Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Real Engineering" channel.

  1. The Moltex molten salt nuclear reactor runs continuously while heating the same type of heat storing salt used in solar boilers. The heat is used to fill peaks in demand while the reactor runs continuously. Costs are cheaper than coal and you don’t need all the cabling of solar (any type) to connect the panels.
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  2. The British Company Moltex is building a nuclear plant (shock horror) in Canada which will burn the high level waste fuel from an old nuclear plant next door. It's zero CO2 with a very low waste profile. The cost built on site is cheaper than a gas fired plant. When they go to factory modules it will be cheaper than coal - the cheapest (dirty) source there is. Moltex plants are cheap and safe because they have designed out the hazardous components which need expensive engineering to make them safe. They also use a thermal store to iron out the daily load fluctuations but that wont give months of energy storage.
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  3.  @shepherdlavellen3301  F4 Phantom is a heavy brute big hitter. Pure physical laws prevent it turning with a lightweight aircraft.
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  4. Back then, designers worked from the “if it looks right” principle. People also had to think in 3D. CAD has seriously speeded up detail design but 3D thinking and instinctive thinking are pretty much gone.
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  5. If we cannot stop the whole world burning coal we have no chance whatsoever. The only way that will happen is by bulk energy cheaper than coal. Check out what Moltex Energy are doing. Ultra safe low cost nuclear powe. Initially using waste used fuel to feed the reactors. Free fuel and removing an intractable waste problem long term they will use thorium.
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  6. The whole point of this is to create an ever more centrally controlled European Union. It keeps the nation states in check. How long before there are power cables, road and rail links between communist China and allegedly democratic EU?
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  7.  @ooohlights  Any degree worth having is tough. You won’t get one without the ability to study and plan your life. It’s not so difficult to get a low grade Arts degree but a high grade (actually worth having) is tough. Engineering degrees demand heavy duty maths and the ability to decipher overly complex, often contradictory questions. Physics is a good balance of both.
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  8. Like it or not the solution is nuclear. Molten salts are safe and cheap and they can burn used fuel from existing nuke plants. Look at what Kirk Sorensen and Ian Scott are doing. The nuclear regulators need to wake up and allow new tech to progress.
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  9. Geo-stationary orbits hold the satellite over the same patch of ground. However the satellite has a higher radial velocity than the base of the tower. Anything climbing that tower must increase its radial velocity. That increased kinetic energy has to come from somewhere. If power is not added to beep the satellite up there, anything chiming will just pull it down. This applies to fuel being pumped up to people riding elevators. We also have to seal the elevator shaft. If we put a simple tube up there the extreme natural draught chimney effect t will suck the atmosphere into space.
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  10. Nuclear power using irradiated waste fuel is even more sensible. It exctracts the 96% unused energy in the fuel and solves the waste storage issues.
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  11. Pulverised coal boilers create a glue gas dust not dissimilar to lunar dust. It is removed with cyclones (think Dyson vacuum cleaners) and electrostatic precipitators. The latter are alternating plates and wires charged at 50,000 volts dc. These attract the fine dust from the flowing flue gas.
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  12. British night fighters had exhaust flame dampers. They reduced top speed but the flickering light dazzled the pilot’s night vision. German planes had inverted cylinders with lower set exhausts. They eventually fitted dampers because those annoying Brits could seem them coming.
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  13. Car charging would be more efficient if the car dropped a receiving coil onto the parking place supply coil. Auto parking software could be adapted to suit
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  14. The British Fairey Gannet was a carrier aircraft with two turbo jet engines powering coaxial propellors. It could fly with one or both engines running. Edit. The engines were not coupled. Each prop ran at its own speed.
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  15. Alvin Weinburg was the top designer and nuclear patent holder on the original submarine PWR said that PWRs are great on board ships and subs. Even if they sink the core is safely cooled and encapsulated. He also said they are not safe for scaling up to utility scales. The civilian nuke accidents proved him right. He also took the aircraft molten salt nuke design and turned it into a very safe and commercially design. Unfortunately Oak Ridge is in Tennessee. Nixon wanted to support Westinghouse from California so the funding for molten salts WESA removed. A few years later three mile island melted down. We now have fully engineered designs but sit waiting for regulatory approval on Generation 4 nuclear which includes molten salts.
