What’s Behind the World’s Heaviest Door? 

*Thanks for watching.* I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but maybe we can take a moment, a deep breath, and learn about T H I C C D O O R.

"this absurdly large and complicated security measure isn't to keep people or things out, it's to keep _something_ in" will never fail to be the most terrifying and intriguing concept in the world

"Now _that_ is a big door." I can see why they used that door in both of the Tron movies, considering _the world's largest source of neutron radiation_ and _a laser that can convert matter into data and back again_ would probably require similar levels of containment.

The fact that no one is mentioning him stumbling at 4:50 and actively chose to leave it in upsets me. It's moments like those that I love in videos like these

One of my best friends growing up, his dad was a scientist at LLL during the 70s and 80s. You wouldn't believe the stories he had about the stuff they took into the lab to blow up and look at under microscopes and things. Let's just say they took measurements I doubt made it into any papers.

I finally have something related to share: I work at the Center for Plasma Material Interaction, the foremost lab studying the use of liquid lithium in nuclear fusion. Under a strong magnetic field and heat gradient - such as you would find in a fission device - liquid lithium will flow along the walls, and even upside down. With this, the steel reactor walls are protected both from radiation, and physical damage from flare ups in the plasma. Additionally, the lithium helps to absorb any contaminants that make their way into the plasma.

I also think its fascinating that the way the door was designed it allowed for one person to open/close it. That's a impressive feat of engineering.

I love that door. It's so ominous and monolithic, almost like something you'd see in the SCP universe. I've always loved visuals/renders of imposing, cold, monolithic structures and monuments, and this is a real-world example of precisely that.

Behold... My Balls. 3:25

I can feel the excitement Kyle had after finding that paper about nuclear attenuation! Love it!

“Behold, my balls” Oh Kyle, don’t tease Also the door that Kyle is talking about was probably used for filming after it was done being used for science things

"If your head were in the path of that beam, you'd be dead " Anatoli Bugorski: hold my vodka

"behold....my BALLS" not what I expected to hear in this video... "I live Agaaaaiiiiine" was also a very great line. Not only very educational but also a joy to view! Kudos to you/r writer!

There's a story I remember my dissertation supervisor told me: A steel used or to be used (don't quite recall) in a reactor housing but would become brittle and nobody knew why. It was found that the Silicone used the steel to increase its strength had been transformed into Aluminium due to the radiation

The first nuclear power plant in the US was the Shippingport plant in western PA. It was decommissioned in the late 80s. I got to go though the huge heavy door in to the core, and the engineering of the door was amazing considering it had been closed in the 50s and opened in the 80s how well it worked.

Kyle, as someone who works at the NBSR (a CP-5 variant), and what I guess could be called the cranky older cousin to the RTNS-II (their neutrons were ~14MeV ours get down to

Kyle, thank you for so many years of fun, witty and super informative videos. Addicted to your channel and I learn so much!

I laughed and I learned. Perfect blend. Thanks Kyle, you're awesome.

I like how Thor can be in action movies and teach me stuff I never knew at the same time

DOE announced today they succeeded in a fusion process. Coming sooner than we expected..

4:13 im not even gonna talk about that

Don't worry Kyle, it's not about the size of your door, it's about how you use it.

“I don’t have door envy…” Narrator (probably Morgan Freeman): “But he did, in fact, have crippling door envy…”

I’ve been curious how neutron embrittlement would be dealt with in fusion plants, and as far as I know there is no solution. With a fission plant they simply build heavy and thick, but with more specialized materials like superconductors being involved with fusion… I have no idea how that gets accommodated.

4:50 I feel this personally

Your two balls reminded me of the battery bounce test. Get an iron skillet, 1 dead AA and 1 live AA battery. Hold each sideways about 8” above the skillet. As you drop each, a charged battery will land with a thunk and a dead battery will bounce. So if you have a pile of batteries in your kitchen junk drawer that need testing, that’s a simple one.

