My thoughts on the lead-lined coffin thing - it might not be necessary. But, given that coffins are normally wood, the lead/lead lining indicates that the thing that is buried is NOT NORMAL, and proceed with caution.
The reason for Alfred to create the Noble Prize was actually pretty interesting: A newspaper mistakenly published an obituary for Alfred Nobel, instead of his deceased brother. Nobel was shocked to see a newspaper crowing that "the merchant of death is dead" due to his invention of dynamite and gun propellants, and was inspired to start the Nobel Prize so that he would be remembered for something else. It worked.
I'm starting to realize that whether you die, or just leave somebody's life for one reason or another, you'll always be remembered most clearly for the last thing you did. Regardless of anything else you might have done. So, it seems that last impressions are just as important as first impressions, if you care what others think of you when you no longer exist. Frankly, I don't think I would mind at the time. But that's me. =P
The obituary part of the story isn't true. It was simply a story insulting him for causing tons of deaths. It is still true he read a newspaper and was shocked about how people blamed him for so many deaths and whatnot.
I think the green glow depiction of uranium in comics etc. is mainly from uranium-glass, which is not radioluminescent, but is fluorescent green in sunlight. It's also called vaseline glass and depression era glass.
The US, under Edward Teller, also considered widening the Panama Canal with hydrogen bombs, and the Soviets also for a while were contemplating to 'dig' canals, underground caverns and even reroute entire rivers with the use of nuclear bombs. The only time that a nuclear bomb was used not for a test (or in anger) , was when the USSR detonated a small nuclear bomb close to a burning oil / natural gas well, which they were unable to put out. The underground shockwave compressed the oilwell and thus shut off the source of flammable material to the raging fire on the surface. (finishes the video and sees the mention of the Panama canal and the burning oil well. Oops.)
"finishes the video and sees the mention of the Panama canal and the burning oil well. Oops." Yeah... I did that exact same thing, on a different piece of information though.
The problem with using nuclear weapons for excavation like this is contamination of dirt with fission products is exactly what makes fallout so much worse than from say, an airburst at 500 meters. Sure, there's fallout in both situations, but a ground or underground detonation will also kick up a lot of contaminated soil, so the amount and severity of the fallout would be many times worse. I couldn't tell you why they gave up on the idea, I always assumed it was the taboo. But, now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the major contributing factors. If you're interested, Kyle Hill just put out a video explaining how Hiroshima is still a perfectly liveable, and normal city, and this was basically the reason he gave. ua-cam.com/video/e3RRycSmd5A/v-deo.html&ab_channel=KyleHill
I have heard of SLAM before, but only couple of years ago. I periodically have an appetite for learning about the most absurdly horrible things. I remember the reasoning for cancelling being "too provocative" well. Considering all the reasons why this is a bad idea, that is akin to not liking the color it was painted.
I had a book when I was a kid with advanced airplane from the future. My father bought the book for him self in the mid 50s, and the slam missile was there. So it for sure was not only a real project, but a rather well known one.
@@kilppa I kind of think that i took that book and have it in a moving box in my storage building. The book is in Swedish, if its originally written in Swedish or if its translated from English, i don´t know. I kind of think its a European book, becasue there is a wide mix of airplanes and rockets from the western and eastern world.
I think you were referring to "nuclear triad" that includes ground-launched ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs and ALCMs dropped from aircraft. I like your content though, keep going.
Bluejay didnt mention what is my favorite radium product: radium condoms. A brand called Nutex was marketed as a radium infused condom for vitlaity. It was eventually removed from shelves ironically for not containing radium. They were sued out of existence because of false advertising.
"Radium doersn't spread like that." It does if living things get into the coffin, munch on your radioactive corpse, and then leave. Lead is also used to make coffins air tight, which stops water getting in and out, which becomes important once your radioactive corpse decays to the point where it's more liquid than solid. On this occasion, it probably was a good idea.
Alaska native here. I heard of the last one in college. They didn't mention that the government did this to test the radiation effects on population centers, per a freedom of information act article the tribes lawyer dug up.
One of the most interesting, successful (and not mentioned) civilian uses of radiation were plutonium-powered pacemakers. These were not boring old Pu-239 or fission based but came from the radiothermalgenerator program for satellites. About a gram of extra spicy Pu-238 would be used to heat the radiothermal generator which relied on a temperature difference between the cold side (body temp) and the hot side (Pu-238 pellet) and provide the small amount of power to drive the pacemaker. These worked fantastically well; many lasting 30 years. These were invented because lithium batteries hadn't been invented and a pacemaker required open heart surgery every few years. Another interesting use of radiation is spices. Many of these have gone on a belt above a very powerful Co-60 or Cs-137 source and been irradiated to ~10 kGy to kill all bacteria, molds and tiny insects that could be there. Also used for hospital foods in the immunity compromised. Sometimes a boring high energy x-ray source or electron beam is used instead of something that could potentially become an orphaned source.
And just to make it clear, the RTG batteries for pacemakers were actually relatively safe and didn't dose the recipient above background levels of radiation. Many were successfully used for many years, as you mentioned.
I know it was just a slip of the tongue, so a very very minor correction...you were talking about the "nuclear triad" at 2:10 instead of the "trifecta"...though trifecta is still technically correct, of course. LOL
The US version of nuking things for fun and profit was called Plowshares (beating swords into plowshares; old testament...); the USSR was called Nuclear explosions for the national economy. The Russians also used nukes to do seismic exploration for coal and gas, putting out gas well fires (an underground explosion at the right distance bends and squeezes the casing pipe closed) and fracking for natural gas (!) and they actually used their tests wells and pumped it into the gas grid. Nuclear explosions for excavation were not above ground and if done properly would not vent much radiation (similar levels to underground nuclear tests). They created an underground cavity, which collapsed all the way to the surface; but if the depth was too shallow they could vent radioactive dust covered in fission products causing a lot of local, highly radioactive fallout (came down quite quickly and geographically concentrated; very bad). The US also tested creation of underground cavities for gas storage and similar; these tests created a cavity taller than it is wide, and the roof would collapse down covering the most radioactive fission product-infused rocks. See e.g. project Gnome test to see people standing inside such a cavity (although that particular test wasn't for gas storage). There was also the PACER idea, which, although really stupid, is so far still the only realistic way to do nuclear fusion. The idea was to create a cavity and use repeated nuclear explosions with small thermonuclear devices designed to provide as much of their energy from fusion as possible (which still means something like 10% nuclear fission) to heat the steam filled, pressurized cavity in granite bedrock. Energy would then be extracted from the steam. About 2 nukes per day for 2 GWe. The cost was very off-putting, corresponding to a yellow cake price (back then) of $300/lb in a conventional LWR. It was also panned for being "controversial".
For the golfer who's jaw fell off, there's also the Radium Girls who had similar happening because of consuming radium containing watch/instrument face dial paint, because management wouldnt give them a sponge or something to point to brush with and instead instructed everyone to point the brushes with their mouths. TLDR with radium in the same group as calcium, the body puts it away in the same places, and the jaw just happens to be the thing that goes wrong first, but youre now in posession of radioactive bones, so big RIP to bone marrow.
You can still buy "negative ion producing" wristbands, pens, stickers, even bed sheets, which are impregnated with thorium powder. "Anti-5G" stickers too. The "self-heating" face masks or bands for your back or knees that market themselves with "tourmaline" often use varietes with fairly high concentrations of U-238 and Th-232. There was some movement to block import of radioactive "health" products to the US, but success rate is fairly low.
It's a fair point. The idea of making not just the targeted cities unliveable, on the short term, you could make it the whole country. Even for them that was too much. They didn't want a weapon like that used against them, and building one would force the Russians to build their own. So they never even built a prototype of the weapon.
Ngl the nuclear powered nuclear bomber would technically be the most destructive planetary nuclear weapon, planetary as in something that would work really well in destroying things on our planet, but not as good in space.
I read a web article about Project PLUTO (7?) years ago. Since then it has remained my go to example for the psychopathic madness that was Cold War weapons R&D. Though the article said that the final phase would just be flying grid patterns over the USSR until the fuel ran out and then it would plow with into the ground at high speed whatever was left into the reactor. As for the Tzar, I have repeatedly heard that thing was detonated at half yield. Again, not sure if true, but if so, the bomb is a lot less inefficient if used at full power. I had heard of not only PLUTO, but Project Plowshare, though the radium water, radium jockstrap, and nuking a a second Suez Canal were new when I first watched this.
Its not the radium that glows green. Its was a radio-Illuminati pigment that was mixed with radium (typically copper-zink-sulfide) that converted the alfa decay of radium into light. This was used everywhere in the 1920 and 1930. During the war it was heavily used for displays like speedometer and clocks in aircraft's and tanks What happen was that this was typically applied with very narrow pencils of late teen girls in large workshops that had a tendency to lick the brush to get a very sharp edge. Yea, the brush with radium on. This is where radiation started to get a bad rep, becasue loads of those girls got cancer.