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  16. Locking your economy into an energy supply from countries with unstable authoritarian governments. What could possibly go wrong?
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  17. Molten chloride salt is LESS corrosive than hot pressurised water. It’s also completely impervious to neutron radiation. This cracks water into hydrogen (which embrittles metals) and oxygen which corrodes metals.
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  18. Molten salt nuclear especially the Moltex) is intrinsically safe. Temperature rise above normal reduces power output to zero well within acceptable limits. Temperature falling increases power from the reaction. It’s entirely self regulating. The coolant loop could be disconnected at full power and nothing bad will happen. The fuel is liquid so cannot suffer physical degradation or the internal pressure rise that stops solid nuclear fuel being fully used. The result is 99% fuel burn vs 4% burn in a PWR. This cuts the waste storage time by 1000x. The list of benefits is huge. The only reason it’s not been done before is the endemic engineering conservatism of the nuclear industry and regulators who move glacially slowly and cannot comprehend anything new.
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  19. Used fuel from a PWR still contains 96% of the fissile materials. That’s right - just 4% gets used. That why it has a 30,000 years 1/2 life. Moltex reuses that used fuel. Their process uses almost all of that unused energy. Their waste has a 1/2 life of just 30 years. That’s easy to manage while the 30,000 years of our existing waste line will just dig for 30,000 years.
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  20. Britain invented the airborne anti tank gun with the Tsetse Mosquito. It carried the 6 pounder anti tank gun with Mohlins auto loader adding about 1100KG to the all up weight.
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  21. Small nuclear reactors sat in a water tank will lyse the water. The blue glow shows it’s working. Stored waste fuel rods do the same thing. It would be a simple task to use molten salt fuel rods to literally lyse the water. Extract the hydrogen and you have nuclear powered cars. But it’s never been done commercially so regulatory costs would be huge not to mention the decades it will take.
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  22. Just had You Tube present this again.  Another thought about he title question. During the Battle of Britain, the Spitfires were the best planes of WW2. For long range bombing and bomber fighter cover, the moulded plywood Mosquito was the best plane out there (sadly ignored by the bomber top brass). The very best plane for sinking Bismarck was the Swordfish biplane. It was heavy lift STOL aircraft that could operate in storm conditions where nothing else could fly never mind return and land on a heaving and rolling carrier deck. P47 was a stunning escort fighter for some reason nobbled by the Eighth Airforce top brass who refused to import the drop tanks that would have given the necessary range. They used the implementation of P41 complete with its drop tanks to hide that they not been using them on Thunderbolts.
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  23. Meeks1 80,000 pounds is 36000 kg or 36 tonnes. Which is what the dude said.
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  24. Xenon and krypton are produced as byproducts in nuclear reactors. In traditional solid fuel systems they creat intense pressures inside the fuel pins. A big problem. Molten salt reactors allow these gasses to harmlessly escape the reactor core. They are collected for commercial use.
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  25. Plant the trees by not chopping them down to grow beef.
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  26. Nobody knows but to be road legal it has to meet these test demands.
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  27. Patten took his forces into Germany via the Fulda gap on his way to the Hartz mountains where he found all sorts of stuff that's still classified and got "retired" in a car crash for his troubles.
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  28. I imagine the machining swarfe was recycled. But clearly it was an extremely tough job.
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  29. Ammonia NH3 is a very convenient way to transport hydrogen. Burnt with oxygen creates steam which adds mass to the hot exhaust gas.
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  30. The nodules could be replaced with inert rocks of similar size.
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  31. Mining these modules makes good sense. However how likely will the miners lift them out without destroying the ocean habitat. Simply sucking them up and dumping the excess over the side will cause incredible damage.
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  32. Just rewatched this. It’s said, Thunderscreech was the loudest aircraft made by USA. However, the Russian Tu-95 Bear (still in use) has FOUR engines driving contra-props. That’s 32 propeller tips knocking out sonic bangs.
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  33. This just popped up in my YT feed. Kim Jong Un has not been seen since April with his sister appears to be running the show. Has Kim croaked. Quiet possibly.