Thank you for the memories … as a young designer the late 1970’s I got to design parts of the “rotating target assembly “. My office was in the building right across the street. Fun times. The door is actually cantilevered. The person in the thumbnail can actually push and open it by hand. The Lab was a wonderful playground of minds of the most talented people in the world. 😊😊😊😊😊

I'm in my first year of studying Material science as a University student, never thought of nuclear smashing lattice, good reminder

I think its mad how something as high tech as a nuclear reactor still has roots back to the industrial age with steam power

Just starting, but as a fan of the Tron franchise, I always love any time this door comes up!

Kyle’s first line. 👌🏻*mwah* Lol love you bro. “Yeah we’re brothers now, get over it”

Allegedly we just recently figured out Nuclear Fusion. It's not a dream anymore, I just read something about scientists being able to replicate fusion for the first time in history

Kyle, I hope that the people and scientists you met with in Ukraine are OK, seriously! And to anyone who watches shows like Kyle's to escape the harshness of the world I apologize to you, this is the only way I could communicate my best wishes to Kyle and the people he met, this was the only form of social media I use that I share with kyle

I love the thought that Kyle just saw a photo on pinterest, went "what's that?" and then ended up making a twenty minute video about it. That's the scientific spirit alright.

Years ago I worked for the local municipality and whenever we would be doing any kind of maintenance or landscaping within ~100yards of LLNL their security detail would arrive. Blacked out SUV’s full tactical kit and they’d monitor everything we were doing as well as their perimeter security cameras tracking our movements.

The current fusion achievements make these results more important then ever before.

"Now that is a big door!" Seriously, that's actually the door that Flynn breaks into in "Tron", because they filmed the Enron manufacturing/lab floor scenes at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

The enormous scale of what the field of nuclear physics encompasses never crossed my mind until a few yeas ago. My naive thought process kind of assumed all the big theories of "This much of this stuff all together gets hot, and this much in one place vaporizes several city blocks" had already been published, and the majority of what was being done now was just fiddling with small details around the edges.......... Then I found myself on a 3 hour plane trip sitting next to a really interesting Swedish bloke who happened to teach the subject in a university. We'd been chatting and laughing for a while before the subject of work came up, and when he smiled and said "Well, I'm actually a Professor of theoretical nuclear physics at XXXX university" I instantly started asking about it. He seemed slightly surprised that this admission hadn't killed the topic of work dead, but he was a typical considerate Swede and dumbed the subject right down to answer my questions. After a while he realised from my follow up questions that I understood slightly more than he was expecting (though still not a huge amount more), so the answers got a bit more complex. The reason this all springs to mind was that he said that there's loads of REALLY counterintuitive stuff that goes on in even a normal fission reactor (I think the phrase "There's some really CRAZY weird sh*t that happens" was one of the ways he excitedly described it....... You've gotta love Swedes. :D), so I asked for some examples, and one of them was how stainless steel can eventually get ridiculously brittle if exposed for long enough to a high level of radiation, to the extent that it'll almost shatter like glass when tapped with a hammer. That concept felt particularly weird to me (A engineering machinist by training) so I asked for details. He spent the remaining 45 minutes of the flight trying to dumb this down far enough for me to understand. The explanations that confused me got down to the level of descriptions involving tennis, golf and Velcro covered ping pong balls colliding, and some of them vanishing, while others stuck together in unexpected ways. In the end the closest we got was that the outcome was similar to the microscopic lattice of fractures you might get in cast iron from giving it several abrupt heating and quenching cycles, but the actual molecular process that was occurring in that example was entirely wrong and in no way even analogous to what was going on in radiation blasted stainless steel. :D He actually tried to apologise to me at one point for not being able to explain the process well enough for me, someone who didn't even take physics at school, to understand ! The poor guy usually taught people who'd been through advanced maths and physics at school, then often did more of the same at college, so they had a solid foundation in the basics before he even saw them. This poor guy wasn't used to explaining stuff that then needed the explanation explaining, then parts of that explaining [repeat ad infinitum]. I told him it was OK, and the problem was that, without even a baseline of high school physics in my past for him to work up from, it was akin to expecting a dog to understand commands in a different language to the one it was trained in. My understanding of how the universe works is predominantly on the everyday, or macroscopic level, so skipping microscopic to get right down to atomic was probably far too much of a jump for me. I've thought about that guy a few times since then (Usually at those times when I've tried to add to what I thought was my reasonable grasp of some subject, only to quickly realising that all the understanding I'd accumulated so far didn't even come close to scratching the surface of the subject as a whole !). He must be one hell of a good teacher. He managed to answer about 90% of the questions I put to him in a way that my idiotic head could understand. You can't do that just by parroting stuff you were taught. You have to be able to visualise and feel the entire subject on a really fundamental level to be able to do that. On top of that he was a really nice guy too. :)

Those swords in the background need to either both point upwards or downwards, that asymmetry is an ocd magnet 😅

4:06 mY BAlLS

If THAT was the "Door" what was the rest of the room made of?

Love this format! Brings me back to Because Science days. Hope you guys make more videos like this! You're too good at it, Mr. Hair

Kyle …how did the folks at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory create such a high energy neutron beam and how did they manage it in terms of aiming it and modulating its output?

the amount of radiation you get standing outside that door is the same amount of radiation you would get standing next to Chernobyl's elephant's foot...

The moment I saw the thumbnail, I thought "is that the _TRON_ door...?" Kyle did not let me down😁.

Math and science both have always been something I’ve been so interested in but could never properly pay attention to it in school. You instruct and explain it really well. Thank you for showing me how much I really actually love to learn.

I love how in nearly every video that I watch of yours, I eventually come to a point where I'm demanding you tell me how I would die.

I've seen one of these big doors, it was closed at the time as they were doing tests. I did go into the simulation fusion reactor though. This was a few years ago now. Was very cool seeing the ins and outs of a fusion plant.

I love that the giant door was in Tron - theoretically to protect the employees in the "Laser research facility" from the laser. Then they just run their experiment standing a couple meters from the laser.

"Now that is a big door." - Kevin flynn/Sam flynn.

I love this channel. I come across these channels and I binge the hell out of em haha

As both Kevin and Sam Flynn said, "now that is a big door."

Glad Kyle did the Chernobyl trip when he did.

Little did he know we have solved one of the first steps to fusion a year later by finally producing a positive output even if it was only a few MW.

8:45 "but it will be the last mistake you ever make" Sounds good to me, at least I know I wont make any more mistakes

Behold, my balls already is the funniest statement of the year. I'm suprised Kyle had the dedication to get castrated just for us.

So, personally, this reminds me of how chlorine trifluoride can be safely stored in a steel drum despite being a strong enough oxidizer to corrode the metal making up the drum, because the metal inside the drum is "passivated" by the reaction into inert metal fluorides. Is it possible that a material could be chosen that gets "passivated" under neutron radiation, such that even if its interior structure gets destroyed, the resulting damage is still able to shield neutrons from the outside, and the activation of the atoms doesn't produce any super radioactive isotopes?

A grown man playing with his balls like that, shameful.

This was cool and all but "Behold, my balls!" at 3:24 caught me off guard

You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror. These are just examples; it could also be something much better. Prepare to enter: The heaviest hinged door.

"Now that is a big door." But in all seriousness, Tron was how I first discovered this.

I've never felt seen the way I did when Kyle called us "nuclear weirdos"

4:04 how you started smiling before telling your joke is just awesome xD

The way that changes in material that has been irradiated is measured, is through a measurement called the reference transition temperature. This measures the temperature at which any given material will transition from state to state (ie solid to liquid, liquid to gas, etc), and then that is compared to that same material after it has been exposed to a certain amount of radiation (be it alpha, beta, or gamma). Fun fact for the day.

This door looks awfully similar to the one in Tron, around the start of the movie. Which also had a laboratory dealing with a lot of very high power stuff

Glad he told us what’s behind the door right up front. Saved me 10 minutes

These videos always felt like something that would be on Cartoon Network at like 5am

Did you know they used the National Ignition Facility target chamber at Lawrence Livermore as the warp core set in Star Trek: Into Darkness?

We all know the heaviest doors in the world are the ones at the entrance of Kyle’s facility

The whole video i was thinkin: YOOO THATS THE TRON DOOR! and then finally... in the end of the video, he actually mentions it. Kyle, you are my spirit animal!

Congrats Kyle, you managed to make me laugh at a “your mom” joke.

Thank you, Kyle. I have a ton of respect for you.

that vault in the first shot immediately made me think of "aw fuck everything's supposed to have been turned to glass back there man don't go in"

I have to say it… “Now _that_ is a big door!” You made so many fans happy just showing that door.😊

My Army reserve unit had one of the old WWII nuclear bunkers we have in the hills of Fort Hood. It was 30m x 150m with a blast door. The 20ton blast door protected some old tents, MRE's, and empty fuel cans.

"Activation" is really worrying since one of the main selling points of Nuclear Fusion is that it does not produce radioactive waste. So not only will someone have to go in there are remove all of the panels from the inside of a fusion reactor regularly but disposing of it will have some of the same problems as waste from fission.

I have learn something new about this door from this informative video. Thanks for making it. The thumbnail got me wanting to watch this particular video because I remember seeing this door in the original Tron. I always thought that the door was fascinating and wonder why that door exist in the first place. Now I know.

Given that neutrons aren't really keen on going around corners, why didn't they just build a zigzagged corridor leading to the accelerator instead of having a door at all? Seems like that would've been vastly simpler and cheaper.

2:59 oh man, I instantly saw that N64 with Smash Bros....I still have that, best party game ever

0:32 lmao is that not the door from the original Tron?

Did you consider the inputs we have from Sellafield/Windscale in the UK, where the reactor core was known to store energy in its deformed crystal structure (see also Wigner release)?

2:15 it’s still hilarious to me how for all our technology, we’re still just using steam power in the end.

That joke killed me harder than radiation poisoning

2:31 you better get out of that reactor quick. It's already taken your right foot!

Id love to hear more about this activation issue with fusion reactors and how it kills fusion power, you should do a video on it!

Kyle’s so brave he’s standing inside that reactor!

“I live once more!” Lmao

3:18 DID YOU REALLY MADE THAT CURSED REFERENCE?

Love your content Kyle keep up the work

Bold of you to assume that if the radiation didn't kill me immediately, *that* would be my last mistake.

Thanks! I always wondered where they got that door in Tron.

This uh......... this actually kind of changes my perspective quite a lot about the difficulty of fusion energy. It's not _just_ achieving net energy. It's also solving the problem of _degradation and activation of the materials used to build the reactor_ due to the intense neutron flux of the reaction. It's _very_ possible that the nuclear waste from a fusion reactor could be _worse_ than from current uranium fission reactor designs, due to activation of the reactor vessel itself. :x

The part that becomes so radioactive that it has to be replaced every year...could something like that be used as a power source (radioactive decay) for deep space probes? The Voyager probes used something similar, no?

i love how all of humanity's progress when it comes to power is just better ways of making hot water.

Kyle rolling "his balls" between his fingers and smiling almost diabolically is the best thing I've seen today

cool stuff there dude, can't say I understood most of it, but I enjoyed it regardless. Quick request, can you make a video on the Martian Iron Rings from Warhammer 40k? They are like the demented lovechild of a space elevator and an orbital rings that act as a space dock yard.

Kyle, with Russian and Ukrainian forces activly fighting in the exclusion zone, radiation levels surrounding the site have reportedly skyrocketed. Could you please do a video on what could be the result of the fighting in the exclusion zone if it continues to worsen over then next few weeks?

I'd like to know how far research has come when utilizing this mechanism and what it could mean for the future

The was a real treat. Thank you, Kyle!

0:37 An SCP?