In Search of a Critical Moment - The Story of ZPPR 

Why was it forced to shutdown?

It is incredible to think that so many o you did this work for 20+ years and the Gov't just cancels it? 1. Was the shutdown recent (since Biden took office)? 2. Was shutdown date planned? 3. Was shutdown due to USA conversion from fossil fuels to "renewable" energy? 4. Was all research and testing shown in film done solely for future electricity production? 5. What now happens to all of the nuclear material (apologies if confidential)? Thank you.

A new era of interest in Nuclear power now. Pebble bed fuel Westinghouse AP1000 and SMR units .

@@yuglesstube also since the idea of breeder type reactors they found richer deposits of uranium in multiple places including in the North in Canada.

​@@MitzvosGolem1 smr : 1/10th the power, 1/4th the price. = Dead end.

Technically the one in EBR-I is ZPR-3, but yeah it's the same exact concept.

That's nothing in the nuclear industry. Louis Slotin decided it was sensible, in the name of accurate science, to use a screwdriver to keep two half spheres of plutonium separated, that together formed a critical mass. Needless to say, Murphy's law happened and Slotin died 9 days later of you-know-what. "Fun" fact: That same Demon Core (The name given to that core) that killed Slotin also killed Harry Daglian a year earlier when he used it for experiments with neutron reflecting bricks. Murphy paid a visit, Daglian dropped a brick in the wrong place, and presto. He died a week later. So, to recap: Safety in the nuclear industry has dramatically increased since the 1940's.

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 My uncle worked at The Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, then went with Teller to Livermore. The EBR-1 is really something to see, but the nuclear jet engines outside are really amazing!

Напоминает Доктора Стренджлава и его веселого ковбоя!)

Jazz flute was the key to most of the 20th century's scientific progress. We ignored it's demise at our peril.

@@iLumberjack Does jazz flute break down nuclear waste?

@@ronaldgarrison8478 yes, but there's always the risk of flute polarity flipping and becoming folk flute.

@@iLumberjack That might explain Jethro Tull Disparagement Syndrome. I've run into that a time or two.

Sadly they were mostly used to generate more plutonium for weapons rather than electricity. The plutonium then became a worry to keep secure.

Эти реакторы нужны только для Третьей мировой войны. Ядерной.

Much easier to contain room-pressure coolant, than water at several thousand psi.

Curious question: Would the radiation sensors pick up the radio active contaminants in cigarette smoke, if someone were to light one up in a modern facility?

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 No, it is a miniscule amount of radiation. It's about not accidentally ingesting any contamination: particularly beta or alpha emitters. In the old days, this tended to get spread around with operating age. Note that radioactive particulate can have strong electostatic charges and will cling to stuff. This is a very interesting subject with lots of "operating experience" being used to create modern practices. Modern nuclear stations are kept incredibly clean. They are also designed better for control of contamination. Doses for workers are a small fraction of what they once were.

@@DavidL-ii7yn Although I never studied nuclear physics (for a degree), I did get a good basic understanding of "normal" physics in high school. But I always used to ask the teacher deeper questions than we officially had to learn. For instance, Protons, neutrons and electrons were discussed. My questions were things like "Why is the neutron slightly heavier than a proton?" And the answer would involve the quarks, and of course I then went on to ask what Quarks were. The teacher gave me a vague answer because he knew I would not understand the scientific description, but it made me curious enough. Now, over 30 years on, I have a much deeper understanding of Quantum mechanics although not on the mathematical level, but as I have autism(undiagnosed until I was 50), I have a profound visual understanding of QM, admittedly some of those are analogous to what "really" happens, if we can even say that in this context...

heh, these old video's really sell dont they? you think they really knew what they were doing by the way they talk and present themselves, then we look at history and realized, holy hell, how are we alive LOL

@@narmale huh? They absolutely knew what they were doing. You think they just magically got lucky and willed these massive operations into existence? Wake up. Educate yourself. Do better. People weren't idiots back then like you sound today.

Other than running with a broken main pump bracket, and injecting hydrogen gas to reduce corrosion on the other bracket, hoping that it doesn’t break and cause a nuclear accident. Hope isn’t safety culture. It is the opposite. It is unsafe. An accident made vastly worse by the hydrogen injection, with reduced safety margins. And also, it is a sister to the Fukushima reactors, which showed just how unsafe this class of reactor is in a station blackout. The major part of the disaster at Fukushima was driven by hydrogen gas evolution from the destroyed cores. That would be even worse in an accident at CGS.

How quickly you forget the other four uncompleted WPPS reactors that have cost power users billions of dollars with exactly zero benefits.