Another great video. You're made some major improvements since your first videos. While I didn't know about Project Pluto, I actually did know about the various radioactive products through my reading. The one that blew me away, and horrified me at the same time, is the Radiencrinator, complete with jockstrap. The other one would be the radioactive sand that was advertised for use in children's sandboxes due to it being so hygienic. Utter madness. I have another mind boggling one for you. Did you know that in the 50s, the US Airforce worked to develop a nuclear reactor powered bomber? As in to drive the engines? They actually miniaturised one enough to make it fit into the midsection of a highly customised plane called the NB-36H. The reactor hung(!) from a hook directly over the bomb bay doors, so that in case of an emergency they could jettison it. On September 17, 1955, a nuclear reactor went airborne for the first time ever in history. It flew a total of 47 times.
@@tfolsenuclear What will boggle your mind even more is that the nuclear bomber flew a pre-planned route with a C-97 accompanying it having a detachment of specially trained Marines on board that would parachute in the moment the reactor were jettisoned, or the plane crashed. It would be their very dangerous task to set up a parameter around the dropped, probably unshielded, and more than lethally radioactive reactor. I can only imagine how they would go about actually retrieving it. Another plane accompanying the nuclear bomber was a B-50 that tagged along to measure the radioactivity issuing forth from the plane as it flew on nuclear power. The radiation field was so intense that the B-50 crew could reliably estimate their distance from the NB-36H by the readings on their instruments. As far as I have been able to find, no reactor was ever jettisoned. Thank God for small mercies...
I believe Project Pluto arose because an unmanned nuclear powered cruise missile solved a lot of the problems with the concept of a manned nuclear powered bomber while offering the same capabilities.
The end goal was to make the thing fly for months on end without landing, but they couldn't get the power to weight ratio to make it happen, it needed a bunch of regular engines to make up the difference. The russians were so damn scared of the idea and thought the US had it working, that they rushed making their own, which *did* work, but they had to ditch all of the shielding to make it fly, so yeah, that didn't work out too well for them.
The Tsar bomba was overcompensation for the Russians inability to aim. Hardened targets require a very close hit and once the Americans got that down they stopped making multi-megaton bombs and just made lots of ~100-400 kT miniaturized devices for MIRV warheads. They could have doubled the yield by having a uranium casing (natural or depleted) as fast neutrons have a reasonable chance of fissioning U-238. This would have raised the fraction of energy provided by fission from ~3% to ~50% and massively increased the amount of fallout (but it still wouldn't have been local, so nobody would have been exposed to massive doses, just small doses and globally as it eventually comes down).
The reason you read about people's jaws melting off because of radium, is because it looks alot like calcium to the body, and gets put into your bones.
I heard of project Pluto before, but only because I wanted to look up something else (I still don't remember what) and ended up going down a rabbit hole. I didn't even remember project Pluto was a thing until watching the original video, since it's been years since I first stumbled across it.
It's kind of nuts to think they tested the engines and they worked... If development continued it would have been built since the rest of it would have been comparatively easy to make...
I've heard of the better part of these, love the crazy project stuff. The Russians DID dig a giant pond, worked spectacular, contamination was WAY more than predicted and to this day, nobody can get near it.
Back in 1971, I was corresponding with the AEC about project Plowshare. It was a social studies assignment in High School. Nuclear ram-jets and SNAP reactors was the big thing back then, Plowshare was falling from favor. I got one letter [lost, sigh] from Dixie Lee Ray herself..."stay in school, study Math and Chemistry!"
I'd heard of SLAM before. The only saving grace with that monstrosity is that it would have only been launched in a nuclear strike scenario. And let's be honest, in that scenario everything has gone to heck anyway.
Cruise missiles are supersonic too and don't need the top of the line alloys to make them survive mach 3 velocities while sea skimming. The p800, kh-31, etc. all are supersonic ramjet powered cruise missiles and don't need exotic materials (unlike scramjet engines which need to sustain ~3000°C for many minutes).
At 24:40 that's the Sedan Crater from the Sedan test, part of project plowshare. After it cooled off for a couple years, they actually had the Apollo astronauts train there b/c it resembled a moon crater. It's a niche use, but IMO still counts as a peaceful nuclear bomb project that came to fruition
23:05 yeah, and it's a desert so that would be alot of contaminated sand, sand which manages to blow and get everywhere in large quantities very rapidly
I was at a history panel once where the speaker was talking about Radithor and he says, "And where was the FDA during all this? Why the FDA was making sure that your Radithor contained exactly as much radium as it said it did! Gotta enforce truth in advertising!"
Fun trivia: Soviets used "nuclear excavation" not only to extinguish gas field fires several times, but they actually DID used it to dig canals (Pechora-Kolva canal in 1971), to excavate cavities for gas storage facilities, and as "ping" to locate oil and gas reserves in Siberia.
Few people were exposed to large doses from these patent cures; mainly because radium was extremely expensive, with a gram or so per ton of high grade uraninite ore. Only rich people could afford a directly hazardous exposure. The people who were exposed to monstrous doses were the radium girls; watch-hand and dial painters who sharpened the tips of their radium-paint-infused brushes with their mouth as they painted dials all day. Committed lifetime doses were up to a few thousand Sv (!!!!!) in the worst exposed; this caused a very particular cancer that is otherwise rare (bone sarcoma, as radium looks like the vital element calcium to your body and it is so kind as to sequester it in your bones). In those exposed to committed doses of less than 60 Sv no increase in bone sarcoma or other ill effects were observed, pretty much invalidating the LNT hypothesis; which is just a useful regulatory fiction that stands in place of figuring out what doses at low dose rates actually do in the human body.
Dynamite was a peaceful invention because before that most people used Nitro Glycerin which likes to explode if you look at it too long. Dynamite was originally nitro glycerin poured into a tube filled with absorbant material which stopped the liquid from being able to slosh and thus stopped it from exploding every time your wagon hit a pebble which did wonders for Mining Moral.
Peaceful and safety-minded intentions at least. But naturally it turned out that armies were also very interested in explosives that wouldn't blow up their own men when they looked at it funny.
There was also the plan in the 1960s to use some kind of a 4-digit number of nuclear bombs to alter the ocean currents on the Atlantic side of north America, in order to get the warm current to flow further north along the coast, in order to warm up the climate of north America, so that more of the coastline could enjoy the apparently lucrative climate of Florida. This went as far as testing that proved that using several bombs in an ocean current, can in fact alter the current for a few days, after which, the current returned to normal.
17:00 well there's plenty of lead in the world and its not exactly expensive...so might as well, my only concern is how many people are getting lead poisoning from water coming into contact with it.
“It’s not often you hear about Native villages getting their way.” Native ALASKANS (a subset of Native Americans) actually SUED the US Government over the government stealing the land they used for hunting and subsistence and the place they, you know, LIVED, which resulted in ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), which settled the lawsuit. In short, the villages got most of what they wanted, and the US Government was put to task for their unlawful treatment of the native population… sort of. That’s way better than any other Native American peoples had ever done up to that point to get the same amount of respect the white (read: IMMIGRANT) Americans got from the government, so despite it being a half-measure at best it was a landmark victory in comparison to something like The Trail of Tears. Native Alaskans are just built different IMHO.
About Project SLAM I had heard that it was not supposed to blow up after the last bomb but rather continue to fly around at supersonic speeds at low altitude for Years/Decades spewing radiation/byproducts and sonic booming anyone still alive as a terror weapon. ☮
One part of PLOWSHARES id heard of is PACER. The project calls for detonating nuclear bombs in a water filled underground chamber to produce steam. When you need electricity, just vent some steam though turbines. When you need more steam, detonate another bomb.
Nuking for gas and oil isn’t as far fetch as it seems. There are deposits far below the surface that are under great pressure but have very strong and thick basalt caps. If you assplode the cap all the oil will push itself to the surface in a very thick sludge which you can then displace with water to extract (aka fracking).
1:30 that's because having things go out of control is easier than to control them. Besides, nobody cared about peaceful applications, it was always weapons first. It's also why they went with the uranium fueled and plutonium fueled pressure water reactors. Because uranium fueled reactors produce plutonium, which is easier to make bombs with and which is easier to make reactors with that fit onto something mobile, like a ship or a submarine.
I have heard of Plowshare. We were shown the crater of the test at the Nevada test site. Best hazmat WMD class I have ever been at. I did read about that bizzaro nuke powered missile. From I read it never got past the planning stage.
I had heard of the problems of radium before, you should look up the videos about the radium girls. They were girls hired to paint on clock hands for military planes. To get the best thin tip on the brush they were told to lick the brush before using it. This made many of these girls die horribly. It's am interesting story but also horrifying.
Especially since management knew about how dangerous the radium was (at least by the end) and still told them to lick the brushes. They then stalled the court proceeding so there would be fewer girls left alive so when they lost they didn't have to pay as much.
Radon natural occurs pretty much everywhere, slowly rising from the ground. Luckily, waterproofing helps block most of it, and in locations with higher natural radon special metal sandwich ones are used. Can't speak about the US, but this are in European building code.
The thing with the canal dug by nukes is even worse considering that in a desert, all that contaminated debris and sand could get kicked up by wind in a sandstorm and just spread uncontrollably in any/every direction.