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  34. The P47 was built big to accommodate the complex turbocharger system. The Vought Corsair used a crank blower on the same engine giving a smaller faster plane. The Fokker Wulf 190 had a similar power plant to the Corsair.
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  35. Geothermal has its place but as you’ve said it’s not cheap. The big (No) the HUGE problem today is coal. The stuff is a massive polluter not to mention the high CO2 emissions. The author brushes over nuclear power but if the hazards and waste issues are resolved it really does become economic and of course it’s zero CO2 and non polluting. Use thorium as fuel and the resource is almost limitless. Today’s molten salt reactors remove the hazards that to date have made nuclear so expensive and led to all three of TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. These new designs can easily undercut coal on costs and as they fully burn the fuel there is no long life waste to deal with.
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  36. The wheels of Mars Rovers turn quite slowly but get absolutely bashed up torn into holes etc. Mars regolith is much the same as moon dust.
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  37. Much of our deserts are caused or aggravated by ill considered dams and excessive water extraction think Aral Sea or Afghanistan. Low cost nuclear could desalinate brackish water as a side effect of cheap electricity. Then you don’t need the dams and rivers don’t need to be over used. We have the technology right now but it’s being ignored by governments and climate protestors alike.
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  38. We actually have an intrinsically safe British fission reactor that’s currently being homologated in Canada. It’s a concrete box with no moving parts. The heat transfer medium is molten salt. The fuel is mixed with the same salt but kept in tubes. It cannot overheat because excess temperature stops the N reaction. When it cools the reaction restarts. It could literally be set to full load then be cut off from its cooling. The fuel would gradually get used up but nobody would be at risk. Google Moltex.
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  39. Carbon capture is ripping off our grandchildren. It allows us to continue burning valuable material resources without guilt. Molten salt nuclear reactors especially the static salt solve all the hazards and costs associated with present day PWR reactors. They can do that at costs less than coal our cheapest fuel. AND they can use the old highly radioactive “waste” and extract the 95% to 97% energy that PWRs are unable to use. That uses 30 times less fuel for the same energy 30 times less waste and what there is quickly decays to background rad levels.
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  40. The first big gun ground attack anti ship aircraft was the Tsetse Mosquito. It carried a 6 pounder auto loading anti tank gun. Check out LindyBeige for an account of how good those guns were. One pilot took out a JU88 when a single round knocked an engine off the aircraft.
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  41. Think of the materials and building costs to connect generating plant that sits idle for 80% of the time. What a waste of resources. New nuclear power using up the “stocks” of stored nuclear waste will do the job for much less cost and make far better use of resources. Irradiated nuclear fuel has a half life of 30,000 years. There’s not much of it by weight but that’s a VERY long time. The old reactors have used only around 4% of the fuel energy. The Moltex (being built in Canada) uses the remaining 96% and results in a waste with 30 years half life. Easily managed. New nukes do not have the massive capital costs of old PWR plant. The cost is low and a long term waste problem is solved.
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  42. Truck axles are HEAVY. Tesla swaps that for motors. Truck wheels are heavy. Musk used 4 very wide driving wheels rather than 8 smaller wheels. US Semi trucks are not state of the art so there are weight savings to be made there.
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  43. Please note that climate change is normal. We are warming right now because we are in a warming part of the 1000 years cycle. Blaming a gas which is just 0.04% of the atmosphere is just ridiculous. Water has orders of magnitude more effect but nobody is trying ban water. Musk only pays lip service to the theology, because it pays very well indeed.
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  44. Elon Musk’s Starship has been suggested as long range sub-orbital “aircraft”. London to Sydney in one hour. It would be no use for regional flights but traditional long haul become redundant. Fuel use is much lower than expected as most of the flight is above the atmosphere.
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  45. The Moltex Energy power plant being built in Canada has a 1000MW molten salt nuclear reactor feeding heat into huge thermal stores. The heat drives 3000MW of steam turbines that ramp up and down during the day to fill the gaps left by renewables. There is no new new resource needed to make all this power, because the Moltex reactor will be fueled with the stored spent fuel removed from a nearby legacy nuclear plant. The huge snag with batteries is the mined resources needed to build them. The Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, etc are all finite resources every much as coal and oil are finite resources. High level nuclear waste is a long term storage problem, but only about 4% of the energy has been used. The Moltex will extract the remaining 96% leaving a short life waste. No mining is needed A (very) long term nuclear waste storage problem is solved. Renewable power is backed by a carbon free power source. Cost is low because the plant is intrinsically safe.
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  46. I was 11. My biggest memory is why we’re the images so crappy? and why was Michael Buerk so annoying?
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  47. Nickel and cobalt are no longer needed for batteries. However Manganese added to LFP makes a cheap efficient battery.
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  48. Two of the most dangerous cars were the original Austin Mini which was a simple box with an engine bolted on the front. The next nasties were the VW split screen and bay window vans. There was nothing but the front panel ahead of the driver and passenger.
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  49. Molten salt fission reactors can do all that at costs lower than coal. Hydrogen fusion will absolutely not be low cost and it will still produce nuclear waste because energy high enough to fuse hydrogen makes all spectrum radiation that will activate the reactor vessel and consumables within. Then there’s the fuel. The only reliable source for tritium is lithium fluoride molten salt reactors Where tritium is a big regulatory issue.
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  50. Finanzcreeper until a solar waste disposal rocket goes titsup and scatters highly toxic nuke waste across the sky. It also needs huge energy to kill the planet’s solar orbit speed with enough force to take the waste canisters into the sun.
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  51. MillionFoul not to mention that molten salt reactors like the Moltex will totally burn all of the fuel whereas PWRs use only 3% of the fuel. A Moltex SSR will extract 30 times more power from every fuel rod creating 30 x less waste. The first plant being built in Canada is a waste burner, fuelled by high level waste fuel rods from the old plant next door.
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  52. Marc T the problem with all renewables is their unpredictable intermittent output. Once the grid has > 50% solar or wind the system gets unbalanced leading to power cuts. The only power plants that can efficiently handle the fluctuations are thermal store nukes like the Moltex. 1000MW reactor heats thermal salt stores which can deliver up to 3000MW of peak power the thermal stores and the reactor itself are naturally load following.
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  53. MillionFoul sorry but no. “Thermonuclear” means nuclear fusion. Plain “nuclear” means fission. With molten salt reactor cores it’s cheap and easy. Fusion is still vapourware and it will never be cheap. Cheap is good because industry will use it. Expensive is not good because they won’t. This is exactly the issue with the fundamentally flawed PWR reactor. They sound simple but making them safe is hugely expensive.
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  54. Sharky The Moltex SSR being built in Canada will burn the stored waste fuel rods. They have a simple chemical process to turn the used fuel to a salt. It then goes into the core. 97% of the energy is still there for the taking. The old plant only extracted 3%. They are being paid to take the waste fuel away and react it down to leave just 1% for medium term storage.
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  55. MillionFoul The existing US nuke regs work for PWRs. Kirk Sorensen is working on new regulations for molten salts. Moltex is working in Canada where they have a more common sense approach. U.K. is hidebound by micromanaging regulators who won’t say shag they want so its become an endless guessing game. Brexit night help but I doubt it.
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  56. MillionFoul Uranium is not renewable but we currently only use 3% of the available fuel energy. The other 97% just sits in the waste fuel ponds. The new molten salts will use 99% of the energy. 33 times more. And the tiny amount of waste produced has a half life of 30 years. A “bit” better than 30,000 years half life of the current waste products.
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  57. G Buz I body is building a real fusion plant right now. Not one of the experimental plants has managed more than a few seconds of fusion while burning up many times more power just to contain it. Fusion will not be cheap. It will be radioactive and it will create active waste. If it ever works.
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  58. B5429671 XJ If we had safety regulators prepared to get things done we could have molten salt fission plants burning waste nuclear fuel. That solves a long term storage problem and give the reactor operated an income before they’ve even fired up the reactor. Thorium is brewer still bet the issues are entirely regulatory. Not. because thorium is inherently dangerous simply because nuke regulatory bodies move at a glacial pace. The USA has to write an entirely new code of practice. U.K. simply won’t say what they do want. Even with established designs the regulatory process costs double the plant build costs.
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  59. encinobalboa Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have by a considerable margin. Fukushima and Chernobyl have blighted huge swathes if land. But tell that to the wildlife who live their perfectly happily. There are people in Iran living with natural background radiation 19x higher than the safe limit for nuclear workers. The people have LOWER than normal cancer rates.