Hundreds of Miles of Underground water canals to passively cool the reactors. Think of fantasy Dwarfs having a Venice culture. Cool thing about a underground facility is that if it cost millions of dollars to build individual underground rooms then mining would have never been economical. Underground rooms could potentially last thousands of years on the Moon & Mars.

by placing it where it will not get sunlight. Without the atmosphere, only directly lighted points get hot. If you build it out of direct light, like underground, you have very near absolute zero. And yes, at least the first few reactors on the moon need to be fast reactors, because we are always going to need power, and we cannot waste space taking up massive fuel assemblies for each plant. Since we know there is U238 on the moon, fast reactors could be used to process the fuel to make more, for more powerplants.

They can be both. The reactor mass is just subcritical and with the insertion of the control rods it goes critical. They also contain the other elements used in the proposed reactor design structure to verify proof of concept. Sodium, stainless and aluminium etc. Everything that would be present in the real core.

@@robinwells8879 Maybe I don’t quite understand the terms, but for simplicity, I thought with control rods inserted, that would essentially stop the reactor? Pulling the rods out would start it back up?

@@brmakl1 both are rods and they can control the reaction! I think that at this early stage of the science they were chasing the point of criticality and so it was easier to achieve it with adding fissile material. Geometry is so important to the physics alongside simple mass. Later when they understood the point of criticality it became easier to insert rods to quench the reaction by absorbing neutrons rather than adding them to initiate it. I am not really qualified but this is my understanding.

@@robinwells8879 no worries! I see what you are saying now and I agree. I am also by no means educated on this stuff but always interested to learn bits here and there. Very fascinating! Thank you for the reply!

@@brmakl1 my pleasure. It was a new concept to me also.

Pretty sure they're referring to the fact that low-pressure coolant reduces the concerns related to containing 2200 psi water.

@@whatisnuclear Yes, sorry, engineer here. I meant to comment on how we all missed out on the enormous advantage of a fast reactor with a liquid metal coolant, thus no pressure vessel, thus no primary side steam explosion threat, given the US cancellation of the fast reactor program. By Clinton, wasn’t it? I would have liked to see more discussion in the film of the main problems, at least in my view: Pu as a fuel and its production chain, and the risks of Na fires as w Super Phenix.

@@Nill757 Almost zero risk of sodium fire with this design. I stored almost 10 metric tons of sodium plates in the warehouse. They were clad in stainless steel, and were room temp. Sodium is not a liquid and very reactive until over 208 degrees F.

@@joelblankenship269 In a reactor as a coolant, it is a heated liquid and not a solid sandwiched in steel. See the Super Phenix accident. This low power experimental reactor has no reported operational Na fires, as have other builds, so it’s possible, though I don’t understand the failsafes.

@@Nill757 In this particular design, the sodium coolant was in the plates, and kept at ambient temperature. Since it was such low power, the cooling was maintained with fans and HVAC, and kept at approx. 90 +/- 0.25 degrees. The physics and nuclear properties they were gathering was the same, regardless of temp. I also qualified and operated Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), and we maintained the sodium coolant in a double tank at 700-883 degrees. Since the sodium does not boil until approx 1600 degrees, we were able to keep the argon cover gas pressure at 1.0 inch HG, and never had any primary leaks or fires either.

Плутоний 239 можно взорвать от 3кг. Используя правильный нейтронный детонатор и бериллиевую оболочку определенной формы. Именно так делают малые тактические ядерные заряды на 3-10кт. Которые помещаются даже в калибре 160мм. 9кг это для устаревшей технологии имплозии с помощью линз из обычной взрывчатки.

But the density was not high so only 100 watts. That’s a lot of fuel for not much return in energy in this format.

Due to their work or by smoking? My guess is their risk of getting cancer from smoking is way greater.

I didn't see anything (other than smoking) that looked fishy to me. I would guess... none. This wasn't the Wild West, they knew the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. And they knew how to mitigate each.

64.5 million you idiot.

All of these research reactors were part of a program to learn more about the technology in order to determine the optimum strategy for large scale power generation. In the end, the PWR design used on submarines was simply scaled up as that is what Westinghouse and B&W had experience with. This is despite the fact that it was far from the best choice for a large scale reactor. Given that most research was winding down even before TMI we're a good 40 years behind where we should be when it comes to nuclear power generation research.

It's always about 30 years.

Yeah, commercial fusion power has been about 10-30 years away for the last 50 years now.

Oh yeah? Who's this we? And what makes you think you know better than them? lol Just the fact that you think a few decades ago was some stone age of information proves how little you know. Certainly you know less than anything that the experts who made what was essentially the bleeding edge of technology come to fruition. But go on ... let that ego keep talking. Tell us more about how they knew nothing back then and you know so much more. We'll believe you. ;)

@@orangejjay hot damn dude, triggered much?

I think you'll find math experiment etc these geniuses knew quite a lot more than you're giving them credit for quite a lot of knowledge has been lost.