Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Why Oppenheimer Deserves His Own Movie by Veritasium

Original Video @veritasium @

[space_artist_real]

This 1 + 1 > 2 thing is a brilliant way to illustrate the true purpose of engineering: ensuring it *will* work and *will* last, and most vital: will be safe. Meaning it needs to be overbuilt in any case so it will always survive any likely situation.

Generally designing something is kinda 1+1=3 because of safety factors. For a spacecraft engineer is more like 1+1=2.3 because weight is absolutely to be minimized. You don't want to find out exactly the truth for stress profiles in a satellite, you want to find out exactly how much you need to overbuild so you are certain it will make it through launch or it's lifetime of operations. Our representation of reality for structural analysis is not exact, it is more severe and we make sure it will resist to this. It's called conservatism.

I can see how 1+1 is equal 100 for nuclear engineers hahaha. Nuclear is regulated to be insanely overbuilt, it needs to be that safe and it is now. Still I was expecting =10 so you got me there lol

[Nolinlc]

Great video! It’s really nice to see a more specialized person react to this topic. I would recommend reacting to more veritasium videos, he covers many different topics.

[SWLinPHX]

Who the hell looks at pictures or footage of General Groves and thinks, "Hey, we have to get Matt Damon to portray him!"??

[wcdeich]

BTW, Cypher the Cynical Historian looked into it & Oppenheimer was not a communist. He was a "fellow traveler" in that he cared about many of the same issues & did pass information to communists (although, not atomic secrets as it turns out), and he was not a fan what Stalin was doing in Russia.

[jimgraham]

When called, Oppenheimer did the duty asked of him. It was an intensely difficult task.

[nathanpfirman]

When you said it looked like a giant basic Minecraft block I limitedly thought about modded Minecraft and how it looks exactly like somebody built their modded Minecraft nuclear reactor in their cave base in a corner like how most people do it in Minecraft. I'm not even joking. Look up Minecraft modded nuclear reactor for a design that looks very similar.

[swokatsamsiyu]

You are spoiling us rotten with all these nice, long videos, lately. Once again well done, with loads of good info. When it comes to the Xbox rental, I will surely watch this movie. Unfortunately, no one around me shares my nerdy reactory interests, and going to the cinema alone is no fun.

And to see real footage of the actual man himself in your video. What a soft-spoken gentleman he was. It was very clear to see that his invention weighed heavy on his conscience. Thanks for putting that in your video.

[ianhaslam]

Your explanation of '1 + 1 = 100' in the context of extreme risk management with the St Alamo testing has answered so many questions I barely knew I had about the media / pop culture interpretations of these events. It shapes public knowledge more than the actual facts do.

[eypandabear]

If am not mistaken, U-238 fission actually contributes significantly to the yield of modern hydrogen bombs. They surround the bomb with depleted uranium, and the fusion reaction produces the necessary fast neutrons. So they are actually three-stage nuclear bombs.

[LimitlessEntertainment_]

honestly think you should do more Oppenheimer videos since it will attract more viewers to your channel

[brohanson]

Appreciate the commentary adding tidbits of information. Learning so much!

[wcdeich]

Some of the scientists at the Manhattan project did anticipate an arms race & wanted to send a letter to President Truman asking him not to use the bomb, but General Groves would not allow it. Interestingly, they did not anticipate how bad the fallout & radiation sickness would be.

[VECTR]

Excellent reaction! There was some information i didn't know in this. Thanks to T. Folse Nuclear for everything he does to provide us with Clean safe energy =)

[WhyneedanAlias]

Did you watch or do you plan on watching the movie?

[charlesmayberry]

To a programmer 1+1 (dependent of application) will have between 8 and 29 trailing 0s after the decimal depending on the end use of the program, and the data type used (a float has 23 bits for the mantissa, double has 52 bits for the mantissa and a "decimal" (rarely used outside of banking or other systems where extreme precision is required) has 96 bits to represent the mantissa, which amounts to 28-29 places of accuracy after the decimal point....we look at numbers slightly differently.

I also saw someone's comment on Aerospace being 1+1 = 2.3, I used to work in Aero and nuclear manufacturing and their assessment is 100% accurate. Weight was everything in Aero, when we worked on nuclear components weight was never even a thought, what was a thought was precision and containment. (In the context of manufacturing containment is referring to FOD and handling, examples to avoid contaminating things, you had to use new gloves any time you left and returned to the work area, that had to be opened at the work area, you had to use fresh shop rags that you opened in the work area, that contained no dye (the rest of the shop used red shop rags, the nuclear projects used white, and basically use once, and dispose) if you ever touched the parts with bare hands you had to right a containment report, call the client companies, fill out a regulatory report, and get special clearance to wash the parts. the list of do and don't do for that stuff is insanely long, basically "someone breathed the wrong direction, write it up")

[SWLinPHX]

I love listening to people more intelligent than me in certain fields of study!

[Eluderatnight]

In my chem 2 class I had an older edition of the class textbook. My products of Uranium decay in my book was different from the new edition. I showed it to my prof who was a compounding chemist. He couldn't explain why the books werw different. Now I know. Thanks.

[fostercathead]

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One… I become death, the destroyer of worlds.
- Bhagavad Gita

[chf]

I wonder how different our future could have been if we focused more on the energy aspect of nuclear.

[beanieweenietapioca]

As i understand it, the large number of radiation casualties from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were due to direct radiation from the explosion itself, rather than exposure to fission byproducts afterward. Because the first bombs were so inefficient (by nuclear-weapon standards), the lethal radius of gamma and neutron radiation from the reaction was larger than the effective radius of its thermal and kinetic blast effects. So even though it generated very little fallout, there were many thousands of people who received a lethal dose of radiation from the moment of the explosion, but were far enough away not to be killed by the blast. They then died in the days, weeks, and nonths afterward according to the amount of dose they received.

(It is the same process that killed Lewis Slotin. The burst of radiation from the "Demon Core" accident gave him a lethal dose, but didn't contaminate the lab with fission byproducts.)

Subseqent, more advanced weapons have a blast whose lethal radius exceeds that of the direct radiation pulse, so this issue is moot--anyone getting a lethal dose from the initial burst of radiation is going to be destroyed by the flash and the shockwave of the bomb.

Unless of course you get to "neutron bombs"...