Heard about Project Pluto and the SLAM 15-20 years ago. They had to assemble the 500 megawatt reactor nicknamed "Tory" in Jackass Flats at the Nevada Test Site complex from original Livermore, Calif. As you pointed out it was intensely radioactive so it had its own dedicated fully automated railroad to move the reactor back and forth between its static test stand and the disassembly building. When they did test the engine, and yes they did. They forced One ton of air per second over 14 million one inch steel balls in four steel tanks at 1,350 degrees F. threw the Tory IIA-I on May 14, 1961 and it worked for a few seconds of test. I think 1964 the Lighter Tory-II-C ran for Five minutes and produced 513 Megawatts, around 35,000 pounds of thrust. One of the major concerns was that it would be as dangerous to allies just flying around as it was to the enemy. One of my hobbies is radiological antiquing and finding all that fun stuff. You know your in for a fun time when your Geiger counter goes off in the parking lot. Then while trying to find the source starting at the top of a old repurposed building made of reinforced concrete finding a source that's blowing threw three floors of this stuff and the floor are we estimated around at least 6 inches thick. Turns out it was a 3ft across old nautical compass where all the Radium dissolved in solution making the water silvery. The brass sides containing most of it, but directly above it just a dance party of Geiger sounds. Best we could figure out with the decay of Radium there is a by product of very little Gamma and that's what was punching threw everything. That's only our best guess as we only know enough to tell people what they got so they can put it behind some leaded glass to keep themselves safe. Low intensity over time isn't great! We're looking at you Three time lung cancer man standing all day in front of a wall of radium clocks, Or lady who's next to a MASSIVE solid chunk of uranium glass candy? dish that's popin out a x-ray dose a second. Being next to that all day almost every day...not great!
Project Pluto aka the flying crowbar is at the top of a lot of lists of crazy cold war weapons projects that were fortunately scrapped. Though it did get frighteningly close to actually getting built.
The real scary part is it technically wasn't scrapped... they just put it on the backburner as a contingency plan contingent on the Russians building something similar... my favorite pentagon contingency plan though is CONOP 8888 while it was originally wrote up by juniors as a training exercise* nothing gets put in the pentagon without approval from numerous people and as it says on the first page "THIS IS NOT A JOKE"... so multiple people Really thought we needed this plan lol
You know, I love dental x-rays, I love x-rays in general because I don't get to see what my insides look like very often so I think it's neat, but being able to get the same amount of absorbed radiation as a year of cuddling IN JUST 3 XRAYS!? DAAAAMN GOODBYE LONELINESS!
On the FDA existing and not caring... The FDA was established in the late 19th century. However, caring about medicines is much more a post-Thalidomide thing.
A lot of the SLAMs non-nuclear tech, like it's ground-following radar, went into the conventional cruise missiles of the day, and beyond, like the Tomahawk. So, while it itself wasn't practical for anything short of WWIII (and the closest humans ever came to making a legit 40K weapon), it produced some much more useful military hardware down the line.
Radon-emitting 'blue concrete' was/is a big issue in Sweden, since it was used in a LOT of construction from the 20's to the mid 70's. The stuff would lead to the air in people's homes having radon concentrations delivering 1000Bq/m3 of air - somewhere between 100-500 times background. And of course with radon being an alpha emitter, and the 'exposed surface' being specifically the inside of the lungs I think that 20x multiplier for alpha 'if internal' you've mentioned is probably in effect here. I can't help but wonder if the popularity of smoking throughout most of the 20th century 'masked' the amount of lung cancer actually caused by radon in sweden.
Its worth saying that Project plowshare did about 30 nuclear test project (they used a simular amount of non nuclear test programs). but it wasn´t like they made just one nuclear explosion per test.. no no no. For example Operation Grommet, that was one of the projects, did 34 nuclear explosions in just that project. The main reason for specifcally operation Grommet was to reduce the fallout of the blast. There was no blast even close to 2MT, most of them was fairly small in the single to low double digit kT yeald. And it wasn´t like they was unaware of radiation. Those test was actually carried on quite late (even as late as the 70s) and there was quite a lot of ways to mitigate the radiation. This was people that very much know what they was doing.
1:30 There is a reason that fission was used as a weapon before it was used as power, and its not what most people believe. The reason is the depression in the 30s. After a few conventions in the early 1920 there was a team set up to build a nuclear reactor out of Belgium. But it so happen that it was not just viable, they did make some progress but a few of the team moved over to the US where they eventually got financing in 1929 to make the first demonstration reactor. Its worth saying that nobody made a true fission reactor at this point, but the theory was quite solid, and the understanding of the subject was quite well known. It happen so that just weeks after they gathered the capital, the capital did no longer exist. The stock-market crash happened. The team was pestering the government to build a reactor during the 1930 but didn´t get any luck. It wasn´t until after the war stared (but prior to USA joining it) that ended up in the reactor CP1 that was actually started construction prior to the Manhattan project and it was retroactively resigned to the Manhattan project. This become the backup plan with a plutonium bomb in steed of the uranium bomb that was the primary one. Anyway, the CP was originally designed as a power reactor, but was hastaly adopted to a plutonium breader.
So legitimate question. If you ingest radium the alpha particles won’t leave your body because it won’t go through organs and skin but what happens when you poop it out?
Good grief. I will be up all night....thanks for the great info. And thanks for trying to calm my terror!! Nobody has yet....cuz it's always a human that screws everything up....
SLAM was thought to be built out of stainless steel. No need to use low weight materials like titanium when you have that much power. It was planned to be launched using conventional rocket boosters to a high altitude trajectory and start up its nuclear ramjet engine over the Pacific ocean. It was never built because it was found to be rather hard to test the missile... And because bombers became more capable of penetrating Soviet air defences. Effectively it was both overtaken by technology in other areas AND by saner minds prevailing. Tsar Bomba was intended to be launched using the N1 rocket, which was developed as an ICBM as well as a moon rocket. The main reason it was never put into production was that the N1 failed, not because the Soviets didn't want to build it. It'd basically perform the same function later taken up by the somewhat (20 or so MT) SS-18Mod3, targeting Cheyenne Mountain and other very deep, extremely heavily fortified, bunkers. The Negev canal never was created, but the Soviets dug several lakes using nuclear weapons along the path they thought to use to create a canal through Kazakhstan for diverting more water to their cotton fields. These lakes are still seriously radioactive 60 years later. The US decided to not go ahead with similar projects because of the concerns of fallout (literally). The initial idea during the planning of these projects was that the radioactive waste would be buried deep under ground. The Soviet experiments showed this wasn't correct. Mind that the Russians actually tested a nuclear powered cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead just a few years ago. It didn't go well. The thing worked, for a while, until it crashed into the arctic ocean. Whether it will ever be fielded is anybody's guess, but I'd not be surprised if Moscow is planning to. They're also fielding a nuclear powered nuclear tipped torpedo, can effectively be launched hundreds of miles offshore, sneak into a river estuary to an inland port city, and bury itself in the mud at the river bottom awaiting a remote command to activate and blow up the entire city with a ground burst. I've heard of most of these ideas, and more. The 1950s especially were insane with the nuclear health craze in the US. As to project plowshare, I seriously doubt the AEC and Pentagon ever took it seriously. All the proposals and subscale experiments under it seem to be designed to show non-feasibility from the outset. It was likely more a PR tool to show the AEC having peaceful uses of nuclear power in mind than anything else.
Project Pluto is mentioned in "The Silent War" by John P. Craven, Chief Scientist of the US Navy in the 1960s. This is a memoir rather than a history, and details are scant. In discussing the initial stages of the Polaris program, Craven mentions that Edward Teller (best known for developing the US hydrogen bomb, and being director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) suggested this type of weapon. Reportedly one of Teller's favorite statements was "there will be a nuclear war within five years, and we must prepare for it." Somewhere I read a suggested scenario was to threaten Cuba by having a Pluto orbit the nation for several days or weeks. I was unaware that development was pursued for seven years. The late 50s and early 60s were the heyday of strange military ideas, many of them involving nuclear weapons. So yes, Pluto was not purely a propaganda concept, but was proposed by one of the most senior members of the nuclear weapons establishment and was worked on for several years. Related to this, I think, are the proposals for nuclear rockets to Mars of the same vintage. These would eject fission products out the back as a euphemistically named "ion drive". To avoid ludicrous radiation exposure, conventional rockets would be used to boost the nuclear rocket outside the atmosphere before starting it.
Didnt Russia test an equivalent to SLAM some years back? Googling seems to indicate 9M730 Burevestnik as the model/name, one test flight in 2017 and a related nuclear accident in Nyonoksa in 2019...
What about Skyfall? They spoke of it the other day. Just a few days ago. Russia's new missile that's nuclear powered. Saying how they can now deploy it. So who knows.
I read about SLAMer in an article in Air and Space magazine back in the 90s…it was interesting but appalling at the same time…what if guidance fails? The SNARK missile failed numerous tests which came around the same time…and didn’t leak actinides and neuron radiation everywhere it went…yeah glad they decided to develop more reasonable cruise missiles. The Russians are now trying to build one of these…sigh…🤦♂️
Speaking of nuclear spacecraft drives, There is one even crazier than project Orion. It's called the Nuclear Salt-Water Rocket engine or NSWRE. Probably the most insane idea for an engine i've ever seen, but that said if it could be made to work it would open up the whole solar system to us. Pros, you get both raw thrust like a normal rocket engine and very good efficiency like an ion drive. Cons The fuel would be very nasty and there would have to be a whole host of procedures and regulations around handling it, storing it etc. The engine's exhaust would also be so radioactive it have to be for space only.
22:32 I did some reading and the percentages of casualties to the immediate blast vs. the radiation is unknown due to poor record keeping during the war. However, it is apparently very likely that tens of thousands died after the initial blast killed at least 70,000 in Hiroshima specifically. By December '45 the number was estimated to be up to 140,000. The Japanese government only confirmed about 1% of survivors having health issues related to radiation. The effects of radiation on people were still unknown, so that data isn't very reliable to say the least. What's nuts to think about is that there were roughly 200 people that survived *both* bombings.
The Nobel thing isn't irony at all. It was entirely intentional, and the one followed directly from the other. First, the video is _completely wrong_ in claiming that Alfred Nobel was a pacifist. *He was actually exactly the opposite.* Nobel actually spent most of his life (and amassed a substantial amount of money) *being an arms manufacturer* (that is, _deliberately_ making weapons to kill people), and making inventions, many of which were related to military explosives. He also invented several of the explosives which were used in or precursors to military weapons of the time (not just dynamite). It wasn't until he happened to read a premature obituary for himself which had been mistakenly published (entitled "The Merchant of Death Is Dead") that he began to worry about how he would actually be remembered after he was gone. It was because of this that he eventually updated his own will to specify that the fortune he had amassed (as an arms manufacturer and weapon inventor) should be used to fund prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in various categories, and one of the categories he specifically mentioned was "peace", including instructions on how the winners should be chosen, etc. So Alfred Nobel deliberately created the Nobel Peace Prize (and other prizes) _specifically because_ he had previously spent a large portion of his life facilitating war, and did not want that to be his only legacy after he was gone.
I once heard the SLAM discussed as "it would rip the roof off your house, permanently deafen you and give your whole family a permanent orange afro.'. Obviously not strictly accurate, but descriptive and colorful...
I have heard of project pluto before. One thing to note is it was intended to be launched from the US mainland most likely in a counter launch. So the usual M.A.D if we get nuked screw the rest of the world. There is a concern if your exposed to a lethal dose of radiation internally, your sweat. Its why if you end up dying of radiation poisoning in hospital your most likely being treated in what looks similar to a quarantine room with all the bedding’s/etc being disposed off instead of cleaned. The one project i wish they put more work into was the Orion Drive. Fun fact the Tsar Bomba was only detonated at half planned yield out of concerns of the effects of the blast/shockwave. Which said shockwave happened to go around the globe multiple times. As well as break windows as far as Moscow Ultimately leaving legitimate concerns that they were right to be concerned considering the collateral damage causes by it being detonated at half yield.
I did know about SLAM and Project Pluto. Particularly the idea of an open reactor flying over a country, even before the bombs go off, making an entire country uninhabitable at least for a short term, not just the "target" was too much. Even if the device was never tested, just the fact that we built one would cause the Soviets to feel they would have to build one but worse. And no one wanted to escalate the conflict in that direction. Even for people ready to blow up the world, this was too abhorrent.
The SLAM would be perfect for digging the canal! It drops nukes in a straight line, and everything below being contaminated doesn't matter if you're going to drop nukes there anyways. And they are so fast, the surrounding nations won't even know something happened! I see absolutely zero downsides in that
You should check out the nuclear jet engines that were actually tested in Area 51. Well, the area around it, I think. Anyway, they built a nuclear bomber with the idea it could stay in flight indefinitely with only the need to land for resupplying food for the pilots. They never tested it under power of the nuclear jet engines but as I understand it they did run the reactor while airborne and all signs showed it would have worked. However, it was decided that ICBMs were basically the way to go and having perpetually airborne bombers was unnecessary and it got scrapped. Which is the actual big secret of Area 51; that's where they buried the waste related to that project. In addition to it being a radioactive hazard for a long time it related to an extremely top secret project, which explains the overabundance of security through the decades. The project is declassified now, but nobody really bothers to check so they still say it's aliens and stuff. Or they say the declassified project is just a cover-up, but honestly it seems a pretty believable explanation to me. Edit: To answer your question at 9:08, no, I had not heard of this one before. The bomber I mentioned above was turbojet, not ramjet, and while the reactor did provide heat to the engine if I recall correctly it was via molten salts which would then be cooled by the air passing over them and be circulated back to cool the reactor. This meant less scattering of radiation. Takeoff and landing were to be done under conventional fuel to avoid scattering radiation. Tho it added a lot of extra weight the cockpit was encased in lead.
Not far from where I live in western Colorado they did actually test using nukes to extract gas and oil. It was called Project Rulison and took place in 1969. It actually worked, but expect the product was too radioactive to use.
I had actually heard of Project Pluto, came across it somewhere on the internet. See also Project Orion, from the same time period: The idea was to propel a spacecraft by throwing a series of nuclear bombs out the back and riding the shockwave. Must have been a good time for mad scientists :)
The Americans got far enough along that they replaced one engine on as a strategic bomber with a reactor powered turbojet. It was of course shielded and unlike SLAM it used a heat exchanger. It passed proof of concept but was deemed impractical for a maned aircraft. Back in 2018 one of the sky fall prototypes was being recovered from the bottom of the ocean when a fuel rod shifted on the reactor and irradiated 5 or 6 technicians. I think it was fatal for a couple of them.
I've heard of project Pluto quite a while ago. If memory serves, it was finally cancelled when they couldn't figure out a safe way to actually test the vehicle.
USSR actually used the series of underground nuclear explosions for seismic tomography in search of mineral deposits and overall research of Earth's crust geostructure. Some detonations was made in densely populated parts of the USSR.
14:05 is a bad image to stop at for this, as that is almost guaranteed to be URANIUM glass, and you mention the green glow doesn't come from uranium, it actually does when you're talking about a uranium oxide being added to glass. In paint it is usually either Radium, or today commonly Tritium.
Could someone sweat out certain radioactive materials after consuming enough? I'm not sure how big of an issue this would be, but if somebody consumed high doses of radium on a daily basis before going to the gym, I could imagine them leaving some radioactive sweat on the exercise equipment.
americans: lets bomb it others: heeell naw americans : uhm we did that before... but not nuclear others: oh holy nuclear batbomb heeeeell naw americans: "ok ... its too expensive anyways, and those natives are not glowin for that idea anyways" others: ok lol
The scariest part of this whole fricken project is it worked, like if we didn't get ICBM equipped submarines we would have had these instead. These were going to be the third prong in our nuclear trident, bombers bunkers and these creations of hell. Ballistic missile submarines have the advantage of not scaring the crap out of the people it is meant to protect.
My dad is a military history buff, and he told me a little about the nuclear bomber concept (and the prototype nuclear-powered tank) and why the navy is the only branch to embrace nuclear power.
You really need to visit the National Atomic weapons testing museum. They have all these stories mentioned on exhibit plus more. Two prototype nuclear aircraft engines are on display at the Argonne National laboratory in Idaho.
The worst combination of words I came across unexpectedly was "unguided air-to-air nuclear missile". Though the idea had some logic behind it at the time. Intercontinental bombers with nuclear bombs were already well established, but missiles could not yet track targets and steer themselves into it. So the plan was that when you see a group of Soviet nuclear bombers approach, you send up one interceptor plane, fire the missile in the general direction, and set the timer so it would explode once it had covered the estimated distance to the bombers. Then the nuclear explosion would be so big that it would destroy any bombers and escort fighters in a mile around it. To shot down planes with a nuclear missile, you don't have to be able to actually hit them.
My thoughts on the lead-lined coffin thing - it might not be necessary. But, given that coffins are normally wood, the lead/lead lining indicates that the thing that is buried is NOT NORMAL, and proceed with caution.
Just like the victims of the sl-1 reactor disaster
That's a good point.
And also as the body decays it stops radium leaching into the soil...
Its pretty metal to be buried in a poison metal. Sign me up
Romans used lead lined coffins, often inside a stone sarcophagus.
Clearly they knew of the dangers of radiation.
The reason for Alfred to create the Noble Prize was actually pretty interesting: A newspaper mistakenly published an obituary for Alfred Nobel, instead of his deceased brother. Nobel was shocked to see a newspaper crowing that "the merchant of death is dead" due to his invention of dynamite and gun propellants, and was inspired to start the Nobel Prize so that he would be remembered for something else. It worked.
I'm starting to realize that whether you die, or just leave somebody's life for one reason or another, you'll always be remembered most clearly for the last thing you did. Regardless of anything else you might have done. So, it seems that last impressions are just as important as first impressions, if you care what others think of you when you no longer exist. Frankly, I don't think I would mind at the time. But that's me. =P
@@VoidHaloI mean Dahmer is remembered for eating people, not his time in jail.
@@tsmitz8184Oh, Dahmer, isn’t that the guy who went to jail. No idea why though.
that’s the story at least.
stories that poetic are usually appocrifol
The obituary part of the story isn't true. It was simply a story insulting him for causing tons of deaths. It is still true he read a newspaper and was shocked about how people blamed him for so many deaths and whatnot.
I think the green glow depiction of uranium in comics etc. is mainly from uranium-glass, which is not radioluminescent, but is fluorescent green in sunlight. It's also called vaseline glass and depression era glass.
