Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Oppenheimer's 'Terrible Possibility' - Atmospheric Ignition by Kyle Hill

Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Oppenheimer's "Terrible Possibility" - Atmospheric Ignition by Kyle Hill

[PsychoSpecter]

Always happy to see Kyle. He's become more and more "himself" over the years since breaking with Because Science, and even though his overall tone is much more serious he still manages to do a great job highlighting just how cool science is, and it really gives him a chance to show his skills as a content producer. I prefer the less put-on, faux-wacky Kyle. He'd be an amazing documentary film maker if nothing else.

[rams]

love waking up to ur reactions, ur unironically my favorite youtuber night now. I love all your insight on things and ur nerdy/geeky freakouts are so relatable! You've made incredible growth in the past few months, you deserve it!

[IndividualBean]

I really love your industry tidbits.
Are you planning on further non-reaction videos?
I would love to hear all you have to share!

[zacharytaylor]

I love your kyle hill videos. Happy to see more half life histories.

[cyrilio]

Love these reaction videos. Request to do one from QXIR. He’s done a couple about nuclear incidents. His videos are short and sweet with some comedy sprinkled in.

[davidmajors]

btw the temp of the Sun at it's core is 25 million K. Helium fuses into carbon at 180 million K. As a general rule as the mass of the nuclei mass goes up so does the temp required to fuse it. There are a few exceptions at the lower end such as lithium which fuses at lower temps than hydrogen.

[djenning]

I enjoyed this piece, would love to see more of your content.

[holderheck]

Kyle hill takes people reacting to his content poorly, you might want to ask him first. But I am here for it especially to see how accurate you think he gets.

[TheMinerat]

Hello Tyler, I'd like to recommend you something really cool - a youtube maker by the name of Hyperspace Pirate has just released a video today documenting his project of building a cloud chamber; a device which utilizes supercooled alcohol vapor to visually detect ionizing radiation! The video's titled 'Seeing Radiation with the Naked Eye', and i firmly believe this is something you will love!

[victore]

I know he did not just say that he used to calculate the energy output of star wars weapons and doesn't expect us to expect a video on that?!?!!

[network_king]

That is kind of mind blowing/terrifying that little bit of energy like 10% of what was there turned to energy and makes a big explosion to destroy entire city.

[FINXainarskrastins]

Well, my first thought to this question would be "can we use the inverse square law to disprove the domino effect of fusion, not to disprove itself, just that possibility of it creating exponential growth of energy from these rections.

[williamkane]

I subscribed, your reactions are great and I can see your channel becoming huge in the future, all the best from another engineer and scientist, William.

[davidmajors]

jfwiw- Just thought I'd give the stellar viewpoint. 
In low mass stars like the Sun Nitrogen plays a very minor role. The primary energy production in the core is that diagram shown in Kyle's video -called the PP I chain. There is a secondary cycle involving Nitrogen called the CNO cycle. With this one Nitrogen along with Carbon and Oxygen act as the nuclear equivalent of a catalyst that facilitates fusion of Hydrogen into Helium. For the Sun it's less than 2% contribution . However the CNO cycle is temperature dependent and in stars of 1.5 Solar masses it surpasses the PP I chain as the more efficient mechanism. There are other minor reactions- especially in later stages of evolution called the "s" process where a post iron seed nucleus can capture a neutron and beta decay into the next element.

In massive stars that go boom (Supernovae) Nitrogen is also not a major player. The key fusion cycles are The formation of the iron core heralds catastrophe. There are no reactions that liberate energy so the star collapses. In a process involving un-imaginable temps in the billions you have photodissociation of nuclei, productions of huge numbers on neutrinos and in a manner not clearly understood that implosion gets turned into an explosion that removes the outer layers leaving behind an ultra dense neutron or black hole core.

Getting back to the video- like everything else involving the behavior of nuclei it's all statistical in nature. The probability of the reactions is very low as the paper Kyle cited but as it isn't zero...the rest follows. 
The description of the stellar reactions I discussed reflect the relative probabilities in stars. Incidentally the lowest probability is actually the first step -fusion of two protons to form Deuterium. That's the reason why current fusion research just simply doesn't even consider 1H1 as a starting point.  
btw-In the context of the 1940's this wasn't totally new but the details were not that well understood either.

[MatthewSuffidy]

Well on the positive side if you could ignite the atmosphere, they would have probably succeeded in fusion electricity generation by now.

[thalt]

He's running out of Sam O'Nella

[everlearnin]

T. Folse, Remember Oppenheimer was trying to figure out how powerful this would be on paper with only an observance from a radio broadcast of a similar yet much smaller event.

[aquilux-vids]

You must remember, , no one had ever done this investigations before. You come in with over half a century's worth of accumulated knowledge. These guys, every time they thought of something they were the first ones to think of it, every calculation they did had never been done before, and every conclusion they came to they knew was based on assumptions that no one had devised experiments to test for if they even realized it was an assumption in the first place. They were forging ahead, well in the lead of any theory that could explain what they were doing, working off of guesses and wild untested extrapolations.

[astroartie]

One crucial fact that is completely fumbled by Kyle (and missed by you), is that *fusion* is not a chain reaction; Previous fusion reactions do not make triggers (neutrons in the case of fission) that make future fusion reactions more likely. The huge consequence of that is that if a fusion reaction did happen, it would just peter out as the initial explosion expands and cools adiabatically. Just the 1/r^2 law of things diminishing from distance, r, to a source tells you it will be quickly extinguished.

[matthewboire]

You and Kyle seem similar, thats because you are both smart and cool.