Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Veritasium 'All the Times We Nearly Blew Up the World'

Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Veritasium "All the Times We Nearly Blew Up the World"

[rayives]

"Near miss" means "close proximity miss, " as opposed to "far miss" or "distant miss, " a logical complement that is not actually used.

[thphoenix]

“Near miss” makes intuitive sense to me, meaning “a miss, of type ‘near’ as opposed to ‘far’, meaning it was dangerously close to a hit”.
The other potential interpretation of ”near miss” that trips some people up, “nearly a miss”, never seemed as intuitive to me. Maybe if it was spelled “near-miss”.

[aftbit]

On the topic of "near miss" vs "near hit", I recently learned that American English uses "just about" to mean something that barely didn't happen, while British English uses the same words to mean something that barely _did_ happen. For example, "I just about finished my homework in time" might mean in America that you did not complete your homework before it was due, while in Britain it might mean that you completed it just before the deadline.

[pluggedfinn-bjhn]

Well, many disasters often happen during routine stuff, because 99% of things we do in any industry are routine.

For me the more scary part is that how many disaster could've been avoided if we had listened to engineers repeated warnings. Space Shuttle Challenger that you mentioned as an example is one of such case. Sure, STS launches were routine, but that one really wasn't. There was HUGE publicity around it because of the "teacher in space" thing, it was the coldest weather Space Shuttle was ever launched and the pressures from the "teacher in space" program pushed them to not delay the launch.

The problem that caused the disaster was known by engineers for over a decade, and they had asked for redesign and further testing, but NASA had not seen it as too urgent. The O-rings had been deemed effectively non-redundant system, and failures of the primary O-rings had occured on several flights in significantly warmer weather. There was a redesign planned, and it would've took effect about a year from the tragic launch.

Before the launch, during the safety assessment teleconference, the engineers did try to convince that the launch was unsafe, but were taken to the side and "had discussion in private with the management", and conceded that there was no proven danger. Yet exactly what they had predicted, happened.

[MPshadowfiend]

This is such an entertaining, informative, and inspiring channel. I’m a physics student in UNI and you’re making me want to focus on nuclear energy. So fascinating and important its crazy. Easy Subscription

[Relkond]

‘Near miss’ - a nearby miss. See also ‘missed by a mile’ which is a miss where only a nuclear weapon makes the ‘miss’ aspect moot.
‘Close only counts in horse-shoes, hand grenades, and a-bombs.

[simpleimprovements]

How many people here would take a selfie with a undetonated nuclear bomb if they found one randomly?

[Bergendal_]

Things we need to know for each video;
- Tyler Folse is a nuclear engineer with a little over 10 years of experience in the commercial nuclear power industry, from engineering, to operations, to emergency response
- He doesn't claim to know everything there is nuclear, but he can certainly share some knowledge

Got it? You're now a T. Folse Nuclear subscriber and you found this comment :DDDD

[VillaFanDan]

I always think about the possibility of a catastrophic accident in the North Korean nuclear weapon programme. Expecially given defectors' descriptions of the incredibly poor safety standards of virtually all industry there. Most likely an accident wouldn't cause a war, unless they managed to accidentally attack a neighbour - but there's more potential for an accident that would cause a big human and environmental disaster within their own borders, given that the government would likely be reticent to accept foreign help to deal with the aftermath.

[Kenneth_James]

No, the question is how many accidents or lost bombs did the Soviet Union have in that time

[terranhealer]

So glad you did this video and I totally agree “near miss” has always tripped me up 😂

[davidg]

See "Dr. Strangelove" for the comedy movie version. "How to stop worrying and love the bomb." Who wouldn't love a comedy about nuclear armageddon made in the middle of the cold war?

[MatthijsvanDuin]

7:15 For some reason this is often mentioned in the context of nuclear reactions specifically even though it's just as true for chemical reactions. It's a completely general principle that the mass of an object is proportional to its energy*, e.g. if you were to have an enclosed box coated with perfect mirrors on the inside and somehow fill it with a bunch of light, the box would now weigh more.