The US, under Edward Teller, also considered widening the Panama Canal with hydrogen bombs, and the Soviets also for a while were contemplating to 'dig' canals, underground caverns and even reroute entire rivers with the use of nuclear bombs.
The only time that a nuclear bomb was used not for a test (or in anger) , was when the USSR detonated a small nuclear bomb close to a burning oil / natural gas well, which they were unable to put out. The underground shockwave compressed the oilwell and thus shut off the source of flammable material to the raging fire on the surface. (finishes the video and sees the mention of the Panama canal and the burning oil well. Oops.)
We weren't the only ones even the British had the grand idea to make giant underground storage with nukes.
"finishes the video and sees the mention of the Panama canal and the burning oil well. Oops." Yeah... I did that exact same thing, on a different piece of information though.
The problem with using nuclear weapons for excavation like this is contamination of dirt with fission products is exactly what makes fallout so much worse than from say, an airburst at 500 meters. Sure, there's fallout in both situations, but a ground or underground detonation will also kick up a lot of contaminated soil, so the amount and severity of the fallout would be many times worse. I couldn't tell you why they gave up on the idea, I always assumed it was the taboo. But, now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the major contributing factors.
If you're interested, Kyle Hill just put out a video explaining how Hiroshima is still a perfectly liveable, and normal city, and this was basically the reason he gave. ua-cam.com/video/e3RRycSmd5A/v-deo.html&ab_channel=KyleHill
My Father drove for Dr. Teller .
Teller was also responsible for the idea of Gnomon and Sundial, a supposed 10 GIGATON nuclear device.
I have heard of SLAM before, but only couple of years ago. I periodically have an appetite for learning about the most absurdly horrible things. I remember the reasoning for cancelling being "too provocative" well. Considering all the reasons why this is a bad idea, that is akin to not liking the color it was painted.
I had a book when I was a kid with advanced airplane from the future. My father bought the book for him self in the mid 50s, and the slam missile was there. So it for sure was not only a real project, but a rather well known one.
@@matsv201 Could you track down what that book was? It sounds so weird to have a theoretical weapon in a book like that.
I feel like it'd be a mean ass missile for the modern age if they just got rid of the nuclear shit lol
@@matsv201 Do you know the name of the book?
@@kilppa I kind of think that i took that book and have it in a moving box in my storage building.
The book is in Swedish, if its originally written in Swedish or if its translated from English, i don´t know. I kind of think its a European book, becasue there is a wide mix of airplanes and rockets from the western and eastern world.
I think you were referring to "nuclear triad" that includes ground-launched ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs and ALCMs dropped from aircraft. I like your content though, keep going.
I was, thanks for the clarification!
15:41 “it’ll cure the living part” absolutely killed me 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Ig it worked then
HEALED! 🖐
Bluejay didnt mention what is my favorite radium product: radium condoms. A brand called Nutex was marketed as a radium infused condom for vitlaity. It was eventually removed from shelves ironically for not containing radium. They were sued out of existence because of false advertising.
You know its a good day when T Folse uploads
"Radium doersn't spread like that."
It does if living things get into the coffin, munch on your radioactive corpse, and then leave. Lead is also used to make coffins air tight, which stops water getting in and out, which becomes important once your radioactive corpse decays to the point where it's more liquid than solid.
On this occasion, it probably was a good idea.
Alaska native here. I heard of the last one in college. They didn't mention that the government did this to test the radiation effects on population centers, per a freedom of information act article the tribes lawyer dug up.
One of the most interesting, successful (and not mentioned) civilian uses of radiation were plutonium-powered pacemakers. These were not boring old Pu-239 or fission based but came from the radiothermalgenerator program for satellites. About a gram of extra spicy Pu-238 would be used to heat the radiothermal generator which relied on a temperature difference between the cold side (body temp) and the hot side (Pu-238 pellet) and provide the small amount of power to drive the pacemaker. These worked fantastically well; many lasting 30 years. These were invented because lithium batteries hadn't been invented and a pacemaker required open heart surgery every few years.
Another interesting use of radiation is spices. Many of these have gone on a belt above a very powerful Co-60 or Cs-137 source and been irradiated to ~10 kGy to kill all bacteria, molds and tiny insects that could be there. Also used for hospital foods in the immunity compromised. Sometimes a boring high energy x-ray source or electron beam is used instead of something that could potentially become an orphaned source.
And just to make it clear, the RTG batteries for pacemakers were actually relatively safe and didn't dose the recipient above background levels of radiation. Many were successfully used for many years, as you mentioned.
I know it was just a slip of the tongue, so a very very minor correction...you were talking about the "nuclear triad" at 2:10 instead of the "trifecta"...though trifecta is still technically correct, of course. LOL
Haha, thanks for the clarification!
Radium was a marketing name. Kind of like you'd have a platinum credit card or membership card; back then you'd have a radium membership card.
The US version of nuking things for fun and profit was called Plowshares (beating swords into plowshares; old testament...); the USSR was called Nuclear explosions for the national economy. The Russians also used nukes to do seismic exploration for coal and gas, putting out gas well fires (an underground explosion at the right distance bends and squeezes the casing pipe closed) and fracking for natural gas (!) and they actually used their tests wells and pumped it into the gas grid. Nuclear explosions for excavation were not above ground and if done properly would not vent much radiation (similar levels to underground nuclear tests). They created an underground cavity, which collapsed all the way to the surface; but if the depth was too shallow they could vent radioactive dust covered in fission products causing a lot of local, highly radioactive fallout (came down quite quickly and geographically concentrated; very bad). The US also tested creation of underground cavities for gas storage and similar; these tests created a cavity taller than it is wide, and the roof would collapse down covering the most radioactive fission product-infused rocks. See e.g. project Gnome test to see people standing inside such a cavity (although that particular test wasn't for gas storage).
There was also the PACER idea, which, although really stupid, is so far still the only realistic way to do nuclear fusion. The idea was to create a cavity and use repeated nuclear explosions with small thermonuclear devices designed to provide as much of their energy from fusion as possible (which still means something like 10% nuclear fission) to heat the steam filled, pressurized cavity in granite bedrock. Energy would then be extracted from the steam. About 2 nukes per day for 2 GWe. The cost was very off-putting, corresponding to a yellow cake price (back then) of $300/lb in a conventional LWR. It was also panned for being "controversial".
For the golfer who's jaw fell off, there's also the Radium Girls who had similar happening because of consuming radium containing watch/instrument face dial paint, because management wouldnt give them a sponge or something to point to brush with and instead instructed everyone to point the brushes with their mouths. TLDR with radium in the same group as calcium, the body puts it away in the same places, and the jaw just happens to be the thing that goes wrong first, but youre now in posession of radioactive bones, so big RIP to bone marrow.
Congrats on the 10k subscribers! 🎉
Thank you!!
Yeah nuclear jockstrap may be the most terrifying radium product I've heard of, except of course radium suppositories.
You can still buy "negative ion producing" wristbands, pens, stickers, even bed sheets, which are impregnated with thorium powder. "Anti-5G" stickers too.
The "self-heating" face masks or bands for your back or knees that market themselves with "tourmaline" often use varietes with fairly high concentrations of U-238 and Th-232.
There was some movement to block import of radioactive "health" products to the US, but success rate is fairly low.
To be fair if you’re shooting off nuclear missiles radiation hitting the average civilian is one of the least of your concerns for now.
It's a fair point. The idea of making not just the targeted cities unliveable, on the short term, you could make it the whole country. Even for them that was too much. They didn't want a weapon like that used against them, and building one would force the Russians to build their own. So they never even built a prototype of the weapon.
Ngl the nuclear powered nuclear bomber would technically be the most destructive planetary nuclear weapon, planetary as in something that would work really well in destroying things on our planet, but not as good in space.
I read a web article about Project PLUTO (7?) years ago. Since then it has remained my go to example for the psychopathic madness that was Cold War weapons R&D. Though the article said that the final phase would just be flying grid patterns over the USSR until the fuel ran out and then it would plow with into the ground at high speed whatever was left into the reactor.
As for the Tzar, I have repeatedly heard that thing was detonated at half yield. Again, not sure if true, but if so, the bomb is a lot less inefficient if used at full power.
I had heard of not only PLUTO, but Project Plowshare, though the radium water, radium jockstrap, and nuking a a second Suez Canal were new when I first watched this.
Its not the radium that glows green. Its was a radio-Illuminati pigment that was mixed with radium (typically copper-zink-sulfide) that converted the alfa decay of radium into light. This was used everywhere in the 1920 and 1930. During the war it was heavily used for displays like speedometer and clocks in aircraft's and tanks
What happen was that this was typically applied with very narrow pencils of late teen girls in large workshops that had a tendency to lick the brush to get a very sharp edge. Yea, the brush with radium on. This is where radiation started to get a bad rep, becasue loads of those girls got cancer.
Marie Curie was not french she was polish
Another great video. You're made some major improvements since your first videos.
While I didn't know about Project Pluto, I actually did know about the various radioactive products through my reading. The one that blew me away, and horrified me at the same time, is the Radiencrinator, complete with jockstrap. The other one would be the radioactive sand that was advertised for use in children's sandboxes due to it being so hygienic. Utter madness.
