boy. You might have noticed the guy Kallen at Slapped Ham is trying to copy your 'Bald/Beard/Glasses look'.
Fact boy, your intellectual content is brilliant!
I would enjoy and warch you more is you coud have the editor figure out how to get rid of the pop and hiss
The Chrysler TV8 sounded mad. A modular tank that was amphibious, around half the weight of current tanks, and able to be powered by either a v8 or a mini nuclear reactor.
Clean and abundant, yeah but never cheap. Pricing was based on the low cost of the fuel for running the reactor, without including construction, maintenance, and decommissioning, which would run into the billions.
Nuclear reactors for Icebreakers makes an incredible amount of sense. Yes it's possible this goes bad, but modern designs in those circumstances can make those things almost impossible and provide complete containment if something goes wrong.
Seriously. We should have more nuclear icebreakers.
Giant ships can have nuclear power because it is big enough the reactor can have sufficient shielding to protect passengers without making the weight excessive.
Nuclear batteries are safe because they are powered by an alpha emitter, for which shielding is easy.
@@soundspark
Yeah I am fully onboard with nuclear ships. I'm also happy with nuclear batteries.
Don’t forget the NV Savannah. The first nuclear powered merchant ship.
There was a proposal for nuclear space ships.
Was? Think again.
The US also had a nuclear powered lighthouse in the Chesapeake Bay, granted if I remember correctly, it was only for a couple years before switching to a different power source.
Its always a treat hear about orphaned soviet nuclear reactors.
Not the radiant future they were thought to herald.
"American's threw out the idea about the direct cycle system" "these ideas never left the drawing board" Look up Project Pluto!!! A nuclear powered ICBM that would have left a trail or irradiated particles wherever it went, and got so far in development that they built and tested working prototype engine with zero failures during testing. There is a video here on TH-cam about it.
We need a nuclear powered Simon
What do you mean need? Are you suggesting he isn't already?
And also, I had quite a bit of fun with my Geiger counter after an angiogram. Unfortunately it only gave me the ability to make my meter sing. I was not able to shoot lightning bolts from my hands. Apparently only casino carpets in winter grant me that power...
Would be nice to have one of those ex-Soviet RTG's to offset some of the power bill in my house. Idea's totally impractical of course, but IMO everyone's overly scared about nuclear stuff.
With nuclear technology, if you respect that it CAN kill you if you are careless, you won't be careless, and it won't kill you.
Which is exactly like working with high explosives.
That being said, I think RTG's belong on space probes, and large centralized nuclear reactor complexes that can afford a proper security detail as well as extremely durable concrete enclosures for the reactors are the far more sensible choice for providing power to the masses.
These made about 500W of electrical power from about 25kW of heat. The core is a beer can sized chunk of strontium 90 in a titanium can. This was placed inside of a hefty tungsten copper heat spreader surrounded by lots of thermocouples made of platinum silicide. When whole the device doesn't make much radiation exposure, but the can if freed from it can give a lethal dose in an hour. When new they glowed bright red hot like a burner on a stove.😮 I would have used them to power a heat engine using pentane or other lower boiling poit fluid to turn an alternator. It would give about 4 to 6kW of electrical power from the 25kw of heat.❤
There is also the NS Savanah, a nuclear powered merchant ship. It was a magnificent ship.
The 2020 luxury Le Commandant Charcot icebreaker (PC2 rated) cruise ship is the equal of the best Russian nuclear icebreakers but still less expensive for holidays.
I normally skip ads, but happened to be talking to my son and looked back when he took a sip and I don’t think he liked that at ALL lol
I love that you referenced the Russian ship the Lenin as "she", as well as all ships should be referenced.
That sip of the advertiser’s drink? Totally unconvincing.
If a vehicle is already carrying nuclear bombs, does adding a nuclear power supply really increase the risk from a crash?
Implanting lithium powered pacemakers in the human body? We are made of 60% water , and lithium is known to go BOOM when it touches water. Who comes up with these things? Doctor Doofenshmirtz ?
The nuclear powered lighthouses reminds me of the plot of Matthew Reilly's book Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves
Decent video but you could have expanded on it even further by using examples of RTGs also being used for decades in the space program on such applications as the Voyager probes and more recently the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.
The only reason I know about RTG’s is because of ksp.
Nuclear powered Siomon
What about the nuclear -powered cereal spoon, the nuclear-powered food processor and the nuclear-powered toothbrush?
The Atomic plane was never meant to fly!
It was designed by the same guy at Oak Ridge who made the first Salt Reactor. He knew it was not going to work as a plane but the military were handy in throwing cash at them to research their other reactors. Check out videos by Kirk Sorrenson for better information!
Someone approached Feynman to say reactor + plane is a new invention; sign this patent application. Apparently the patent office is sloppy enough to accept this without seeing a nuclear powered plane actually invented.
@PMA65537 the patent is for a new or novel process, nothing says it needs to work, rather that it merely "might" work.
It seems, that I am living in a Simon Shistler world. I am not complaining, I think kids wouldlove thisway of learning about the wonders of the world! And beards!
I bet Strike Gum flavored Huel would taste good.
I'm a bit surprised there isn't nuclear powered tanks.
RTG’s are not reactors at all. There’s no fission chain reaction going on in those, just ordinary radioactive decay.
I would love to meet some elderly person with a plutonium pacemaker, that is dope
It's pronounced Stew-D-baker , not BACKER, just to clarify. Thank you Simon for that bit of history
So this is the 30th video of fact boy in white T-shirt it seems
I thought you did one on the lighthouse reactors a while ago, covering Russia refusing to comply with further tracking down and dismantling and even planning to make more?
Nuclear is perfect for icebreakers, military submarines, remote mines and production facilities, deep space probes,and lighthouses if they are remote and ultimatic. So there's nothing weird here, except the accent.
A nuclear ship left out was the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship.