Nick Touran
@whatisnuclear • 36,736 subscribers
Nuclear engineer / advanced reactor designer (Ph.D. P.E.) who runs https://t.co/ofTjIciUnl.
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If you pull a vacuum on wood, then impregnate it with a monomer, and then irradiate the heck out of with gamma rays, you get a wood-plastic composite that is extremely tough while looking great. If it gets scuffed, you just buff it out, the finish goes all the way through. Here's a 1969 AEC film describing the material, commercial applications, and the production process. (Title: "Atomic Revolution in Wood", AVN0481, Digitized by the IAEA) 📽️⚛️
Nick Touran177,802 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
In February 2016, I was active on a repeater in Seattle, and we had a guy causing regular illegal interference. We got organized, set up speech diarization software, logged his appearances, and calculated probabilities. After we knew his timing, two others and I sat at high spots with handheld directional Yagi antennas to triangulate his location. I was up there, spinning around in circles in the rain at the Civil War Cemetery on Seattle's Capitol Hill. Once we realized he was mobile and what route he was on, we planned to get video of him driving by (on I-5). We heard him coming, giving me ~10 minutes to get into position. I grabbed my backpack, pre-loaded with camera and tripod, and hopped on my motorcycle. It was about 11:30pm on a Sunday night in pouring rain. On the way, I took a turn a little too fast, slid out on the newly-installed light rail tracks, and went down. Not too much damage, but the side stand broke off. Having been welded to the frame, this actually totalled the bike (though it was rideable with a center stand). I limped home, demoralized. Later, someone told us they knew who the guy was and that he was under investigation for something far more serious, and that he had like 50 guns in his apartment or something. We gave up the hunt and he eventually disappeared. We had of course opened a case with the FCC but I'm not sure they ever did anything. Good times.
Nick Touran620,299 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Industrial Applications of Nuclear Explosives (1958) That's one way to make a new harbor!
Nick Touran26,590 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Nuclear waste shipping casks have been through a hell of a lot of testing. Now with Red Alert music.
Nick Touran58,542 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Will you at least admit that a nuclear explosion is awesome?
Nick Touran54,725 görüntüleme • 6 ay önce
This has to be one of the biggest ideas I've ever seen: a nuclear-powered Agro-Industrial complex. ✅ 1 billion gallons of fresh water / day from the sea ✅ 2 GW of electricity ✅ 300k-acre food factory ✅ phosphorous via electric furnace for fertilizer ✅ food for 6 million people ✅ aluminum sheet and bar stock ✅ ammonia from electrolytic hydrogen ✅ caustic and chlorine from brine electrolysis
Nick Touran94,575 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
An incredible NUCLEAR-POWERED FLIGHT film is newly available online! We just scanned this declassified film showing 30 minutes of detail from the major reactor development program at its peak, between 1956-1958. It presents the program goals and evolution, including how global operating costs were expected to be reduced by eliminating the need to operate foreign air bases around the world. Materials problems required them to reduce requirements from high-altitude/supersonic to low-altitude/subsonic. Ongoing development and progress is shown on the GE direct air cycle (XMA-2) in Idaho and Evandale, and the P&W indirect liquid-metal lithium-7 cooled cycle at CANAL, where they developed niobium-based alloys and technology that could run at the required crazy-high temperatures and withstand lithium. It shows dozens of things I've never seen before, like the 3 ZrH and BeO inserts put into HTRE-2, and talks a bit about the HTRE-3 meltdown. The HTREs can still be seen in the parking lot of the EBR-1 museum on the INL site. They show an in-reactor test loop being fabricated and tested in a large oil-fired heater, destined to be inserted in the ETR in Idaho. Of course, shielding makes an appearance. The Convair Nuclear Test Aircraft is shown, and shields made of Lithium hydride, BeO, tungsten alloys, and depleted uranium are discussed. They also show some work on radiation effects on electrical components, using test reactors. Overall, another incredible find and amazing content given the deceptively simple and boring title. Huge thanks to my friends at Nuclear Talent Scout for funding the scan, and for choosing to prioritize it! As always, the engineers from the 1950s continue to throw the word "advanced reactor" back in our faces today.
Nick Touran67,955 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Have you ever heard of an *organic* nuclear reactor? They use hydrocarbons as the coolant/moderator. These allow low-pressure operation, are non-corrosive, and hardly neutron activate at all, thereby allowing cheap materials of construction and easy maintenance. We just got a 1958 film about the first-ever organic cooled/moderated reactor digitized. Here it is! (Thanks to Mikal Bøe for sponsoring. The original soundtrack is in Spanish, thanks to Shirly Rodriguez Rojas for translating and narrating)
Nick Touran29,543 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
In 1961, we flight tested the PM-1 portable nuclear microreactor, and then flew it in 16 packages via C-130 from its factory to an airstrip near its final site. It was re-assembled and operated on a mountaintop in Wyoming. Here's footage of it being loaded and flown.
Nick Touran29,737 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Beautiful animated breeder reactor film here from the late 1970s, with a to-the-point description of breeders and then a detailed depiction of the major systems in Superphénix, the largest sodium-cooled reactor ever built. This is also from the Ron Knief collection. Thanks to Suzanne Wehrenberg for sponsoring the scan.
Nick Touran17,038 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Presenting "Sodium Safety: Action & Reaction", a 1979 liquid metal safety film produced at the Fast Flux Test Facility as part of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Program. This and many more forthcoming CRBRP ones generously made possible by Aalo Atomics
Nick Touran15,138 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
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Lots of major equipment was fabricated for the Clinch River Breeder. Here's testing of the reactor closure head from April 16, 1982. The rotating plug design allows fuel handling without opening up the reactor. Inset rotating plugs allow you to reach all core positions. Thanks to Aalo Atomics for making this scan possible. (Since this one is silent, I sped it up 6x but posted the real-time one as well.)
Nick Touran13,186 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
An amazing film depicting General Atomic's development of the Peach Bottom High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) in Pennsylvania. 53 private utilities banded together to fund the prototype reactor. The film shows a beautiful model of Peach Bottom, the reactor under construction, many non-nuclear tests (including one with 400 pressure sensors!), details of the thorium-bearing TRISO-like fuel elements, fuel fabrication, critical assembly testing, pilot plant testing (General Atomic in-pile loop), the reactor components test tower, full size control rod and drive mechanism testing, fuel handling tests! An incredible gem. (I did not get this one digitized; the San Diego Air and Space museum did. I just cleaned up the audio and generated/edited subtitles)
Nick Touran10,660 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Daha fazla içerik yok.