I have another mind boggling one for you. Did you know that in the 50s, the US Airforce worked to develop a nuclear reactor powered bomber? As in to drive the engines? They actually miniaturised one enough to make it fit into the midsection of a highly customised plane called the NB-36H. The reactor hung(!) from a hook directly over the bomb bay doors, so that in case of an emergency they could jettison it. On September 17, 1955, a nuclear reactor went airborne for the first time ever in history. It flew a total of 47 times.
Thank you!
Wow, I’ve never heard of that bomber! Crazy thinking about an emergency reactor drop!
☢️✈️😳
@@tfolsenuclear
What will boggle your mind even more is that the nuclear bomber flew a pre-planned route with a C-97 accompanying it having a detachment of specially trained Marines on board that would parachute in the moment the reactor were jettisoned, or the plane crashed. It would be their very dangerous task to set up a parameter around the dropped, probably unshielded, and more than lethally radioactive reactor. I can only imagine how they would go about actually retrieving it. Another plane accompanying the nuclear bomber was a B-50 that tagged along to measure the radioactivity issuing forth from the plane as it flew on nuclear power. The radiation field was so intense that the B-50 crew could reliably estimate their distance from the NB-36H by the readings on their instruments. As far as I have been able to find, no reactor was ever jettisoned. Thank God for small mercies...
I believe Project Pluto arose because an unmanned nuclear powered cruise missile solved a lot of the problems with the concept of a manned nuclear powered bomber while offering the same capabilities.
The end goal was to make the thing fly for months on end without landing, but they couldn't get the power to weight ratio to make it happen, it needed a bunch of regular engines to make up the difference. The russians were so damn scared of the idea and thought the US had it working, that they rushed making their own, which *did* work, but they had to ditch all of the shielding to make it fly, so yeah, that didn't work out too well for them.
The "put radium in everything and see what happens" portion I knew about but not anything else
The Tsar bomba was overcompensation for the Russians inability to aim. Hardened targets require a very close hit and once the Americans got that down they stopped making multi-megaton bombs and just made lots of ~100-400 kT miniaturized devices for MIRV warheads. They could have doubled the yield by having a uranium casing (natural or depleted) as fast neutrons have a reasonable chance of fissioning U-238. This would have raised the fraction of energy provided by fission from ~3% to ~50% and massively increased the amount of fallout (but it still wouldn't have been local, so nobody would have been exposed to massive doses, just small doses and globally as it eventually comes down).
The reason you read about people's jaws melting off because of radium, is because it looks alot like calcium to the body, and gets put into your bones.
I heard of project Pluto before, but only because I wanted to look up something else (I still don't remember what) and ended up going down a rabbit hole. I didn't even remember project Pluto was a thing until watching the original video, since it's been years since I first stumbled across it.
It's kind of nuts to think they tested the engines and they worked... If development continued it would have been built since the rest of it would have been comparatively easy to make...
I've heard of the better part of these, love the crazy project stuff. The Russians DID dig a giant pond, worked spectacular, contamination was WAY more than predicted and to this day, nobody can get near it.
Back in 1971, I was corresponding with the AEC about project Plowshare.
It was a social studies assignment in High School.
Nuclear ram-jets and SNAP reactors was the big thing back then, Plowshare was falling from favor.
I got one letter [lost, sigh] from Dixie Lee Ray herself..."stay in school, study Math and Chemistry!"
I'd heard of SLAM before. The only saving grace with that monstrosity is that it would have only been launched in a nuclear strike scenario.
And let's be honest, in that scenario everything has gone to heck anyway.
Cruise missiles are supersonic too and don't need the top of the line alloys to make them survive mach 3 velocities while sea skimming. The p800, kh-31, etc. all are supersonic ramjet powered cruise missiles and don't need exotic materials (unlike scramjet engines which need to sustain ~3000°C for many minutes).
Thanks for the info!
At 24:40 that's the Sedan Crater from the Sedan test, part of project plowshare. After it cooled off for a couple years, they actually had the Apollo astronauts train there b/c it resembled a moon crater. It's a niche use, but IMO still counts as a peaceful nuclear bomb project that came to fruition
23:05 yeah, and it's a desert so that would be alot of contaminated sand, sand which manages to blow and get everywhere in large quantities very rapidly
I was at a history panel once where the speaker was talking about Radithor and he says, "And where was the FDA during all this? Why the FDA was making sure that your Radithor contained exactly as much radium as it said it did! Gotta enforce truth in advertising!"
Rootin Tootin Putin McSchootin .. im dead
Fun trivia: Soviets used "nuclear excavation" not only to extinguish gas field fires several times, but they actually DID used it to dig canals (Pechora-Kolva canal in 1971), to excavate cavities for gas storage facilities, and as "ping" to locate oil and gas reserves in Siberia.
Few people were exposed to large doses from these patent cures; mainly because radium was extremely expensive, with a gram or so per ton of high grade uraninite ore. Only rich people could afford a directly hazardous exposure. The people who were exposed to monstrous doses were the radium girls; watch-hand and dial painters who sharpened the tips of their radium-paint-infused brushes with their mouth as they painted dials all day. Committed lifetime doses were up to a few thousand Sv (!!!!!) in the worst exposed; this caused a very particular cancer that is otherwise rare (bone sarcoma, as radium looks like the vital element calcium to your body and it is so kind as to sequester it in your bones). In those exposed to committed doses of less than 60 Sv no increase in bone sarcoma or other ill effects were observed, pretty much invalidating the LNT hypothesis; which is just a useful regulatory fiction that stands in place of figuring out what doses at low dose rates actually do in the human body.
Dynamite was a peaceful invention because before that most people used Nitro Glycerin which likes to explode if you look at it too long. Dynamite was originally nitro glycerin poured into a tube filled with absorbant material which stopped the liquid from being able to slosh and thus stopped it from exploding every time your wagon hit a pebble which did wonders for Mining Moral.
Peaceful and safety-minded intentions at least. But naturally it turned out that armies were also very interested in explosives that wouldn't blow up their own men when they looked at it funny.
@12:21 all I could think of was the "radium girls" incident...
There was also the plan in the 1960s to use some kind of a 4-digit number of nuclear bombs to alter the ocean currents on the Atlantic side of north America, in order to get the warm current to flow further north along the coast, in order to warm up the climate of north America, so that more of the coastline could enjoy the apparently lucrative climate of Florida. This went as far as testing that proved that using several bombs in an ocean current, can in fact alter the current for a few days, after which, the current returned to normal.
Assalamualaikum. It's really surprised me that people would go that far, to do the deed . You know what l mean.
The FOMC meeting distracted me or i would have finished this faster. =) This video was full on 100% crazy! In a good way =) thanks!!
17:00 well there's plenty of lead in the world and its not exactly expensive...so might as well, my only concern is how many people are getting lead poisoning from water coming into contact with it.
“It’s not often you hear about Native villages getting their way.”
Native ALASKANS (a subset of Native Americans) actually SUED the US Government over the government stealing the land they used for hunting and subsistence and the place they, you know, LIVED, which resulted in ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), which settled the lawsuit. In short, the villages got most of what they wanted, and the US Government was put to task for their unlawful treatment of the native population… sort of.
That’s way better than any other Native American peoples had ever done up to that point to get the same amount of respect the white (read: IMMIGRANT) Americans got from the government, so despite it being a half-measure at best it was a landmark victory in comparison to something like The Trail of Tears.
Native Alaskans are just built different IMHO.
About Project SLAM I had heard that it was not supposed to blow up after the last bomb but rather continue to fly around at supersonic speeds at low altitude for Years/Decades spewing radiation/byproducts and sonic booming anyone still alive as a terror weapon. ☮
One part of PLOWSHARES id heard of is PACER.
The project calls for detonating nuclear bombs in a water filled underground chamber to produce steam. When you need electricity, just vent some steam though turbines. When you need more steam, detonate another bomb.
There were also plan for nuking sahara desert in Egypt to create a lake to change deser into a habitable place.
blue jay stated in video that corpse it self was too radioactive that it had to be placed in lead lined coffin
Nuking for gas and oil isn’t as far fetch as it seems. There are deposits far below the surface that are under great pressure but have very strong and thick basalt caps. If you assplode the cap all the oil will push itself to the surface in a very thick sludge which you can then displace with water to extract (aka fracking).
1:30 that's because having things go out of control is easier than to control them. Besides, nobody cared about peaceful applications, it was always weapons first. It's also why they went with the uranium fueled and plutonium fueled pressure water reactors. Because uranium fueled reactors produce plutonium, which is easier to make bombs with and which is easier to make reactors with that fit onto something mobile, like a ship or a submarine.
I have heard of Plowshare. We were shown the crater of the test at the Nevada test site. Best hazmat WMD class I have ever been at. I did read about that bizzaro nuke powered missile. From I read it never got past the planning stage.
I would love to see you do a deep dive on readily available nuclear materials during the 50s 60s and 70s within home chemistry experiments
Have you heard of the nuclear bomber program? They had a large display at EBR-1
Hey just because you can't see the green glow don't shit all over the rest of us that totally can see the green glow
I had heard of the problems of radium before, you should look up the videos about the radium girls.
They were girls hired to paint on clock hands for military planes.
To get the best thin tip on the brush they were told to lick the brush before using it.