(*) The only caveat is the energy of an object is generally taken to include its kinetic energy which depends on frame of reference while the term "mass" when unqualified is typically used to refer to its rest mass (aka invariant mass), so then E = m c² only holds when E is the object's _rest energy_, i.e. its total energy when measured in the frame of reference where the object is not moving (has zero total momentum). However there is a sense in which E = m c² also holds in a moving frame of reference (relative to the object), in that Newton's second law of motion, F = m · a, is only true if you take m to be the object's _relativistic_ mass, mᵣₑₗ := E / c² where E is the object's total energy (including kinetic energy). An object's momentum is also determined by its relativistic mass rather than its rest mass, p = mᵣₑₗ · v, which is how photons manage to have non-zero momentum despite having zero rest mass (specifically |p| = mᵣₑₗ · c = E / c since a photon always travels at the speed of light).

[KevinLyda]

George Carlin has a great rant on "near-miss." He agreed with you!

[barefootalien]

"Which risk do you think is higher?" Right now? Deliberate use. But that's not the normal situation.

Have you heard of the multi-decade period during which all of the nuclear launch codes for US silo-based nuclear weapons was On purpose. The logic being that if DC was taken out in a first strike before the President could authorize a retaliation, the guys in the silos should be able to launch... along with some ideas that it'd be marginally faster to just push zero a bunch of times than carefully enter a more complex code.

We are profoundly stupid sometimes...

[nathnathn]

21:04 theres the bomb they dropped accidentally next to a city that only didn’t go off because it had a faulty detonator.
Theres the salted nuke they accidentally sent to a remote area of mexico that they spent a lot to covertly clean up. The potential places it could of hit included multiple cities.

[aftbit]

22:50 The proper procedure at the time was to use a different tool, which would securely hold the socket, but the airman forgot the tool in the truck and used a ratchet wrench instead. The military had a major blindspot for human factors at this time.

[karlharvymarx]

For the last 70 or so years, I think a malfunction/accident involving nuclear weapons has been a greater threat than their initial use. MAD is twisted but realistic because even crazy people aren't crazy enough to launch a first strike knowing there will be a massive counter strike in a few minutes. But what if the US and North Korea each had one 10 megaton bomb. Still a bad retaliatory spanking if you use it, but maybe you don't have to be completely insane to use it since your country will be mostly ok. If so, I don't know where the minimum number of nukes threshold is that MAD kicks in but I think it is more than one nuke. However, maybe if you know other countries have disassembled nukes in deep secret bunkers, and those parts can be assembled and used in a day or two, it is still never worth starting a game of Global Thermonuclear Warfare because ultimately both sides get damaged beyond repair albeit at a slower pace, and you get the benefit of a lower risk of high risk accident.

Anyway, I knew about some of the accidents in the video, but he did reveal details I didn't know. For instance, the slab over the broken arrow in NC--I always heard it augered in too deep to retrieve. Also didn't know it may have been more ready for action than than it should have been. I saw another show somewhere where they went into details about some of the improvements to the the electronics and other systems after incidents where we nearly blew our hands off, so to speak. Good but probably not good enough considering how monumentally stupid the military's handling of these things have been historically.

I don't know to what degree it has been a factor, maybe it is just rumor, but I have heard many times that the fossil fuel industry manufactured much of the FUD and other weapons the anti-nuclear power activists unknowingly used to curtail the use of fission electricity. I suspect that is a missing piece of the puzzle about why people tend to be more afraid of nuclear power plants than thousands of nuclear bombs. Basically oil pulled the same crap on nuclear it is has on green power and any effort to wean ourselves off their teat. I support nuclear safety, but the lawyered-up headless chicken NIMBY thing annoys the crap out of me.

[nathnathn]

For the titan missile silo incident watch a documentary called “command and control”.
They tried to blame the crew they ordered under protest to ignore the open escape hatch and to cut through the seal on the blast doors to get into the silo.

[I_Am_Transcendentem]

"I like nuclear power it is very cool. Like we humans manipulating these tiny particles is so amazing"
-my little brother