Well There's Your Problem | Episode 135: Project Plowshare

It's like 10,000 plowshares when all you need is a sword

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Captions by Pineapples Foster Media Services
Twitter: @annasfoster

Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro and Weather Update
00:02:52 The GD News: Russia Bad, Okay?
00:13:10 The GD News: Stockton "The Crush" Rush
00:31:34 The GD News: Russian Mercs Invade Russia
00:38:56 The GD News: US Railroads Need One Simple Trick
00:45:21 What is a Nuclear?
00:49:34 What is a Nuclear Weapon?
00:53:54 What is a Nuclear Weapon For?
01:00:42 Nuclear Excavation
01:31:51 Safety Concerns
01:36:50 NUKE FRACKING
01:46:57 The "Liam BRB" Digression
01:49:51 The End of Plowshare in General and Nuke Fracking in Particular
01:54:51 The Soviets Did It Better
02:01:01 The Soviets Also Did It Much Worse
02:09:57 Digression: The Butt Story
02:18:16 Safety Third: Huge Magnet, Contractors, and a WTYP Deep Cut (that thankfully was a Fairly Shallow Cut)

[nathaniellindner]

16:55 I’m glad Alice mentioned that the carbon fiber body was literally one step up from “found lying by the side of the road” like the flavor text for the cheap components from Jeb’s Used Spaceships in KSP

[leradoms]

When my great aunt died suddenly in her sleep, the funeral director asked my great uncle if "this sort of thing runs in her family". He replied, "what, dying? Yeah I'm pretty sure most of them do it eventually."

[jaysea]

YAY LIAM! Yay Rocz! Yay Alice! Yay Devon! Yay James! Yay 2.5 hour episode! Edit: Yay Activate Windows Watermark! (thanks y'all)

[Asylumrunner]

Big fan of Devon's militant fact-checking with regard to how fast and how soupifying getting imploded in a submarine would be

[tadferd]

Stockton Rush was crushed by the free hand of physics.

[jbarbeau]

One of the things about Stockton Rush, aside from an obviously fatal case of ‘disruption-brain’ is he DID actually have an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering. Ideally, that would give him an appreciation for the incredibly fine tuned, detail-oriented and data-based thinking required for actual innovation in cutting edge material sciences, as opposed to silicon-valley ‘innovation, ’ where innovation is just skirting regulation, but it seems to have combined with his MBA to give him a stupid sense of self confidence in his gut instinct that every other submarine expert was just wrong about how stupid his idea was. And it got a bunch of people killed, luckily including himself.

[vcostello]

RE: navy hearing the sub implosion: they did not hide it from the coast guard, they did let them know. the coast guard kept doing SAR ops because it wasn't definitive that that's what the sound the navy heard was, and they needed to be out there searching on the off chance the sub was like bobbing around lost on the surface or something.

[GaldirEonai]

47:32 What he was prying open was a beryllium neutron reflector shell. They were smart enough to realize that any test setup where you actually mash two bits of subcritical fissile material together to create criticality was a _very_ spicy kind of experiment and not for everyday tinkering. Instead they relied on these shells to direct escaping neutrons back into the core. The more of the core the shell closed off, the more neutrons got trapped inside and the more spicy the core got. The idea behind the experiment was to find out exactly what happens at the weird, then little-understood threshold between sub-critical and fully critical. So what they did was basically...edge the core.

[angryowlet]

The comments from Devon are like an Easter egg! 😸

Edit: Y'all missed the billionaire soup-like homogenate joke. It was right in front of you!

[Frommerman]

I am once again asking for Alice to be informed that smoking makes the lungs more rigid.

[ernekid]

I've had 5 beers, 2 glasses of wine, its Thursday night, the air is poison outside and I'm wearing sunglasses at night. let's do this

[philliptrzcinski]

Loved James's dogged determination to just push on through everyone else's bullshit. Great guest.

[nothinglikeasongbird]

You know it's gonna be a good WTYP when the first 45 minutes are the goddamn news

[NukaLemonade]

we have determined that nukes are very useful when you need to construct a Very Large, Radioactive Hole

[TheRandomAustralian]

"I guess gets a big laugh out of a room of nuclear physicists" actually Enrico Fermi told Slotin that if he kept doing that he would be dead in a year.

[rawbebaba]

I demand a 14 hour episode on disaster tourism 😅

[dougpowers]

Only the deep sea submarine Titan can reduce five naive adventurers to a soup-like homogenate in under 10 milliseconds.

[napalmholocaust]

On a weed run, I ended-up going to where a home nurse worked so my chick could meet her. The little house was a guy's who had contributed to/ designed and worked on getting the bugs out of the original synchronous implosion required for the detonation of one dropped. He was dying of cancer. We talked for about two hours. Nice guy.

[RbaDader]

My heart goes out to Stockton “The Mush” Rush and his detrítivore friends

[arandomlostsoul]

29:20 Justin pronouncing blåhaj like it rhymes with Hajj is deeply funny to me, a Swede.