This made many of these girls die horribly.
It's am interesting story but also horrifying.
Especially since management knew about how dangerous the radium was (at least by the end) and still told them to lick the brushes. They then stalled the court proceeding so there would be fewer girls left alive so when they lost they didn't have to pay as much.
Just finished watching Oppenheimer
Radon natural occurs pretty much everywhere, slowly rising from the ground. Luckily, waterproofing helps block most of it, and in locations with higher natural radon special metal sandwich ones are used. Can't speak about the US, but this are in European building code.
14:39 I think 'Randomness Emeralds' is a more accurate term.
The thing with the canal dug by nukes is even worse considering that in a desert, all that contaminated debris and sand could get kicked up by wind in a sandstorm and just spread uncontrollably in any/every direction.
Heard about Project Pluto and the SLAM 15-20 years ago. They had to assemble the 500 megawatt reactor nicknamed "Tory" in Jackass Flats at the Nevada Test Site complex from original Livermore, Calif. As you pointed out it was intensely radioactive so it had its own dedicated fully automated railroad to move the reactor back and forth between its static test stand and the disassembly building. When they did test the engine, and yes they did. They forced One ton of air per second over 14 million one inch steel balls in four steel tanks at 1,350 degrees F. threw the Tory IIA-I on May 14, 1961 and it worked for a few seconds of test. I think 1964 the Lighter Tory-II-C ran for Five minutes and produced 513 Megawatts, around 35,000 pounds of thrust. One of the major concerns was that it would be as dangerous to allies just flying around as it was to the enemy.
One of my hobbies is radiological antiquing and finding all that fun stuff. You know your in for a fun time when your Geiger counter goes off in the parking lot. Then while trying to find the source starting at the top of a old repurposed building made of reinforced concrete finding a source that's blowing threw three floors of this stuff and the floor are we estimated around at least 6 inches thick. Turns out it was a 3ft across old nautical compass where all the Radium dissolved in solution making the water silvery. The brass sides containing most of it, but directly above it just a dance party of Geiger sounds. Best we could figure out with the decay of Radium there is a by product of very little Gamma and that's what was punching threw everything. That's only our best guess as we only know enough to tell people what they got so they can put it behind some leaded glass to keep themselves safe. Low intensity over time isn't great! We're looking at you Three time lung cancer man standing all day in front of a wall of radium clocks, Or lady who's next to a MASSIVE solid chunk of uranium glass candy? dish that's popin out a x-ray dose a second. Being next to that all day almost every day...not great!
Project Pluto aka the flying crowbar is at the top of a lot of lists of crazy cold war weapons projects that were fortunately scrapped. Though it did get frighteningly close to actually getting built.
The real scary part is it technically wasn't scrapped... they just put it on the backburner as a contingency plan contingent on the Russians building something similar... my favorite pentagon contingency plan though is CONOP 8888 while it was originally wrote up by juniors as a training exercise* nothing gets put in the pentagon without approval from numerous people and as it says on the first page "THIS IS NOT A JOKE"... so multiple people Really thought we needed this plan lol
I love your videos. Keep up the great work.
Thank you!
You know, I love dental x-rays, I love x-rays in general because I don't get to see what my insides look like very often so I think it's neat, but being able to get the same amount of absorbed radiation as a year of cuddling IN JUST 3 XRAYS!? DAAAAMN GOODBYE LONELINESS!
On the FDA existing and not caring... The FDA was established in the late 19th century. However, caring about medicines is much more a post-Thalidomide thing.
A lot of the SLAMs non-nuclear tech, like it's ground-following radar, went into the conventional cruise missiles of the day, and beyond, like the Tomahawk. So, while it itself wasn't practical for anything short of WWIII (and the closest humans ever came to making a legit 40K weapon), it produced some much more useful military hardware down the line.
Radon-emitting 'blue concrete' was/is a big issue in Sweden, since it was used in a LOT of construction from the 20's to the mid 70's. The stuff would lead to the air in people's homes having radon concentrations delivering 1000Bq/m3 of air - somewhere between 100-500 times background. And of course with radon being an alpha emitter, and the 'exposed surface' being specifically the inside of the lungs I think that 20x multiplier for alpha 'if internal' you've mentioned is probably in effect here. I can't help but wonder if the popularity of smoking throughout most of the 20th century 'masked' the amount of lung cancer actually caused by radon in sweden.
Its worth saying that Project plowshare did about 30 nuclear test project (they used a simular amount of non nuclear test programs). but it wasn´t like they made just one nuclear explosion per test.. no no no. For example Operation Grommet, that was one of the projects, did 34 nuclear explosions in just that project.
The main reason for specifcally operation Grommet was to reduce the fallout of the blast.
There was no blast even close to 2MT, most of them was fairly small in the single to low double digit kT yeald.
And it wasn´t like they was unaware of radiation. Those test was actually carried on quite late (even as late as the 70s) and there was quite a lot of ways to mitigate the radiation. This was people that very much know what they was doing.
1:30 There is a reason that fission was used as a weapon before it was used as power, and its not what most people believe. The reason is the depression in the 30s.
After a few conventions in the early 1920 there was a team set up to build a nuclear reactor out of Belgium. But it so happen that it was not just viable, they did make some progress but a few of the team moved over to the US where they eventually got financing in 1929 to make the first demonstration reactor. Its worth saying that nobody made a true fission reactor at this point, but the theory was quite solid, and the understanding of the subject was quite well known.
It happen so that just weeks after they gathered the capital, the capital did no longer exist. The stock-market crash happened.
The team was pestering the government to build a reactor during the 1930 but didn´t get any luck. It wasn´t until after the war stared (but prior to USA joining it) that ended up in the reactor CP1 that was actually started construction prior to the Manhattan project and it was retroactively resigned to the Manhattan project. This become the backup plan with a plutonium bomb in steed of the uranium bomb that was the primary one.
Anyway, the CP was originally designed as a power reactor, but was hastaly adopted to a plutonium breader.
So legitimate question. If you ingest radium the alpha particles won’t leave your body because it won’t go through organs and skin but what happens when you poop it out?
Good grief. I will be up all night....thanks for the great info. And thanks for trying to calm my terror!! Nobody has yet....cuz it's always a human that screws everything up....
SLAM was thought to be built out of stainless steel. No need to use low weight materials like titanium when you have that much power.
It was planned to be launched using conventional rocket boosters to a high altitude trajectory and start up its nuclear ramjet engine over the Pacific ocean.
It was never built because it was found to be rather hard to test the missile... And because bombers became more capable of penetrating Soviet air defences.
Effectively it was both overtaken by technology in other areas AND by saner minds prevailing.
Tsar Bomba was intended to be launched using the N1 rocket, which was developed as an ICBM as well as a moon rocket. The main reason it was never put into production was that the N1 failed, not because the Soviets didn't want to build it.
It'd basically perform the same function later taken up by the somewhat (20 or so MT) SS-18Mod3, targeting Cheyenne Mountain and other very deep, extremely heavily fortified, bunkers.
The Negev canal never was created, but the Soviets dug several lakes using nuclear weapons along the path they thought to use to create a canal through Kazakhstan for diverting more water to their cotton fields. These lakes are still seriously radioactive 60 years later.
The US decided to not go ahead with similar projects because of the concerns of fallout (literally).
The initial idea during the planning of these projects was that the radioactive waste would be buried deep under ground. The Soviet experiments showed this wasn't correct.
Mind that the Russians actually tested a nuclear powered cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead just a few years ago. It didn't go well.
The thing worked, for a while, until it crashed into the arctic ocean. Whether it will ever be fielded is anybody's guess, but I'd not be surprised if Moscow is planning to.
They're also fielding a nuclear powered nuclear tipped torpedo, can effectively be launched hundreds of miles offshore, sneak into a river estuary to an inland port city, and bury itself in the mud at the river bottom awaiting a remote command to activate and blow up the entire city with a ground burst.
I've heard of most of these ideas, and more. The 1950s especially were insane with the nuclear health craze in the US.
As to project plowshare, I seriously doubt the AEC and Pentagon ever took it seriously. All the proposals and subscale experiments under it seem to be designed to show non-feasibility from the outset. It was likely more a PR tool to show the AEC having peaceful uses of nuclear power in mind than anything else.
Project Pluto is mentioned in "The Silent War" by John P. Craven, Chief Scientist of the US Navy in the 1960s. This is a memoir rather than a history, and details are scant. In discussing the initial stages of the Polaris program, Craven mentions that Edward Teller (best known for developing the US hydrogen bomb, and being director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) suggested this type of weapon. Reportedly one of Teller's favorite statements was "there will be a nuclear war within five years, and we must prepare for it." Somewhere I read a suggested scenario was to threaten Cuba by having a Pluto orbit the nation for several days or weeks. I was unaware that development was pursued for seven years. The late 50s and early 60s were the heyday of strange military ideas, many of them involving nuclear weapons. So yes, Pluto was not purely a propaganda concept, but was proposed by one of the most senior members of the nuclear weapons establishment and was worked on for several years. Related to this, I think, are the proposals for nuclear rockets to Mars of the same vintage. These would eject fission products out the back as a euphemistically named "ion drive". To avoid ludicrous radiation exposure, conventional rockets would be used to boost the nuclear rocket outside the atmosphere before starting it.