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  60. One Autumn Leaf PWR nukes are ridiculously expensive because they are fundamentally flawed and will do bad things if given the chance. Molten salt reactors remove all of those risk factors by being intrinsically safe. The safety systems are entirely passive so costs are cheaper than coal. Check out Ian Scott and Moltex. They have the Chinese interested in removing coal boilers and replacing them with Moltex reactors. The steam turbines will be the same plant as before. Saving billions in plant replacement costs and cutting running costs as well.
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  61. James Neilson Graham High level nuclear waste is easily managed but Moltex Energy are building a full scale waste burner in Canada. It will take high level irradiated waste neckwear fuel and extract the 97% remaining energy that he PWR could not use. It’s not fantasy. It’s happening. Every megawatt of power will make 33 times less waste. What is left over, has a half life of 30 years and easy to engineer for storage. They are being paid to take the waste fuel. So it’s in their interests to solve the waste issue. They have it sorted.
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  62. G Buz PWR nuclear power fundamentally no different to a 1950s designed nuclear submarine is expensive to build safely. But that’s just one way to do it. Molten salts like Flibe and SSR have entirely passive safety. Much cheaper and much quicker to build though the very first plants (which are full size) will take the longest, because regulatory procedures are being developed at the same time.
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  63.  @ne2526  UK has removed almost all of it's coal fired power plants Guess who bought the Didcot turbo-generator plant - Germany of course.
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  64.  @spoonikle  USA cannot get molten salt reactors until it sorts out its safety regulatory process. Currently its a tick box system designed for PWRs. It wont work for reactors that dont have the hazards found in a PWR. UK is no better with it's regulators wanting everything done from first principles but expecting the new plant designers to guess what will be required.
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  65.  @nimistar01  That really is down to the nuclear industry surrounding everything with razor wire and making a huge fuss about all their Oh so great safety systems that cost $mega. Not surprisingly, people get concerned when you need all of that to be safe. The molten salt reactor was ignored in favour of PWR which back then was cheap. Three Mile Island changed all that but molten salt was still ignored. Who knows why, because they are intrinsically safe and therefore cheap to build. They cannot overheat and cannot melt down. The most recent design goes even further because all safety systems are entirely passive. They can lose the cooling at full power and still not overheat. That drastically cuts build and operational costs and removes the need for expensive engineers to monitor the plant 24/7. They all burn the fuel many times more efficiently creating a small fraction of the waste.
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  66.  @ne2526  Germany went into virtue signalling mode, closed it's perfectly good nuclear power plants then built coal fired power plants to replace them. Even worse they burn brown coal which is dirty and inefficient. Worse still, cleaning the sulphur-laden exhaust gas releases even more CO2.
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  67.  @nimistar01  Nuclear power has killed (or made ill) fewer people than any other power source we have. It is carbon neutral and over time the lowest cost energy we have.
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  68. The Tucano (which can be traced back to the WW2 P51 Mustang) is incredibly noisy. The enemy will hear them coming from miles away. But for tank busting that’s no problem and today’s tank busting missiles can be carried.
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  69. Sheet metal or machined surfaces with a line of flats at 15 degree angles behave to flowing air like a continuous curve. It’s highly likely a folded front with 15 degree flats would be no worse for pedestrians than “normal” truck fronts. There’s also no solid lump of metal hidden by a thin sheet with nasty claw fastener.
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  70. I will be labelled a denier. But the start of the industrial revolution was the the peak of the Maunder Minimum a period also called the Little Ice Age. How do the climate studies account for this purely natural warming?
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  71. Negative G flooding was a common flaw in most engines of the day. The German Mercedes Benz engines were fuel injected so didn’t have the problem.
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  72. The ridiculous costs expose that SLS is yet another way for USA to subsidise its aerospace industry.
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  73. Metal production requires massive amounts of power. Nuclear is the only way to get enough concentrated power. Kirk Sorensen rediscovered molten salt reactors while researching power for a moon base. Molten salt reactors are small and light. The moon has Thorium deposits making this type of nuke a no brainer. Even better molten salts can operate at very high temperatures cutting out the power generation altogether.
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