Didnt Russia test an equivalent to SLAM some years back?
Googling seems to indicate 9M730 Burevestnik as the model/name, one test flight in 2017 and a related nuclear accident in Nyonoksa in 2019...
What about Skyfall? They spoke of it the other day. Just a few days ago. Russia's new missile that's nuclear powered.
Saying how they can now deploy it. So who knows.
I read about SLAMer in an article in Air and Space magazine back in the 90s…it was interesting but appalling at the same time…what if guidance fails? The SNARK missile failed numerous tests which came around the same time…and didn’t leak actinides and neuron radiation everywhere it went…yeah glad they decided to develop more reasonable cruise missiles. The Russians are now trying to build one of these…sigh…🤦♂️
Speaking of nuclear spacecraft drives, There is one even crazier than project Orion. It's called the Nuclear Salt-Water Rocket engine or NSWRE. Probably the most insane idea for an engine i've ever seen, but that said if it could be made to work it would open up the whole solar system to us. Pros, you get both raw thrust like a normal rocket engine and very good efficiency like an ion drive. Cons The fuel would be very nasty and there would have to be a whole host of procedures and regulations around handling it, storing it etc. The engine's exhaust would also be so radioactive it have to be for space only.
22:32 I did some reading and the percentages of casualties to the immediate blast vs. the radiation is unknown due to poor record keeping during the war. However, it is apparently very likely that tens of thousands died after the initial blast killed at least 70,000 in Hiroshima specifically. By December '45 the number was estimated to be up to 140,000. The Japanese government only confirmed about 1% of survivors having health issues related to radiation. The effects of radiation on people were still unknown, so that data isn't very reliable to say the least.
What's nuts to think about is that there were roughly 200 people that survived *both* bombings.
Yep, first read about Project Pluto in '94 or '95 ... in, like, Popular Science or similar magazine. Fascinating and horrifying.
The Nobel thing isn't irony at all. It was entirely intentional, and the one followed directly from the other.
First, the video is _completely wrong_ in claiming that Alfred Nobel was a pacifist. *He was actually exactly the opposite.* Nobel actually spent most of his life (and amassed a substantial amount of money) *being an arms manufacturer* (that is, _deliberately_ making weapons to kill people), and making inventions, many of which were related to military explosives. He also invented several of the explosives which were used in or precursors to military weapons of the time (not just dynamite).
It wasn't until he happened to read a premature obituary for himself which had been mistakenly published (entitled "The Merchant of Death Is Dead") that he began to worry about how he would actually be remembered after he was gone. It was because of this that he eventually updated his own will to specify that the fortune he had amassed (as an arms manufacturer and weapon inventor) should be used to fund prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in various categories, and one of the categories he specifically mentioned was "peace", including instructions on how the winners should be chosen, etc.
So Alfred Nobel deliberately created the Nobel Peace Prize (and other prizes) _specifically because_ he had previously spent a large portion of his life facilitating war, and did not want that to be his only legacy after he was gone.
3:56 - "THE SUN IS A DEADLY LAZER!"
"Not anymore there's a blanket~!"
-bill wurtz, the history of the entire world, i guess
I once heard the SLAM discussed as "it would rip the roof off your house, permanently deafen you and give your whole family a permanent orange afro.'. Obviously not strictly accurate, but descriptive and colorful...
I have heard of project pluto before.
One thing to note is it was intended to be launched from the US mainland most likely in a counter launch. So the usual M.A.D if we get nuked screw the rest of the world.
There is a concern if your exposed to a lethal dose of radiation internally, your sweat.
Its why if you end up dying of radiation poisoning in hospital your most likely being treated in what looks similar to a quarantine room with all the bedding’s/etc being disposed off instead of cleaned.
The one project i wish they put more work into was the Orion Drive.
Fun fact the Tsar Bomba was only detonated at half planned yield out of concerns of the effects of the blast/shockwave.
Which said shockwave happened to go around the globe multiple times. As well as break windows as far as Moscow
Ultimately leaving legitimate concerns that they were right to be concerned considering the collateral damage causes by it being detonated at half yield.
Let's not forget drilling down into the outer core of earth to RESTART IT WITH NUKES. Americans...
Edit: that is a movie plot, jtms
I did know about SLAM and Project Pluto. Particularly the idea of an open reactor flying over a country, even before the bombs go off, making an entire country uninhabitable at least for a short term, not just the "target" was too much. Even if the device was never tested, just the fact that we built one would cause the Soviets to feel they would have to build one but worse. And no one wanted to escalate the conflict in that direction. Even for people ready to blow up the world, this was too abhorrent.
The SLAM would be perfect for digging the canal! It drops nukes in a straight line, and everything below being contaminated doesn't matter if you're going to drop nukes there anyways. And they are so fast, the surrounding nations won't even know something happened! I see absolutely zero downsides in that
You should check out the nuclear jet engines that were actually tested in Area 51. Well, the area around it, I think. Anyway, they built a nuclear bomber with the idea it could stay in flight indefinitely with only the need to land for resupplying food for the pilots. They never tested it under power of the nuclear jet engines but as I understand it they did run the reactor while airborne and all signs showed it would have worked. However, it was decided that ICBMs were basically the way to go and having perpetually airborne bombers was unnecessary and it got scrapped. Which is the actual big secret of Area 51; that's where they buried the waste related to that project. In addition to it being a radioactive hazard for a long time it related to an extremely top secret project, which explains the overabundance of security through the decades. The project is declassified now, but nobody really bothers to check so they still say it's aliens and stuff. Or they say the declassified project is just a cover-up, but honestly it seems a pretty believable explanation to me.
Edit: To answer your question at 9:08, no, I had not heard of this one before. The bomber I mentioned above was turbojet, not ramjet, and while the reactor did provide heat to the engine if I recall correctly it was via molten salts which would then be cooled by the air passing over them and be circulated back to cool the reactor. This meant less scattering of radiation. Takeoff and landing were to be done under conventional fuel to avoid scattering radiation. Tho it added a lot of extra weight the cockpit was encased in lead.
The purpose of Pluto was to cruise for months, spreading *maximum* amounts of radioactive exhaust, while also lobbing nukey balls.
Not far from where I live in western Colorado they did actually test using nukes to extract gas and oil. It was called Project Rulison and took place in 1969. It actually worked, but expect the product was too radioactive to use.
I had actually heard of Project Pluto, came across it somewhere on the internet.
See also Project Orion, from the same time period: The idea was to propel a spacecraft by throwing a series of nuclear bombs out the back and riding the shockwave. Must have been a good time for mad scientists :)
The Americans got far enough along that they replaced one engine on as a strategic bomber with a reactor powered turbojet. It was of course shielded and unlike SLAM it used a heat exchanger. It passed proof of concept but was deemed impractical for a maned aircraft.
Back in 2018 one of the sky fall prototypes was being recovered from the bottom of the ocean when a fuel rod shifted on the reactor and irradiated 5 or 6 technicians. I think it was fatal for a couple of them.
I've heard of project Pluto quite a while ago. If memory serves, it was finally cancelled when they couldn't figure out a safe way to actually test the vehicle.
USSR actually used the series of underground nuclear explosions for seismic tomography in search of mineral deposits and overall research of Earth's crust geostructure. Some detonations was made in densely populated parts of the USSR.
14:05 is a bad image to stop at for this, as that is almost guaranteed to be URANIUM glass, and you mention the green glow doesn't come from uranium, it actually does when you're talking about a uranium oxide being added to glass.
In paint it is usually either Radium, or today commonly Tritium.
Could someone sweat out certain radioactive materials after consuming enough? I'm not sure how big of an issue this would be, but if somebody consumed high doses of radium on a daily basis before going to the gym, I could imagine them leaving some radioactive sweat on the exercise equipment.
americans: lets bomb it
others: heeell naw
americans : uhm we did that before... but not nuclear
others: oh holy nuclear batbomb heeeeell naw
americans: "ok ... its too expensive anyways, and those natives are not glowin for that idea anyways"
others: ok lol
The scariest part of this whole fricken project is it worked, like if we didn't get ICBM equipped submarines we would have had these instead. These were going to be the third prong in our nuclear trident, bombers bunkers and these creations of hell. Ballistic missile submarines have the advantage of not scaring the crap out of the people it is meant to protect.
My dad is a military history buff, and he told me a little about the nuclear bomber concept (and the prototype nuclear-powered tank) and why the navy is the only branch to embrace nuclear power.
You really need to visit the National Atomic weapons testing museum. They have all these stories mentioned on exhibit plus more. Two prototype nuclear aircraft engines are on display at the Argonne National laboratory in Idaho.
The worst combination of words I came across unexpectedly was "unguided air-to-air nuclear missile".
Though the idea had some logic behind it at the time. Intercontinental bombers with nuclear bombs were already well established, but missiles could not yet track targets and steer themselves into it. So the plan was that when you see a group of Soviet nuclear bombers approach, you send up one interceptor plane, fire the missile in the general direction, and set the timer so it would explode once it had covered the estimated distance to the bombers. Then the nuclear explosion would be so big that it would destroy any bombers and escort fighters in a mile around it.
To shot down planes with a nuclear missile, you don't have to be able to actually hit them.